Buscador means seeker, or searcher, in Spanish, and no winery name was ever more earned. Before Matt Kowalczyk made a single barrel, he spent years circling the globe looking for a reason to keep going. The wine he makes now in a small Buellton warehouse is the answer he found, an ever-changing slate of Spanish, French, and Italian bottlings made in tiny lots, each one a small chapter in a search that is still going. Love your search, the label says, and it means it.

A search that became a winery

Kowalczyk grew up in Michigan and was a graduate student at UCLA when his first wife, Rebecca, died in a sudden accident in 2000 at a beach near San Diego. He was thirty years into a life that had just lost its center, and what followed were years he has described as nearly impossible to put into words. So he went looking. He spent a month in Guatemala living with a family, and it was the father there, Sebastian, who gave him the nickname Buscador. He took a hard job in Iraq to clear his debts, ran with the bulls in Spain, drifted through Central America and Hawaii, and slowly the searching began to point somewhere.

It pointed at wine. He moved to Santa Barbara in 2005, just as the film Sideways was sending the region into a boom, and got hired on the spot at Kalyra, the winery that appears in the movie. In 2006 he made his first vintage, seventy-seven cases of cabernet sauvignon, and named the label Buscador. That same year he met Stephanie Lopez. “I never thought I’d find love again,” he later said, and they married in 2007. For another decade he learned the craft behind the scenes at Kalyra before he and Stephanie finally took the leap in 2017 and opened Buscador its own winery and tasting bar in Buellton.

Buellton, at the mouth of the valley

Buscador sits in a small complex on Industrial Way, part of a cluster of garage wineries that locals nicknamed Industrial Wine Works, a friendlier cousin of the old Lompoc wine ghetto. There is no estate vineyard here. Instead, Kowalczyk buys fruit in small quantities from some of the best sites across the Santa Ynez Valley, choosing each vintage by what the season actually offers rather than forcing the same wines every year.

That freedom suits the place. Buellton sits where the cool maritime influence of the western valley meets the warmer, sunnier benchland to the east, and the wider Santa Ynez Valley holds an unusual range of microclimates and soils in a small area. It is exactly the kind of patchwork that lets a curious winemaker chase Spanish, French, and Italian grapes that most California wineries never touch, and ripen them honestly.

Tiny lots and an open mind

Buscador is one of the smallest wineries in the region, and that is the whole point. Production runs in the hundreds of cases, sometimes just a dozen or two of a given bottling, so the lineup shifts constantly. Across the years it has spanned Spanish varieties like tempranillo, graciano, and grenache, French ones like cabernet, malbec, grenache blanc, and chenin blanc, and Italian grapes like sangiovese and vermentino. You come not for a fixed menu but for whatever the search has turned up this season.

Behind the tasting bar is a massive mural by Los Angeles artist Bobby Rodriguez, mapping the pivotal moments of Kowalczyk life, Hawaiian flowers, a surfboard and wave, a bull. It is a fitting backdrop, because the wines carry the same idea. “It’s about constantly searching for your truth, whatever your vision of that is, and that constantly changes,” he has said. “That’s what life is about.”

What to pour it with

Buscador makes grapes that come from food cultures, so they belong at the table. Reach for the tempranillo with roast lamb or anything off the grill: the Spanish grape grew up next to those plates, and its firm tannins bind to the protein and fat in the meat so the lamb tastes cleaner and the wine tastes rounder. Pour the grenache, which is softer and red-fruited, with grilled sausages, paella, or a smoky pot of beans, where its generosity and gentle tannin flatter the spice without fighting it.

The whites are your aperitifs and your seafood wines. A high-acid chenin blanc or grenache blanc slices through fried food and creamy cheeses the way a squeeze of lemon does, resetting your palate for the next bite, and chenin has a real affinity for fresh goat cheese, since both carry bright, green, citric notes that lock together. The move to avoid is putting a tannic red like the tempranillo or malbec next to a delicate flaky white fish, where the tannin finds no fat to grab and turns hard and metallic.

Buscador Winery: common questions