Walk into the small tasting room on Alamo Pintado Avenue in Los Olivos and the first thing Larry Schaffer is likely to ask is how you take your coffee. It is a disarming opener, and it tells you everything about Tercero Wines: a one-man, Rhone-focused project built on the radical idea that wine should be a pleasure, not a test.

The story

Larry Schaffer did not come to wine the usual way. He spent years in educational and trade publishing before the pull of the vineyard became impossible to ignore. He went back to school, earned a Master’s in Viticulture and Enology from UC Davis, and landed in the Santa Ynez Valley around 2005 as the enologist at Fess Parker Winery, one of the best-known names in Santa Barbara County. The classroom and the cellar gave him the craft. What came next gave him a voice of his own.

In 2006 he started Tercero as a micro-winery, a tiny operation built on bought fruit and borrowed space, with his own first commercial wines following close behind. The name carries its own quiet logic. Tercero means third in Spanish, and the number three runs through Larry’s life: he was the third child in his family, he lived in the third dormitory complex at UC Davis, and he is the father of three children.

Schaffer is also one of the more generous and outspoken people in the valley, a tireless champion of Santa Barbara Rhones and of getting newcomers over their nerves. “For the most part, American consumers are scared of wine, and we don’t do a good job making them less scared of wine,” he has said. Tercero is his answer to that problem, poured one glass and one coffee question at a time.

The place

Tercero is rooted in the Santa Ynez Valley, the broad inland heart of Santa Barbara County where the warmth runs higher and the Rhone grapes ripen with conviction. This is one of the great accidents of California geography. The mountain ranges here run east to west rather than the usual north to south, opening a funnel that pulls cool Pacific air and morning fog deep inland. Mornings start gray and damp, afternoons climb into real heat, and then the marine air slides back at dusk and drops the temperature like a stone.

That daily swing is the engine behind these wines. The heat ripens Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvedre to full, sun-soaked fruit, while the cold nights lock in acidity and keep everything fresh and lifted. Within the valley, Tercero draws on some of the most respected Rhone sites in the county, including Larner Vineyard in the sandy, warm Ballard Canyon AVA and the sprawling Camp 4 Vineyard, along with Tierra Alta, Thompson, and Vogelzang. Each site brings its own accent, and Schaffer’s job, as he sees it, is to stay out of the way.

What they grow and make

Tercero does not own vineyards. It is a winery in the truest, oldest sense of the word: Schaffer chooses the fruit, then makes the wine. The whole portfolio sits in the Rhone family, the grapes of southern France grown under a California sun, and it spans both colors with equal care. On the white side there is Grenache Blanc, Viognier, and Marsanne, the textural, aromatic whites that the valley does so well and that too few American drinkers know. On the red side it is Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvedre, bottled both as single-vineyard expressions and as blends.

The single-vineyard wines are where you taste the dirt. The Larner Mourvedre, from a block in Ballard Canyon, leans into the grape’s wild, gamey, brooding side, while a Camp 4 Grenache can show a lighter, brighter, red-fruited touch. The blends are where you taste Schaffer’s hand. Verbiage Rouge, his flagship red blend, is a classic southern Rhone composition, in one vintage roughly 46 percent Grenache, 30 percent Syrah, 20 percent Mourvedre, and a splash of Cinsault, built so the parts disappear into a single, generous whole.

Across the range the wines are honest and unmanipulated, made to show the vineyard and the vintage rather than a recipe. He describes his aim as wanting each bottle to be “a transparent look at that vineyard, that vintage, that variety, or that blend.” That is winemaking as translation, not as performance, and it is rare.

Farming and sourcing

Because Tercero is a sourced-fruit operation, the farming story is really a sourcing story, and it is a deliberate one. Rather than tie himself to a single piece of ground, Schaffer has built long relationships with a handful of the best Rhone-planted vineyards in the Santa Ynez Valley and works closely with their growers. Larner and Camp 4 have been part of the program since the early days, and that continuity matters: knowing a vineyard across many vintages is its own kind of farming knowledge, the slow accumulation of how a block behaves in a hot year, a cool one, a drought. The wines are small-lot and hand-crafted, made from fruit Schaffer has watched for years.

Visiting

The Tercero tasting room sits in the middle of walkable downtown Los Olivos, a few steps from the rest of the village’s tasting rooms and cafes. It is small, warm, and personal, the kind of place where the person pouring may well be the person who made the wine. Reservations are recommended, especially on weekends, and Schaffer’s coffee question is a real one, a quick way to point you toward the wines you are most likely to love.

Food pairing

These are wines built for the table, and the Rhone grapes practically choose their own plates. Pour Verbiage Rouge or the Larner Mourvedre alongside something with fat and char: a herb-rubbed lamb shoulder, grilled merguez sausage, or a Tuesday-night burger off the grill. The reasoning is structural. The supple tannin and dark fruit of these reds bind to the fat and protein, so the meat tastes cleaner and the wine tastes rounder, each one improving the other bite by sip. The Syrah wants pepper and smoke, so reach for grilled short ribs or a peppercorn-crusted steak.

The whites are the quiet stars of any meal. Grenache Blanc and Marsanne have the body and texture to stand up to roast chicken, creamy pastas, and richer seafood, while their freshness keeps the whole thing from feeling heavy. Viognier, with its peach and honeysuckle perfume, loves a little spice, so try it with a mild Thai curry or grilled prawns. If you want a starting point for your own table, run your menu through the pairing tool and build the night from there.

To go deeper, explore the wider Santa Ynez Valley, read about the broader world of Santa Barbara wine, learn what makes a great bottle of Syrah, and use the wine pairing generator to match Tercero’s Rhones to your next dinner.

For a tasting day that needs no designated driver, the Funk Zone urban wine trail gathers dozens of Santa Barbara County producers into a walkable grid of converted warehouses near the harbor.