Winefullness Magazine
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TOP of the Pops
The TOP Interview
Tops in Monochrome
I don't know what attracted me to TOP. Could it have been the evocative name that implied so much?
I seem to remember that when I was planning this trip, scanning maps and wondering where might be an interesting place to go and see what was happening, this jumped off the page, and the more research I did, the more the reputation of this winery seemed to grow.
It was just down the road from where I was staying and the journey was little more than a few minutes by car.
I follow a list of intriguing directions, avoided parking in somebody's spot before searching for a tasting room that gives no clues. All very mysterious.
The only signs I find of TOP's presence is a solitary fence with a number on. No signage here. Most intriguing.
At one end of the tall fence there's an entrance, of sorts, and I step behind and there it was.
It's a small tasting room that could almost be in somebody's living room, and perhaps this is part of TOP's ideology of family.
The TOP List
Three people sit tasting, making effusive gestures about the contents of their glasses until I'm noticed and one of them stand and comes to say hello.
This is Yudy, who works for TOP ( one of only three full-time employees). She might be in public relations, but at TOP the people wear many different hats, and with wine as good as the stuff I'm served I'm not going to argue.
She has a seat, tasting notes and glass waiting for me, and is so courteous that I feel at home in moments, and with the sounds of Amy Winehouse riffing in the background she fills me in on their history.
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The name of TOP is not a confident boast. After you've tasted the wines you'll think it an apt name. It's taken from the spinning top that has been part of childhood for centuries. It's a toy that is simple in concept and design, but has an unassuming dynamic running through it.
TOP's aim in making wine is no different, and the reasoning of Stanley the winemaker is to transform simple ingredients into an elevated expressions of what is in your glass.
They named their winery TOP after the toy, and various incarnations of it appear on the labels of the wines that TOP make as they work hard to produce Rhône varietal wines from highly acclaimed vineyards throughout California.
The focus is on Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre, Graciano, Roussanne, Grenache Blanc and a bit of dabbling with other varieties, but this is only a small part of their story, and as I listened to Yudy, I realised that this is a tale of family and dreams that started in Mexico, and has taken them from corporate Los Angeles to a place at the top table of Paso Robles wine making. Don't just read my utterings here, seek them out at The French Laundry, but before we get down to the chat, who are the guiding lights behind this story.'
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STANLEY BARRIOS - PROPRIETOR AND WINEMAKER
Stanley was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. While working at a financial firm in Los Angeles he began collecting and sharing wines with associates. He formed wine tasting groups and competitive tastings with colleagues, further expanding his knowledge in wines from around the globe.
In 2014 he purchased four tons of grapes from the west side of Paso Robles, which later became the first vintage of TOP wines.
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ELENA MARTINEZ - PROPRIETOR
Elena was also born and raised in Los Angeles, where she worked for several years in hospitality and which is where she first discovered her passion for wine.
In 2005 she moved to the Willamette Valley to explore the wines of Oregon while shifting her career focus on real estate as a broker. In 2007 she moved back to Los Angeles to study oriental medicine and acupuncture before moving full-time to Paso Robles in 2019. Elena’s management and hospitality experience have become the core of what TOP is today, but enough of the website chit-chat, what are TOP bringing to the Paso Robles wine party?
Just A Fence?
Winefullness Magazine: You're a small, but important Paso Robles winery. How do you manage?
Yudy: As you know we have to wear so many hats for a business of this nature, and today Stanley and Elena are hosting a group of people from a charity event that we are participating in in Alabama. They're hosting off-site at one of the vineyards that we get access to.
Winefullness Magazine: I've got to say that I really like the location for your tasting room.
Yudy: I feel so fortunate because we wanted to create a Speakeasy feel. That means we can be hard to find because there's no signage, and that's all intentional because most of our customers, our contracts arrive because they want to come and get to know us. We always say that if it's meant to be you'll find us, so we don't do any marketing or advertising.
We know that there are hundreds of wineries out there, and we feel honoured and humble when a person walks in and chooses to taste with us, and we want to make sure that it's more like a visit to a friend, and we love to hear all of the tasting experiences that they've done. The people who come for their first visit will say that they visited such and such winery and the pourers, owners and staff have said that you have to go to TOP, and this fills our hearts because it is wonderful to be so highly respected in the community and amongst our friends. We feel so privileged because word of mouth is such a powerful a marketing tool.
