Pull off Foxen Canyon Road, climb the short rise to the visitor center, and pour a glass of Syrah that tastes like the warm inland heart of the Santa Ynez Valley. Andrew Murray Vineyards is the producer that staked its whole life on the Rhone, the grapes of southern France grown under a California sun, and turned a teenage obsession into one of Santa Barbara County’s most respected red houses.

The story

The story starts with a road trip. In the late 1980s, a teenager named Andrew Murray traveled with his family through France’s Rhone Valley, and somewhere between the steep granite slopes of the northern Rhone and the sun-baked stones of the south, he fell hard for two grapes most Americans had never heard of: Syrah and Viognier. That obsession set the course for the rest of his life.

In 1990, his parents, Jim and Fran Murray, sold their Southern California restaurants and bought 200 acres of hillside in the Santa Ynez Valley, planting vines on the slopes above Foxen Canyon Road. Andrew left UC Berkeley and a path toward paleontology, did an internship in Australia, and earned a degree in viticulture and oenology from UC Davis, the finest wine school in the country. Then he came home and founded his eponymous winery on the family land. There is a piece of winemaking folklore that he set out to plant Viognier and ended up with a block of Syrah by mistake. Whether or not the cuttings were truly mixed up, Syrah became the wine that made his name.

Over three decades, Andrew Murray built a reputation as one of California’s most serious Rhone specialists, the kind of producer collectors trust and critics return to. The 200-acre family estate on Foxen Canyon Road was sold in recent years to a new owner, but Andrew kept the brand and kept making wine under his own label, sourcing from the vineyards he knows best across the Santa Ynez Valley and the Central Coast. The winery and visitor center at the entrance of the Foxen Canyon Wine Trail carries the work forward, still family owned, still Rhone focused, still chasing the wines he first tasted as a kid in France.

The place

Andrew Murray Vineyards sits in the Santa Ynez Valley, the warm inland AVA of Santa Barbara County and the engine room of the region’s red wine. Like the rest of Santa Barbara, the valley owes its character to the transverse ranges, the rare east-to-west mountains that funnel Pacific air and fog inland off the ocean. But the Santa Ynez Valley sits far enough from the coast to escape the worst of the chill. Mornings open cool and foggy, afternoons turn genuinely hot, and that daily swing is exactly what Rhone grapes want: enough heat to ripen Syrah and Grenache to dark, spicy depth, and enough cool night air to lock in acidity and perfume.

The ground here tells its own story. The hills around Los Olivos rest on uplifted, ancient sea-bed soils, sandy and well drained, the kind of low-vigor dirt that forces a vine to struggle and concentrate its fruit. Andrew Murray has long sourced from a network of sites that read like a map of the best Rhone terroir on the Central Coast, from the upper Santa Ynez Valley and Ballard Canyon to Los Alamos, Cat Canyon, and Paso Robles to the north. Each site brings its own accent, and blending across them is part of the craft.

What they grow and make

This is a Rhone house through and through. The lineup runs across the classic varieties of southern France: Syrah above all, plus Grenache and Mourvedre for the reds, and Viognier, Roussanne, Marsanne, and Grenache Blanc for the whites. These are the grapes that built the great wines of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Hermitage, and Condrieu, grown here with California ripeness and an honest sense of place.

Syrah is the flagship, and the Tous les Jours Syrah is the bottle that introduces most people to the house. The name is French for “every day,” and that is exactly the idea: a dark, peppery, juicy Santa Ynez Valley Syrah meant for the dinner table rather than the cellar shelf, and one of the genuine values in California wine. Above it sit single-vineyard and reserve Syrahs that show what the grape can do when yields drop and the best barrels are chosen. The Viognier carries the other half of Andrew’s first love, a white with the heady stone-fruit and honeysuckle perfume that makes the grape so seductive, and there is a dry Esperance rose for warm afternoons.

Andrew also makes wine under the E11even label, a separate project rather than a second label. The name comes from the idea of pushing one step past a perfect ten, and the wines showcase standout barrels and grape varieties from across thirty years of growing in Los Olivos, including bottlings beyond the core Rhone range. The downtown Los Olivos tasting room is built around this collection.

Farming

From the start in 1990, Andrew Murray Vineyards has farmed with sustainability at the center. The wines are SIP Certified, a rigorous Central Coast standard that audits not just the vineyard practices but water use, energy, habitat, and the treatment of the people who work the land. The fruit is farmed for modest yields and high quality across the estate and contracted sources, the slow and patient approach that lets a vine pour everything it has into a smaller crop of concentrated grapes.

Visiting

You can taste Andrew Murray in two very different settings. The winery and visitor center sits at the entrance of the Foxen Canyon Wine Trail, a scenic drive north of Los Olivos, where the Estate Tasting Experience pours through the core Rhone lineup with the vineyards in view. In the walkable heart of downtown Los Olivos, the E11even tasting room offers a more casual stop along Grand Avenue, easy to fold into a day of strolling the town’s clustered tasting rooms and shops. Hours can shift by season, so it is worth confirming the current schedule by phone or on the official site, and reservations for the estate experience are made through the Tock booking platform.

Food pairing

Rhone reds were born for the grill and the table, and Andrew Murray’s wines reward a plate in front of them. The Tous les Jours Syrah, dark and peppery with a savory edge, is a natural with grilled lamb chops, a smoky tri-tip off the Santa Maria oak, or braised short ribs on a cold night. The tannin in the wine binds to the protein and fat in the meat, so the Syrah feels softer and rounder while the meat tastes cleaner, the classic reason big reds and rich red meat belong together. Reach for the Grenache-driven reds with roast pork, duck, or anything touched with herbs and warm spice, where the wine’s red-fruited brightness lifts the dish. The Viognier, all honeysuckle and apricot, is a beautiful foil for roast chicken, a curry with coconut and mild spice, or pork loin with stone-fruit chutney, its perfume and texture wrapping around the food. For a tailored match to 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 that gives these wines their warm, spicy backbone, browse the wider world of Santa Barbara wine, and when you are ready to plan a dinner around a bottle, the wine pairing generator does the matching for you.

For a tasting day that needs no designated driver, the Funk Zone urban wine trail gathers dozens of Santa Barbara County producers into a walkable grid of converted warehouses near the harbor.