Walk into the little room on Bell Street in Los Alamos and the proposition is radical in its simplicity: every bottle is Grenache, and only Grenache. A Tribute to Grace is Angela Osborne’s love letter to a single grape, a New Zealander’s vision of the variety she chased across three continents before she found its truest home under the California sun. The wines are pale, perfumed, and weightless in a way that feels almost spiritual, and they are named, like the label itself, for her grandmother Grace.

The story

Angela Osborne was born and raised in New Zealand, where she first set out to be a filmmaker before wine pulled her in another direction. The moment that redirected her life came in 2002, in Sonoma’s Dry Creek Valley, when she tasted Grenache for the first time. She has called it the most perfect yin and yang balance she had ever encountered in the wine world, a grape that could be both powerful and delicate, dark and bright, all at once. New Zealand was too cool to ripen it, so she went looking. She searched northern Spain, southern France, and southern Australia before setting her sights on the Santa Barbara coast, a place with enough sun and light to give Grenache what it needs.

She moved to California in 2006 and, in 2007, sourced her first fruit from the Santa Barbara Highlands Vineyard, a remote high-desert site in the Cuyama Valley. That first vintage became A Tribute to Grace, named for her grandmother Grace, the woman who helped raise her, and for grace itself, her most beloved attribute. From the start the intention was clear: capture that spirit in the glass and stay as close to nature as humanly possible. The label has been single-minded ever since, dedicated entirely to authentic, single-vineyard expressions of Grenache.

Since 2012 the company has called Los Alamos home, and Osborne eventually opened her own tasting room, the Space of Grace, on Bell Street. She remains the owner and winemaker, a rare thing in an industry that tends to dilute founders over time. The whole project still runs on her hands and her intuition, the work of someone who treats winemaking less as control and more as a conversation with forces she cannot fully command.

The place

The tasting room sits in Los Alamos, a tiny former stagecoach town in the Santa Ynez Valley, the broad inland AVA that also takes in Santa Ynez, Buellton, Ballard, and Solvang. Like the rest of Santa Barbara County, the valley owes its character to a quirk of geography. The mountain ranges here run east to west, an unusual transverse orientation that opens the land like a funnel to the Pacific. Marine air and fog pour straight inland, cooling the nights and stretching the growing season, so the grapes keep their acid and the wines stay alive and lifted.

But the heart of these wines beats farther east, in the high desert. The Santa Barbara Highlands Vineyard, the source of the flagship bottlings, sits roughly 33 miles inland in the Cuyama Valley, perched around 3,500 feet up in the Sierra Madre Mountains on decomposed granite and clay loam. It is a place of extremes: intense high-elevation sun by day, sharp cold by night, and thin, well-drained soils that force the vines to dig deep. That balance of heat and light and altitude is exactly what Grenache wants. The diurnal swing keeps the fruit fresh while the desert sun coaxes it to full, even ripeness, which is why these Grenaches manage to be both deeply flavored and astonishingly light on their feet.

What they grow and make

A Tribute to Grace makes one grape in many guises, and the discipline is the point. The wines are all 100 percent Grenache, each a single-vineyard expression meant to show what that site does to the variety. The flagship is the Santa Barbara Highlands Vineyard Grenache, grown high in the Cuyama desert. It is laced with crushed red berries, fresh mint, spice, and a whisper of cedar, with a deceptive lightness on the first sip that opens into real depth and firm, youthful tannin. This is Grenache made in a cool, ethereal register, the opposite of the jammy, high-alcohol style the grape is often pushed into elsewhere.

Beyond the flagship, Osborne sources from a handful of remarkable old-vine sites. The Besson Vineyard Grenache comes from own-rooted vines planted in 1910 near Gilroy, just three tons a year, dense and intense with the gravitas only century-old vines confer. The Shake Ridge Ranch Grenache, from the Sierra Foothills, runs lighter and prettier, ethereal and a little eccentric. There is a Rose of Grenache, pale and floral and bright, made by foot-treading whole clusters to draw out just a blush of color before a slow, cool fermentation in stainless steel. There is even a Grenache Blanc from the Thompson Vineyard, and a methode champenoise sparkling Grenache called Gracias Madre. Different soils, different elevations, different vine ages, one grape, one hand.

Farming

Osborne’s approach is rooted in nature and restraint. She works with biodynamic principles and sources from vineyards that practice biodynamic and organic farming, and her cellar work is deliberately hands-off: native processes, whole-cluster ferments for some bottlings, foot-treading rather than machinery for the rose, and aging that lets the wine find its own shape. Her stated intention has always been to stay as close to nature as humanly possible and to honor the wine’s own life, which she sees as ultimately independent of the winemaker. The fruit is sourced from a small set of trusted single vineyards rather than estate-owned land, with the Santa Barbara Highlands Vineyard in the Cuyama high desert as the anchor.

Visiting

The Space of Grace is an intimate tasting room on Bell Street, the seven-block main drag of Los Alamos that hops on summer weekends with natural-wine bars, restaurants, and shops within an easy stroll. The experience is reservation-focused and unhurried, built to spend real time with the wines rather than to rush a crowd through. Plan on about an hour for the full tasting. Because a small family operation can shift its hours by season, confirm the current schedule by phone or on the official site before you make the drive.

Food pairing

Grenache made in this lifted, cool style is one of the most food-friendly reds you can pour, because it brings perfume and bright acid without heavy tannin or weight. Reach for the Santa Barbara Highlands Grenache with roast chicken and herbs, with a pork tenderloin, or with grilled salmon, where the wine’s red-fruit and spice notes echo the char and its acidity cleans the palate between bites. The savory, slightly herbal edge bridges beautifully to mushrooms, lentils, and roasted root vegetables, so it is a genuine gift at a vegetarian table. The Rose of Grenache, all floral and stone-fruit lift with an anise-tinged finish, is built for a warm afternoon: think nicoise salad, grilled prawns, a platter of charcuterie and soft cheese. One thing to avoid is a heavily charred, fatty ribeye. This is a delicate, medium-bodied red, and that much fat and fire will simply flatten it. If you want a tailored match for a specific bottle and a specific dinner, our wine pairing generator will point you to the right plate.

To go deeper, explore the Santa Ynez Valley AVA where Los Alamos sits, browse the wider world of Santa Barbara wine that gives these bottlings their cool-climate spine, and when you are ready to plan a dinner around a glass, let the wine pairing generator do the matching for you.

Visitors short on time often start at the Funk Zone, the walkable warehouse district near the Santa Barbara waterfront where a large share of the county’s producers keep a tasting room.