Carr Winery – Santa Barbara Urban Wine Tour #5

This is a post in my Santa Barbara Urban Wine Trail Series. See the summary article here for general Wine Trail info or to read about the 27 other wineries!

I visited Carr Winery in the Midtown section of Santa Barbara with my girlfriend Alena on a bustling Friday evening. Our first impression of the Carr Winery was its amazing ambiance and the fun vibe of the people and staff inside. It is a working winery with an expansive tasting area against a backdrop of aging barrels of wine stacked to the ceiling. It is an awesome environment to taste the many Carr Winery wines they have available.

We arrived right before the cutoff for wine tastings. (Note they stop serving wine tastings at 5pm every day. After 5pm they serve wine by the glass, bottle and tap wine in special growlers.) It was a Friday evening so as usual they had a live band which kicked off partway through our tasting. (The band was The Left Hand Lions and they were awesome!) The place was quite full, with a mix of people from all adult age groups.

We were again lucky to be served by the Winery's owner, Jessica Carr. This meant we had amazing service and a great provider of knowledge about the winery and each of the wines we tried.

Jessica started us off with two of Carr Winery's popular white wines, a 2016 Sauvignon Blanc and 2017 Pinot Gris. Both were aged in steel barrels and had fruity smells. Alena and I both thought they both tasted of light apple juice with the Pinot Gris having a bit more complexity with hints of caramel and yest even though it was not on oak.

Next we tried the 2016 Santa Rita Hills Pinot Noir. It had a great and complex smell; sweet cherry and grassy fields. Neither of us particularly were fond of this wine once we tasted it though. It definitely had complex flavors, but I didn't find it quite as smooth as I would hope.

I asked Jessica about their wines on tap and how that worked. She then showed us the cool wine growlers they sell and gave us a bit of insight into the difference between the tap wines and the other bottled wines. She kindly surprised us and let us try the Red Wine that was on tap, the 2016 Il Padrino - a mix of Sangiovese, Merlot and Syrah. This was a fruity and peppery (white pepper) wine that was easy to drink. Overall, it was well balanced with a really strong oak finish.

Next, Jessica surprised us again with another off menu tasting, the 2016 Sangiovese. It had fresh strawberry and rose petal flavors with good tannin and acid as well, but overall I felt it was a little weak as a single varietal.

We got back to the regular tasting menu with the 2016 Carr Syrah. It tasted lightly of candied plums and was super oaky. I thought there was a hint of mint on the tongue, but Alena just looked at me like I was crazy.

We finished with our favorite wine of the evening, the 2016 Cab Franc. This one is aged in French oak for 20 months. Alena described the beautiful color of this wine as garnet. It had strong fresh red fruit and floral smells. It was a very well made wine, with a great balance and its complexity flowed well. The Cab Franc is an easy drinking wine that you could drink alone or pair with a nice meal.

It was a great finish to our Friday date night wine tasting at Carr Winery. While the wines did not blow me away, the atmosphere and beauty of the tasting room were spectacular. Carr Winery's tasting room was impressive and somewhere I would love to visit again, listen to the live music on Thursday or Friday evenings and have a nice glass of their fun on-tap wines. Thank you to Jessica for making our experience awesome and I would definitely recommend the Carr Winery tasting room as a top Santa Barbara wine experience, getting to taste their wines in such a beautiful working winery atmosphere.

- Visited on October 5th, 2018