Sonja Magdevski came to wine the long way around. She trained as a journalist, won a Fulbright to study ethnic conflict in Macedonia, and went looking for the paths toward peace. She found her own version of that work in a cellar. Creating world peace one bottle at a time, she likes to say, only half joking. Today, from a small storefront on Bell Street in Los Alamos, she makes some of the most quietly radical wine in Santa Barbara County: cool-climate Rhône varieties from the Sta. Rita Hills that most California wineries would not dare to plant.

From the newsroom to the cellar

Magdevski undergraduate work was in political science at the University of Michigan, her graduate work in journalism at Michigan State, and her Fulbright took her to what is now North Macedonia in 1998 to study how divided people find their way back to peace. Writing and winemaking, she came to realize, are the same pursuit: the story is in the grapes, the harvest, the people, and the season, and each year is a fresh page. She learned the craft on the job and in the viticulture classes at Allan Hancock College, and in 2004 she helped plant a vineyard that changed the trajectory of her life.

She started as a garagiste with a rag-tag group of friends more than twenty years ago, and in 2011 opened a tasting room in Los Alamos under the name Casa Dumetz. In April 2024, on her twentieth year of making wine, she rebranded the whole project as Clementine Carter. “Last year was our twentieth year making wine,” she said, “and I thought, well, I have earned the right to call my name whatever I want it to be.” She does not work alone. Her brother Plamen runs the day to day, her mother Dobrila pilots the kitchen and the morale, and her husband, the celebrated Sta. Rita Hills winemaker Greg Brewer, keeps pace with her endless curiosity.

Who is Clementine Carter

The name comes from a movie. Clementine Carter is a character in My Darling Clementine, the 1946 John Ford Western that Magdevski first watched as a young woman beside her father Kalche, the two of them sharing glasses of wine in the back room of the family Baskin-Robbins in Plymouth, Michigan. In the film, Carter travels across the country chasing a love that never arrives, lands in Tombstone with nothing, and builds a new life for herself through sheer determination. Magdevski saw her own story in that arc, a woman making her own way across a hard and beautiful landscape.

That spirit of determination and ingenuity is the through-line of the wines. Clementine Carter exists to elevate cool-climate Rhône varieties to the distinction Magdevski believes they deserve, in a region that made its name on chardonnay and pinot noir. She is, by her own cheerful admission, here to defy expectation, not to change the world, just to try things that have not been tried.

Cool-climate Rhones from the Sta. Rita Hills

Magdevski sources the majority of her fruit from the Sta. Rita Hills, the cold, wind-scoured appellation whose east-to-west mountains funnel Pacific fog and saline ocean air straight over the vines. That marine chill and the long, slow growing season give her wines what she calls wild finesse and fresh intensity: grenache that is bright and lifted rather than heavy, alongside mourvèdre, syrah, roussanne, picpoul blanc, graciano, and a little pinot noir. With no estate vineyard of her own, she works hand in hand with growers, and at Robert Rae Vineyard the owners grafted an acre each of mourvèdre and roussanne just for her, with picpoul blanc and grenache blanc on the way.

She approaches every vintage like a beginner, hunting for the answer rather than assuming she has it. No two vintages are the same on purpose. “You should be able to read each vintage in each bottle,” she says. “Everything that happened that year should be in this bottle.” It is roughly 2,000 cases a year of curiosity made drinkable.

What to pour it with

These are Mediterranean grapes, so set a Mediterranean table. Grenache, bright and red-fruited with gentle tannin, is the great all-rounder: pour it with roast chicken, lamb, ratatouille, or a board of charcuterie, where it flatters the spice and fat without overpowering anything. Mourvèdre is the dark, brooding, slightly gamey one, and it was born for slow-cooked meat. Pour it with braised lamb shank, a cassoulet, or short ribs, because its firm tannins bind to the fat and protein so the meat tastes cleaner and the wine tastes rounder and richer.

The whites are where it gets fun. Picpoul blanc comes from the same corner of southern France as the oyster beds of the Languedoc coast, and the pairing is no coincidence: its searing acidity and saline snap cut through brine and richness, making it one of the best oyster and shellfish wines on earth. Roussanne, fuller and rounder, loves roast chicken and anything in a cream sauce. The move to avoid is putting a tannic red like the mourvèdre next to a delicate white fish, where the tannin has no fat to grab and turns hard and metallic.

Clementine Carter Wines: common questions