THE CELLAR: Buy Local, Drink Local

Q: I like to buy local. What are my options regarding wine?

There is a handful of vineyards in Pacific Palisades, but they do not produce wine in commercial quantities. Therefore, your first locavore stop ought to be the Pali Wine Company, which is owned by longtime Palisadians Tim Perr and Scott Knight. Their story combines a quest for quality with sound business sense and a certain rebellious streak.

After they built a successful insurance consulting firm, the two wine connoisseurs “thought it would be fun to start a winery,” Tim told me in an interview at his office. From its beginnings in 2005, Pali Wine Co. has steadily expanded its offerings and even pioneered a distribution mode that’s new for California.

They began in a garage-sized facility, one of many in the town of Lompoc in Santa Barbara County. Their initial focus—and still the flagship of the company—is high-quality Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, which winemaker Aaron Walker procures from select vineyards, guiding each into a separate release. They produce seven of these wines in most years, always in lots smaller than 200 cases.

“I try to let each vineyard express its own personality,” Walker told me when I visited in mid-March. The wines have drawn interest in national publications and could easily grace your table for a special occasion.

On the strength of their early success, Perr and Knight built a winery in 2007 on the north edge of Lompoc, with gently sloping floors, passive air circulation and temperature-controlled tanks for fermentation and blending.

The next level of their production further shows the company’s Palisadian roots. They created a line of moderately priced Pinots and Chardonnays from regions such as Santa Barbara County, the Russian River Valley and the Sonoma Coast. Some also come from the 50-acre Pali Estate Vineyard in the Sta. Rita Hills, planted in 2013 and just now coming into production. They named these regional wines after Palisades neighborhoods: Huntington, Charm Acres, Alphabets, Riviera and Summit. They perform the rare feat of showing enticing quality at reasonable prices.

In search of new challenges beyond the flagship varieties, five years ago they started the Tower 15 label, named for the lifeguard tower nearest the Palisades, for offerings made from other grape varieties. Some are labeled by the grape, others are blends called The Reef, The Jetty, The Swell and others. All are worthy and dependable.

A couple of their offerings can be found at the Palisades branch of Gelson’s but beyond that, Palisades wines have to compete with much larger corporate producers for shelf space in stores. This fact brought out Perr’s iconoclastic streak, as he has vowed to “break the distribution stranglehold” that those mega-wineries exert.

Expanding from the tasting rooms in Lompoc and Santa Barbara, he is now busily opening Palisades-dedicated outlets in San Diego, Anaheim and two planned future venues in LA. Customers who buy a branded, empty, one-liter bottle can return for a refill at any time, poured from a tap. So far no other winery in California sells its product this way in branch outlets. These stores encourage customers to treat wine as a food commodity similar to lettuce or pasta, helping cater to the locavore in all of us.