Small But Mighty: Sans Liege Wines
By Jaime Lewis
Call it a generational distrust for The Establishment. Despite the overall high quality of wines in our neck of the woods, when I see a SLO County winery featured in print, I tend to dismiss it if it’s owned by (1) an attorney/businessman/doctor from out of town, or (2) a corporation. I can almost smell it when they are.
Here’s what most people don’t know. There is a cache of young guys making wines to enormous national and international critical acclaim right here in our area. No, they don’t have flashy tasting rooms or fountains or dazzling caps and tee shirts. They do have small amounts of killer wine. Take, for example, the Rhone-centric Sans Liege Wines, owned and operated solely by 35-year-old winemaker Curt Schlachlin. Sans who? Sans Liege (sahn leej). It means “without allegiance,” which aptly describes Curt’s tenacity to pursue craft winemaking on the Central Coast unhindered by the trappings of any particular style. Growing up in East L.A., Curt isn’t one of those privileged wine country kids raised among the vines. “I didn’t even drink wine until I came to Cal Poly,” he says. And unlike so many of his fellow local winemakers, Curt majored in business, not viticulture. “Wine was just something I had fun tasting on the weekends.”
While attending Cal Poly, Curt took a job with Trader Joe’s and found himself hanging around the wine aisle, reading labels and taking new wines home to drink. By the time he accepted a position in management, he was formulating a plan to try his own hand at winemaking. “My friend McPrice Myers (of the McPrice Myers label) was starting a winery, and I had the opportunity to help out here and there. “I was working 50-70 hours per week at the store and going to Santa Maria to help McPrice and his partner Russell From (of Herman Story Wines) in the cellar (for their joint label, Barrel 27 Wine Company.) At the end of a long day, going and working with them was my pleasure. It’s what I did for myself.” And from there, the journey began.
After getting a couple vintages under his belt, two critical events occurred to spur Sans Liege into existence: an injury at work and a trip to the Rhone Valley in France. While injury forced Curt away from his day job and its attendant securities, it also allowed him the freedom to steam ahead into the glorious unknown to start his own winery. And it was on his trip to the Rhone that the name “Sans Liege” first came to mind. “We were tasting through some wines with Bernard Gripa, a third-generation winemaker in St. Joseph, and I expressed how envious I was of all the tradition and history he was carrying on. He looked at me and replied how envious he was of my opportunity to be part of a winemaking region which is still shaping its history. That is what Sans Liege is about, freedom to work with these varietals in an area where the tradition doesn’t really exist.” And now, just a few vintages later, Curt is making some of the most outstanding and delicious wines to grace the Central Coast — and the United States. Between a feature in the L.A. Times as the Wine of the Week and a place on Wine Spectator’s “Top 10 Emerging Rhone Producers list, plus some nice scores posted on the Spectator website earlier this year, Curt has found himself in the wonderful position of having sold out all of his wine. When asked if he plans to grow the winery to accommodate more volume, he is non-committal: “I never wanted to become a big company. I may have a tasting room at some point, but I don’t know. I’d like to cap my production at 3,000 cases and make just enough to keep enjoying what I’m doing.”
For now, the only way to get your paws on any of Curt’s wines is to join his wine club, which has a limit of 150 members. To see if you might be interested, give Curt a call on his cell phone at 805.305.8564 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to set up a tasting with him. More information on the wine club can be found at www.sansliege.com.
