Push open the door on State Street as the light goes gold, and you find a room that feels less like a tasting bar than a living room with a record collection. There is jazz on the speakers, a back patio catching the last sun, and a wall of bottles built over four decades by one of Santa Barbara County’s quiet founding fathers. Longoria Wines has been making graceful, vineyard-honest Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Cabernet Franc since 1982, long before this stretch of coast was famous, and it is still pouring its heart out one glass at a time.

The story

Rick Longoria arrived in Santa Barbara wine in 1976, when the region was barely a rumor. He took a job as the first cellar foreman at Firestone Vineyard, learned the craft from the ground up, and by 1982 felt ready to bet on himself. With financial help from his father, he and his wife Diana made 500 cases of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from Santa Maria Valley fruit and launched a label under their own name. It was a tiny, blind-faith start, made while Rick still held a day job as a winemaker for others.

For twelve years he ran the cellar at The Gainey Vineyard, helping build it into one of the county’s most respected names while quietly growing his own brand on the side. Along the way Rick became a genuine pioneer, one of the first in Santa Barbara County to bottle varieties that are now local signatures. He made Cabernet Franc here as early as 1990, planted and bottled Albarino and Tempranillo in 2003, and even introduced the Spanish grape Mencia in 2021. In 1998 he and Diana finally opened a tasting room of their own, and not long after he committed to the label full time, moving production to a working winery in the city of Lompoc.

In 2022, after forty years, Rick and Diana sold the namesake winery to Brooke and Lindsey Christian, who married in Santa Barbara and set out to carry the legacy forward as a family-run house. Rick stayed on as consulting winemaker to pass the torch, and Lompoc native Eric Wilson now leads the cellar. The wines still chase the same thing Rick chased from the start, balance and honesty over size and noise.

The place

The soul of Longoria lives in the Sta. Rita Hills, the cool, wind-raked AVA at the western edge of the Santa Ynez Valley where the transverse mountain ranges run east to west and open the land like a funnel to the Pacific. Marine fog pours straight inland off the cold ocean, settling over the vines at night and burning off slowly each morning, so the grapes ripen at a crawl and hold onto bright, mouthwatering acidity. It is one of the great cool-climate addresses in California, the kind of ground that makes Pinot Noir and Chardonnay taste like somewhere.

In spring of 1998 Rick planted his own piece of it, an eight-acre vineyard he named Fe Ciega, Spanish for blind faith, on a breezy slope in the southwest corner of the appellation. The site is lean and windswept, with sandy, diatomaceous soils that stress the vines and concentrate the fruit. That estate vineyard remains the heart of the range, the source of the Pinot Noir that carries the Longoria name furthest.

What they grow and make

At its core, Longoria is a Pinot Noir and Chardonnay house with a deep love affair on the side. The estate Fe Ciega Vineyard Pinot Noir is the flagship, the darkest and most structured of the lineup, all black cherry and forest-floor savor with firm but clear tannins and the patience to age. The Chardonnays lean cool and mineral rather than buttery, built on orchard fruit and a fine line of acidity. These are wines for the table, not the spotlight.

Then there is Cabernet Franc, which Rick has called his favorite grape of the region. For years he worked it into a singular Bordeaux-style blend with a splash of Syrah, and rather than label it plainly he named it Blues Cuvee, a nod to his lifelong love of blues and jazz that still plays in the tasting rooms today. The winery also bottles a varietal Cabernet Franc from Santa Barbara County, along with the pioneering Albarino and Tempranillo that Rick introduced here. Tasting through the range is a tour of one winemaker’s restless curiosity across forty vintages.

Visiting

Longoria pours at two very different rooms. The Santa Barbara tasting room sits right on State Street downtown, an easy, walkable stop with cozy indoor seating, a sunny back patio, and a calendar of live music from local singer-songwriters, plus Friday-night karaoke that leans into the winery’s musical streak. The original winery tasting room in Lompoc, in the working-class wine quarter known as the Lompoc Wine Ghetto, is where the wine is actually made, a more low-key, behind-the-scenes experience for people who want to taste close to the source. Hours shift by season, so it is always worth a quick call before you go.

Food pairing

These wines were built to share a table. The estate Fe Ciega Pinot Noir, with its black cherry fruit and savory, earthy undertow, wants the classics that cool-climate Pinot has always loved: seared duck breast with a cherry reduction, mushroom risotto, or grilled salmon. The wine’s earthy notes bridge directly to the umami in mushrooms and the char on the fish, so the two read as a single flavor. The mineral, high-acid Chardonnay slices through butter and cream, making it a clean match for roast chicken with lemon or a creamy seafood pasta, the acidity resetting your palate for the next bite. For Blues Cuvee and the varietal Cabernet Franc, lean into their herbal, peppery edge with grilled lamb, braised short ribs, or anything off the fire, where the wine’s structure meets the fat and softens. 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 the estate Pinot its cool-climate spine, browse the wider world of Santa Barbara wine, and read our guides to California Pinot Noir and California Chardonnay, the two grapes Longoria does best. When you are ready to plan a dinner around a bottle, the wine pairing generator does the matching for you.

Visitors short on time often start at the Funk Zone, the walkable warehouse district near the Santa Barbara waterfront where a large share of the county’s producers keep a tasting room.