Push open the door at 388 Bell Street in tiny Los Alamos and you land somewhere that feels more like a friend’s living room than a tasting room. There are wines by the glass, a board of cheese and charcuterie, a sunny patio shared with a beer bar, and a winemaker who came to all of this by way of journalism. Clementine Carter is the Rhone-focused label of Sonja Magdevski, a small, personal project built around cool-climate Grenache and Mourvedre grown across Santa Barbara County, with the heart of the fruit coming from the fog-cooled Sta. Rita Hills.

The story

Sonja Magdevski is a journalist by training and a winemaker by drive, a Macedonian-American who found her way into wine the way the best stories usually start, by accident. She learned the craft on the job, in the vineyard and the cellar, supplementing instinct with viticulture and enology classes at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria. More than two decades ago she helped plant a Pinot Noir vineyard in Malibu and began making wine in a garage with a band of fellow oenophiles. She named that first project Casa Dumetz, after the Spanish missionary for whom Point Dume is named, and she moved the operation up to Los Alamos, where it took root in a sleepy stretch of the old Highway 101 wine country.

For about twenty years Casa Dumetz was the name on the bottles, with two side labels living under its roof, the Feminist Party Wines and a Rhone-focused line called Clementine Carter that she introduced in 2016. The name came from her favorite Western, John Ford’s 1946 film My Darling Clementine, and the character of Clementine Carter, a woman who arrives in a rough frontier town and quietly changes it. In April 2024 Magdevski retired the Casa Dumetz name and made Clementine Carter the face of the whole enterprise. The borrowed name of that Malibu vineyard, a place that had not existed for years, had simply started to make her sad. Clementine Carter was a name her customers already knew and loved, and it pointed forward instead of back.

The world she built around the wine is part of the appeal. In 2013 she opened Babi’s Beer Emporium next door, named for her grandmother Ilinka, a woman she describes as exemplifying love and forgiveness, and her brother works there too. The two businesses share a patio and a spirit. This is a family operation in the truest sense, run by a storyteller who never quite stopped being a writer, and it shows in how she talks about her wines and her town.

The place

Clementine Carter has no estate vineyard of its own, which makes Magdevski something close to a curator, choosing parcels across Santa Barbara County the way a chef chooses a market stall. Over more than twenty years working this ground, one appellation came to hold a special place in her work, the Sta. Rita Hills, and the majority of her fruit is sourced from it. The Sta. Rita Hills is one of the coolest growing regions in California, a narrow corridor between Lompoc and Buellton where the transverse mountain ranges run east to west instead of north to south. That unusual orientation opens the valley like a funnel to the Pacific, pulling marine fog and cold ocean air straight inland off the water.

That fog is the whole point. It settles over the vines through the night, burns off slowly in the morning, and stretches the growing season out for weeks, so the grapes ripen slowly and hold onto their acid. The soils here are a mix of ancient diatomaceous earth, sand, and clay, marine sediment left behind when this land sat under the sea. For Rhone grapes that can turn jammy and overripe in warmer climates, this cool, slow, mineral ground is a gift. It keeps Grenache fresh and red-fruited rather than heavy, and it gives the whites a tension and lift that warmer sites cannot match. Beyond the Sta. Rita Hills, Magdevski reaches into other corners of the county, the warmer limestone hillsides of Ballard Canyon for Larner Vineyard fruit and the pioneering Rhone plantings at Zaca Mesa, so the range reflects the full breadth of Santa Barbara terroir.

What they grow and make

Clementine Carter is a Rhone house at its core, with Grenache and Mourvedre as the two grapes Magdevski cares about most. The Grenache is the signature, sourced from the Sta. Rita Hills and from Larner Vineyard in Ballard Canyon, where she has been buying fruit since 2012. In the cool Sta. Rita Hills it shows the bright, high-toned red fruit and lifted perfume that make Grenache feel almost like Pinot Noir’s sun-loving cousin, while the Larner bottling from warmer Ballard Canyon brings more weight and spice. The Mourvedre comes largely from Robert Rae Vineyard, a special site above Santa Rosa Road on the eastern edge of the Sta. Rita Hills, where two acres were grafted to the variety in 2020. Mourvedre gives the darker, more brooding, meaty side of the Rhone, all black fruit, earth, and structure.

The range stretches across the Rhone family and a little beyond. There is Syrah, including a bottling from Larner that joined the lineup in 2023, and on the white side a Roussanne, a Grenache Blanc, and a crisp, saline Picpoul Blanc, the seafood-loving white of the southern Rhone. Magdevski also makes a fun, fresh Graciano Nouveau and a small amount of Pinot Noir, a nod to where her winemaking began. Most of these are made in tiny quantities, the kind of small-lot wines you mostly find by walking into the tasting room or joining the club, which is part of why a visit is the best way to know them.

Farming

Because Clementine Carter sources its fruit rather than farming an estate, the farming story belongs to her growing partners, and Magdevski chooses them with care. At Robert Rae Vineyard she had an acre of Grenache and two acres of Mourvedre grafted specifically for her wines, along with a half acre of Roussanne, a level of involvement that goes well beyond simply buying grapes off a list. Larner Vineyard in Ballard Canyon and Zaca Mesa, the winery that first planted Syrah in Santa Barbara County back in the 1970s, round out a roster of respected, established growers. The throughline is a winemaker who knows exactly where every cluster comes from and who farms it, and who builds long relationships rather than chasing the cheapest fruit.

Visiting

The tasting room sits on Bell Street in the heart of Los Alamos, a one-stoplight town on old Highway 101 that has quietly become one of the most charming food and wine stops on the Central Coast. The room is small and unpretentious, the kind of place where you can settle in with a flight, a glass, or a bottle, order a cheese and charcuterie board or a panini, and spill out onto the sunny patio shared with Babi’s Beer Emporium next door. Reservations are recommended for tables, and you can book or ask questions through the wine hotline or by email. Because hours can shift with the season, it is worth confirming before you make the drive.

Food pairing

These are wines built for a table and a long afternoon, which is exactly how the tasting room serves them. The cool-climate Sta. Rita Hills Grenache, bright and red-fruited with soft tannins, is a natural with roast chicken, grilled lamb chops, or a mushroom and herb pizza, where its lifted fruit and gentle structure flatter the food instead of fighting it. The darker, meatier Mourvedre wants something with more char and fat, braised short ribs, a lamb shoulder slow-cooked with rosemary, or a plate of grilled sausages, because the wine’s tannin binds to the protein and fat and turns silky against it. The Picpoul Blanc, all salt and lime, is one of the great seafood whites, made for oysters on the half shell, grilled white fish, or a bowl of steamed clams, where its acid cuts the brine and resets your palate for the next bite. Pour the Roussanne with something richer, a roast pork loin or a soft, nutty cheese, where its texture can stretch out. 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 Sta. Rita Hills AVA that gives these wines their cool-climate spine, browse the wider world of Santa Barbara wine, and read our guide to California Pinot Noir, the grape where Magdevski’s winemaking story began. When you are ready to plan a dinner around a bottle, the wine pairing generator does the matching for you.

Downtown, the Funk Zone tasting rooms offer a different way to drink Santa Barbara County wine, with producers from every sub-appellation pouring within a few blocks of each other.