San Pasqual Winery is located at 5151 Santa Fe Street. I never knew the name of that street before. I guess I just thought of it as a bike path between Pacific Beach and the UTC area next to I-5. I've ridden it possibly hundreds of times and never paid much attention to San Pasqual Winery either. I assumed it was a warehouse that a wine company used to store wine for distribution in San Diego. Little did I know they actually do something really interesting there!

When I got there, Steve May (who I had met a few days before at San Diego Coffee) was shoveling grapes into a crushing machine. Steve went to Torrey Pines high school with Erik Humphrey. Erik's dad had moved up to Napa Valley. While visiting his dad, he got a chance to learn about wine making and then joined the Amateur Winemaking Society here in San Diego. When San Pasqual Winery came up for sale, Erik partnered up with Steve to buy it, moved it from Escondido to San Diego, and gave it a burst of new blood. Now, two years have passed and things are going well.

When I arrived, Erik was out picking up a load of grapes, so I helped Steve with the crushing machine that had jammed up. Then I shoveled grapes for a while which was great fun as I've never done it before! Erik arrived shortly thereafter with grapes from the Escondido area. He gets grapes from around San Diego county as well as the Guadalupe Valley in Mexico. Once the grapes were unloaded, he showed me a little about how you can tell the quality of a grape for wine making. Every few minutes, he would walk over to the grapes and start smelling them, pick some up, look at them, eat one, and look at the seeds.

When it gets hot and wet just before harvest time, the grapes can absorb water and then burst. Their skins can split which allows bacteria in, changing the flavor and making for a lower quality wine. Enough bacteria can even make wine turn to vinegar because it prevents the fermentation process. Another thing to look out for is how ripe the grape is. Remove the grape seeds and look at them. If there are a lot of green seeds, then they likely aren't ripe enough.

Erik was very open to doing wine tastings at the restaurant and to bringing people to his facility to show them how wine is made. The nearby location of the winery, the local origin of their grapes, and the ability to show restaurant customers how the wine is made is exactly what I'm looking.

Go to one of these places to try their wine.