Winefullness Magazine: So how did it all start?
Yudy: We started this brand in 2014 and were only able to afford to make 200 cases, and that was it. Essentially, my sister Elena and her husband Stanley used their life savings and cashed in their corporate jobs in Los Angeles, which is quite different from the beautiful Central Coast.
Before we were ready to move here fully, my brother-in-law did an unpaid internship for two years, and during this time he learned the very basics. He was in corporate America, down in Los Angeles, and would take sabbaticals from work to be able to come and learn about wine, and he knew that making wine was something that he was meant to be doing.
He had started to collect wines prior to this and he was just very passionate about the process. He was so lucky because he started his internship with a producer from Paso Robles who offered him a chance because of his passion and how knowledgeable he was without being in the industry.
Thankfully he worked harvests for those two years, and one day he mentioned to my sister-in-law that he thought that this was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. My sister just told him to do it because she believed in him so much.
Winefullness Magazine: That is quite a bedrock of support?
Yudy: Indeed. So they start to get the money together, sell the house in LA and come to live with my husband and I for three years just so they could save every single penny to be able to start TOP, and we grew based on the demand, and our growth has been so organic. Today we're a 3000 case producer, but we're almost where we want to be.
Winefullness Magazine: How many of you work here?
Yudy: It's just a team of three and I cannot believe that we've been doing this since 2014. It's all about constant growth, and we're so happy because when we envisioned this brand we knew from the very start we wanted to be producers making high quality wine, and most of our production goes directly to our customer base.
This is such a personal thing. We don't have any outside investors and we've mostly grown based on the numbers in our wine club. It was so interesting when we started because we didn't even have a product in bottle. We started pouring in 2015 and people were signing up to our wine club, believing in us before we even believed in ourselves. They saw potential in people who didn't tick all the traditional wine making boxes and didn't have the background, or long resume or pedigree.
Winefullness Magazine: It sounds as though both you and your customers were taking leaps of faith?
Yudy: That's right. We didn't have all the financial privilege of being able to come and buy our way in, and we didn't have generations of us growing up in this region either.
We were amazed that people were truly so giving with their confidence and were signing up to our wine club, buying wine futures because they could only taste the barrel sample. Then they told us that we had the potential and signed up to our wine club. These generous people were willing to wait.
Winefullness Magazine: It's interesting that you used the tried and tested en primeur model?
Yudy: Yes. We had no clue that it was going to be successful. All we did was to take our life savings and a giant leap of faith, and we were hoping and praying that it worked out because we didn't have a back-up if it didn't.
The idea that supported us was to work really hard, try to develop good relationships with people, create a product and relationships based upon quality, and see how it developed.
Winefullness Magazine: Community seems to be very import to you?
Yudy: We know that for us it's really important to be a part of the community because it's been a big reason why we've been able to create the success that we have. They are such huge a big part of who we are, and it's such a beautiful community.
Winefullness Magazine: You weren't at the Paso Wine Fest this year?
Yudy: Normally we love pouring at that event but we sold out of our spring wines and didn't have any new wines that we could pour, but we've been lucky because everything has been very serendipitous in how things have worked out for us. We were just people that worked really hard and we love being able to share our dream with others.
It's in our mindset to be good to people because people will be good to you, and that's always been a part of who we are. I think people have really appreciated that sort of authenticity behind who we are and have gravitated towards wanting to support us.
Winefullness Magazine: You're even on the wine list of The French Laundry?
Yudy: We knew one of the sommeliers from the French Laundry and he was leaving, and he told us that before he left he wanted to try and get our wine on to the wine list there.
Winefullness Magazine: You've been very fortunate?
Yudy: You never think that anything is gonna come from it.
Winefullness Magazine: Your website seems to be quite reserved?
Yudy: We want people to come in and get to know us and make a judgement call based on their experiences here. We're not your standard tasting room where we just pour wine, give you the flight and some tasting notes.
For us it's about building the relationship, appreciating the time that you make to be here and getting to have great conversations as you taste great wine.
