Montemar is a small, family-run winery tucked into the no-frills Lompoc Wine Ghetto, the working warehouse cluster at the gateway to the Sta. Rita Hills. It began in a Camarillo garage in 1991, when aerospace engineer Steve Arrowood started turning Santa Barbara County fruit into wine fourteen barrels at a time. Today his son Kyle runs it, pouring serious cool-climate Pinot Noir and Syrah in a place that puts the wine, never the marble, first.

The story

Steve and Caryn Arrowood made their first wine in 1991, in the garage of their home, as a passion that quietly took over a life. By day Steve was an aerospace engineer. By night and on weekends he was hauling fruit, from Santa Barbara County up to Napa, and building toward fourteen barrels a year on instinct and obsession. The name came from the street near their house, Via Montemar, which loosely means hill by the ocean. Steve loved that it captured the thing that made his wines work: the cool sea breezes that pour off the Pacific and keep the Sta. Rita Hills honest.

The turn came in 2009, when Steve bonded the operation and made Montemar a real winery. By 2013 production had grown enough to open a tasting room, and by 2015 the family had its own dedicated space in Lompoc. Steve had retired from aerospace after his first bout with cancer in 2012, and he poured everything that was left into the wine, the way a person does when they finally get to do the thing they always wanted.

Steve Arrowood died in 2020, after a long fight with cancer. His son Kyle, who had grown up around the barrels and came on full-time in 2018, stepped into the cellar as a second-generation winemaker. Kyle kept his father’s beloved red-wine protocol intact, then began to stretch it, adding white experiments and a streak of play that fits the house tagline, serious wine, serious fun. He runs the place with his wife Layne, and the result is a winery where the family that made the wine is the family that hands you the glass.

The place

Montemar’s fruit comes from the Sta. Rita Hills, the coolest and most coastal corner of Santa Barbara County, and the tasting room sits at its doorstep in Lompoc. This is one of the rare places on earth where the mountain ranges run east to west rather than north to south. That transverse geology opens the valley like a funnel straight to the ocean, so marine fog and a hard afternoon breeze sweep inland every day. The grapes ripen under a generous sun, then get chilled at dusk, and that daily swing is the entire secret. It lets the fruit develop flavor slowly while holding onto its acid, which is why the wines here taste alive rather than heavy.

The soils add the rest of the tension. The Sta. Rita Hills floor is built on sand, silt, and ancient diatomaceous seabed, ground so poor and free-draining that vines have to struggle for everything. That struggle shows up in the glass as nerve and minerality, the savory cut that separates a great cool-climate Pinot from a soft one. Montemar leans on a roll call of the appellation’s most respected sites, the kind of vineyards serious Pinot drinkers chase by name.

What they grow and make

Montemar is a small-lot, vineyard-driven house, producing around 1,200 cases a year and averaging fewer than 100 cases per lot. Pinot Noir is the heart of it. The fruit comes from a deep bench of Sta. Rita Hills sites, including Bentrock, Radian, Rancho la Vina, La Encantada, Rita’s Crown, and Hillard Bruce. Each lot is fermented and aged separately, with most bottled as vineyard designates that show off the specific patch of ground they came from. There is also a Sta. Rita Hills Pinot Noir that blends several of those vineyards into one expressive, appellation-wide statement, a fine place to start if you want to taste the region in a single glass.

Syrah is the other pillar, the wine that carries Steve’s old Rhone-loving heart. It comes from sites like Thompson, Watch Hill, McGinley, and Zotovich, again made and aged lot by lot, with vineyard-designated Syrahs alongside several Rhone-style blends assembled at bottling. These are dark, peppery, savory wines, built on cool-climate acid rather than brute power, the kind of Syrah that tastes of crushed black fruit and smoke without ever turning jammy.

Kyle has widened the lineup with whites and oddities that keep the room interesting. He makes a zingy, stainless-steel Chardonnay with no oak to hide behind, an amber, skin-contact Grenache Blanc that leans into texture, and sparkling pet-nats for the people who like a little wildness in their glass. The through-line across everything is the same: cool fruit, careful hands, and an honest expression of place over any house formula.

Farming

Montemar does not farm its own estate. Instead it sources from a hand-picked set of premium Sta. Rita Hills and Santa Barbara County vineyards, choosing growers who farm the cool sites the way the Arrowoods would themselves. The work that defines the wines happens in the cellar, where Kyle keeps his father’s red-wine protocol, treats each vineyard lot as its own small project, and ferments and ages them separately so the differences between sites stay legible all the way to the bottle. It is a grower-respecting, low-volume approach that favors precision over scale.

Visiting

The Montemar tasting room sits in the Lompoc Wine Ghetto, the famously unglamorous industrial park off Highway 1 where some of the Central Coast’s best small producers make and pour their wine side by side. There is no chandelier and no pretense, just a roomy 5,000 square foot indoor and outdoor space, charcuterie and cheese, and patio seating where you can pack a picnic and settle in for the afternoon. It is one of the friendliest places in the Ghetto to spend a couple of hours, and the family ethos means you are often talking wine with someone who actually made it.

Food pairing

These are table wines in the truest sense, built on the acid that connects wine to food. Start with the Sta. Rita Hills Pinot Noir. Its light, silky tannin and red-fruited lift make it a natural with seared duck breast and a cherry reduction, the wine and the fruit echoing each other in a clean congruent match. It is just as good with mushroom risotto or a simple roast chicken, where the Pinot meets the earthy, savory notes of the dish on shared ground. Pour the vineyard-designate bottlings when the food is quieter and you want to taste the differences between sites.

The Syrah wants smoke and char. Its dark fruit, black pepper, and cool-climate freshness stand up to grilled lamb, a peppercorn-crusted steak, or anything off the fire, the wine’s structure cutting the fat while its savory edge follows the grill marks. Kyle’s stainless Chardonnay is your oyster-and-ceviche wine, all bright acid and no oak, while the amber Grenache Blanc, with its grippier texture, loves a board of cured meats and hard cheese. Building a menu around a bottle tonight? Run it through our wine pairing generator for a specific match.

Keep exploring from here. Read the full story of the cool-climate Sta. Rita Hills, see where Montemar fits in the wider world of Santa Barbara County wine, go deeper on the grape with our guide to California Pinot Noir, and plan a dinner with the wine pairing generator.

Anyone planning a weekend in the area should also walk Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone, where old warehouses a few blocks from the beach now hold the densest cluster of tasting rooms in the county.