In late 2003 Helen Keplinger met DJ Warner over a bottle of Ribera del Duero in a Spanish wine shop in Los Angeles. A year later she moved to Priorat to build a winery on Spanish soil, and there, working Grenache from seven different sites, she fell completely in love. She came home with a conviction about how minute changes in terroir imprint a wine. By 2006 she and Warner had launched Keplinger Wines with 250 cases. By 2012 she was Food and Wine’s Winemaker of the Year. The story since has been about finding the right rock.

A winemaker who chased the rock

Helen Keplinger earned a master’s in enology from UC Davis in 2000 and built a resume that reads like a list of California’s most coveted labels. She made wine at Bryant Family Vineyard, where her Cabernet drew a 98-point review from Robert Parker, and she has been the longtime winemaker for Grace Family Vineyards and Carte Blanche, with consulting work at Kenzo Estate alongside viticulturist David Abreu. In 2012 Food and Wine named her Winemaker of the Year.

But the formative chapter was Spain. In 2004 she moved to Priorat to start a winery, and the steep, slate-and-schist hill country reshaped how she thought about wine. Her own words put it plainly, that it was in the Priorat where she gained an enormous appreciation for minute changes in terroir and the results they imprint on a wine made from a single site. She and DJ Warner, her husband and partner, founded Keplinger Wines in 2006 around exactly that idea, Old World restraint applied to bold California Rhone fruit.

For years Keplinger made acclaimed wine with no estate at all, sourcing fruit grape by grape until 2020, when she bought 75 limestone acres in Willow Creek and named the vineyard Star Wagon.

Star Wagon, planted at last

For more than a decade Keplinger built her reputation with no estate vineyard, sourcing fruit from prized California sites in the Sierra Foothills, Amador and El Dorado counties, plus Napa and Sonoma. Wine Spectator once summed up the model as a Napa winery with no Napa grapes. The wines were cult objects, made a few hundred cases at a time and released to a mailing list.

Then in 2020 Helen and DJ bought a 75-acre property in the Willow Creek District of Paso Robles and planted roughly 20 acres, mostly to Rhone varieties, naming the vineyard Star Wagon. It was a deliberate landing. Willow Creek is mountainous and limestone-rich, the calcareous, Monterey Formation country of the Paso west side, with cool high slopes and the Templeton Gap pulling marine air inland for a wide day-to-night swing. For a winemaker who learned to read terroir on the schist of Priorat, this steep, rocky, limestone ground was a homecoming of sorts.

The cuvees, dark and lifted

Keplinger’s wines are Rhone and Spanish at heart, built on Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre, Counoise, Petite Sirah, and Viognier, and they are tiny. Lithic, from Amador’s Shake Ridge Vineyard, is a Grenache-led blend with Mourvedre and Syrah, perfumed and savory, all wild red berry, dried herb, and a stony spine that earns its name. Caldera, from El Dorado, leans on Mourvedre with Grenache and Counoise, darker and meatier, with blueberry, game, and crushed pepper.

Sumo is a denser proposition, Petite Sirah with Syrah and a touch of Viognier, inky and powerful but kept honest by acidity. Kingpin Rows is a single-vineyard Syrah from Pelkan Ranch, plush and sweetly fruited. The scores have followed throughout, with Antonio Galloni rating early vintages of Sumo at 94 points and Caldera and Lithic at 93. Across the range the signature is the same, generous California fruit reined in by an Old World sense of structure and lift.

What to pour Keplinger with

These are Grenache- and Mourvedre-driven wines with real concentration, so think about both tannin and acid. Lithic, with its perfumed red fruit and moderate tannin, is a natural with red-oak-grilled lamb or a herb-crusted leg, where its acidity cuts the richness of the meat and its savory edge meets the char. Caldera, the meatier Mourvedre blend, wants game or a slow-braised short rib, the firmer tannin binding the protein and fat so both the wine and the dish soften and deepen.

Sumo, the dense Petite Sirah, is a special-occasion red built for the grill at its most serious, a thick ribeye or smoked brisket where big tannin needs big fat to fold into. Because heat amplifies alcohol, keep the spice restrained on these full-bodied wines and let the smoke and salt carry the seasoning instead. For a specific Keplinger cuvee and a dish you have in mind, our wine pairing generator can dial in the match.

Visiting Keplinger

Keplinger is a small, highly allocated producer, and its wines are sold chiefly through a mailing list where members get first access to each release. Tastings are by appointment, intimate seated experiences of the Rhone and Spanish-leaning range, and the winery has offered guided visits to the 75-acre Star Wagon ranch in Willow Creek itself. Reserve directly through Keplinger and confirm current hours, locations, and fees when you book, since a producer this small keeps a tight calendar. To understand where Star Wagon sits within the broader west side and the wider appellation, our Paso Robles guide maps the districts and the roads between them.

Keplinger Wines: common questions