CrossHatch Winery
A winery built on a drawing technique: harvest different grapes the same day, crush them together, and let the lines cross in the bottle.
Cross-hatching is what an artist does when a single line is not enough: closely spaced strokes laid across one another until they build shading, depth, and form. CrossHatch Winery took that idea off the page and into the cellar. Instead of making one grape at a time, it harvests several varieties on the very same day, then crushes and ferments them together, letting the flavors intersect from the first hour. The result is a small range of co-fermented wines that taste like nothing else in Santa Barbara.
An old idea, drawn in a new hand
CrossHatch was founded in 2011 by Santa Ynez winemaker Ryan Carr, who after more than a decade of making single-variety wines wanted to try something genuinely different. He and his wife Jessica landed on the cross-hatching metaphor, and the concept stuck. Today the winery is women-owned and operated under Michelle Vautier, still making tiny lots, only around a thousand cases a year, each one a co-fermented blend sourced from vineyards across Santa Barbara County.
The technique is not a gimmick. Co-fermentation is one of the oldest methods in winemaking, the way the field blends of Europe were made for centuries before anyone separated the rows. In the Northern Rhone, growers still co-ferment a little white Viognier right in with their red Syrah, because the two grapes together hold color and add a lift of perfume that neither achieves alone. CrossHatch leans into that history, betting that grapes picked, crushed, and fermented as one will knit into something more layered than the same grapes blended after the fact.
Why Santa Barbara makes it work
The method only sings if the fruit is right, and Santa Barbara County gives CrossHatch an unusually deep palette to draw from. The county runs from cool, fog-bound coastal hills to warm inland valleys, all of it shaped by the transverse mountains that funnel Pacific air straight inland. That range of microclimates means a single county can ripen cool-climate Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, Rhone grapes like Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre, and Viognier, and Bordeaux varieties like Cabernet Franc and Merlot, often within a short drive of one another.
That diversity is the whole point for a co-fermenting winery. By picking complementary varieties at the same moment and fermenting them together, CrossHatch can build wines with both structure and aromatic lift, the intersecting lines of the cross-hatch. The microclimates add their own layer, so the same blend tastes of a specific Santa Barbara season as much as a specific recipe.
The wines and the downtown room
Because the lineup is built from co-ferments rather than single varieties, the wines refuse easy labels. Across the range you will find Rhone and Bordeaux grapes woven together, Syrah and Viognier, Grenache and friends, Cabernet Franc, Mourvèdre, Tempranillo, plus white blends built on Grenache Blanc and Chardonnay. They tend to be layered and aromatic, with the freshness that Santa Barbara cool nights preserve, and they are made in small enough quantity that no two vintages repeat exactly.
After years in the Santa Ynez Valley, CrossHatch now pours in downtown Santa Barbara at 111 East Haley Street, an easy walk from the Funk Zone and the rest of the Urban Wine Trail. Come in for a flight, a glass, or bottle service, with a happy hour midweek and reservations available for groups. It is a fitting home for a winery that has always been about bringing different things together in one place.
What to pour it with
Treat the reds as the structured, peppery, Rhone-leaning wines they are. A Syrah-based co-ferment, especially one with a whisper of Viognier, is built for the grill: pour it with a pepper-crusted steak, lamb chops, or smoky tri-tip, because the tannins bind to the fat and protein so the meat tastes cleaner, while the wine natural pepper note mirrors the seasoning and reads as one flavor. The softer, Grenache-driven blends love roast chicken, sausages, and charcuterie, where gentle tannin flatters the spice.
The white co-ferments are your seafood and aperitif wines. Built on high-acid grapes like Grenache Blanc and Chardonnay, they slice through richness, so reach for them with grilled fish, shellfish, or anything fried, where the acid scrubs the fat and resets your palate for the next bite. The move to avoid is putting a tannic red blend next to a delicate, flaky white fish, where the tannin finds no fat to grab and turns hard and metallic on the tongue.
Taste wine made like a drawing
Co-fermented blends you will not find anywhere else, poured in a downtown Santa Barbara room steps from the Urban Wine Trail. Come see what happens when the lines cross.
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