Through this approach our wine club has such a wonderful retention rate, with people who are still with us today. Our retention rate continues to be very consistent. People will drop other clubs but they won't leave ours. We have such great loyalty from people because we get to really know each other and there's always a wonderful glass of wine.
TOP is truly a family affair. There's myself, who's the only official employee. My husband comes in and helps all the time. My mother comes in sometimes, and it also helps when my brother-in-law's mother, my brother, his wife, and even my in-laws come in. We just hosted our annual event for our members, and it was all the family working at the event, including my nieces and my sister-in-law. If you ask around, people who love what we're about, can feel the warmth, the love and the essence of who we are.
We want people to feel at home. That's our goal, but I think being in this industry it's important for us to allow people to have an insight into who we are, and we give an opportunity for people to come in and get to know our story, not read it somewhere and it be so impersonal.
There are so many amazing wineries out here that people can go to and so for us this is what our niche is. The legacy we want at TOP is for people to associate it with family, integrity and quality. We don't take it for granted, and we are so grateful.
A TOP Tasting Room
Winefullness Magazine: You have such a positive outlook.
Yudy: Yes. I think we're the type of people that always look at the glass half full, and so you're always gonna get a more positive answer from us than anything else because we always remember.
Winefullness Magazine: The vineyards you use have got a good reputation?
Yudy: We just feel so grateful that we've been able to get access to these amazing vineyards, but that didn't start out the case.
Nobody knew who we were, so people were very hesitant in selling us any grapes because we were new and unknown. We knew that we were going to have to come in and prove ourselves, and build really great relationships with people, and that's what the first few years starting up was our focus, and slowly but surely we've gained a reputation, and people started talking about us and saying they really admired what we're trying to did.
We started out as the crazy kids from L.A. coming here every weekend. We would come here from Friday until Sunday trying to build the brand, and it was difficult because we kept the full-time jobs down in L.A. and we were self-funded and were sourcing from all sorts of different places, because beggars can't be choosers. We were getting grapes from wherever we could and from whoever was willing to give us access to the amount of grapes we needed.
TOPS in Sepia
Once we started building that reputation then people would tell us that they really admired what we were doing. We were obviously knocking on a lot of doors and getting a lot of rejections, but I think they warmed up to us and realised we were really serious. They were also impressed by Stanley's gift of being able to blend southern French varieties.
He fell in love with the Rhône region through a trip to the South of France, and he said that this was the type of wine he wanted to make, and the types of grapes he wanted to be working with, and because he got offered that unpaid internship with somebody from this region it really worked in his favour and he ended up getting a lot of recognition for the calibre of wine he started producing.
Winefullness Magazine: Where do you source your grapes?
Yudy: From across California. We have amazing contracts in Napa, Carneros, and we're actually getting some fruit from Sonoma. We're also getting some from Santa Barbara, so we cover a lot of ground.
Winefullness Magazine: That must create a lot of challenges?
Yudy: Yes. Stanley goes and does all the site visits, works very closely, side by side, with the vineyard management team to be able to really get the best from the amazing vineyards who all practise really great farming methods.
A lot of them practice organic farming and we know that we're in trusted hands, however my brother-in-law is very hands on and he's got very high standards. We pay a premium to obtain the grapes we need. Most of our budget goes into securing the sites and we don't mind that we have to pay so much to be able to get access to these grapes because it starts with the vineyard and we know that these grapes are being managed to the degree that we feel is in line with the quality we want to make.
We're very grateful that we have longstanding relationships and contracts with our growers and they know us really well. it's almost like an unspoken thing that they know our expectations, our philosophy and our ways of doing things, but we are always on the hunt for good sources and developing new relationships.
TOPS in Blue
Winefullness Magazine: Are there any varieties that Stanley would like to work with?
Yudy: Chardonnay is going to be added to our repertoire and we're looking up north in Carneros where they make fantastic Chardonnays. Stanley is always looking for a challenge, and if something from a great site comes his way he's curious and likes a challenge. He'll figure this out because as a wine producer he loves all sorts of regions. If he gets the privilege of getting access to one of these sites it's in his head to see if he can do something special. He's like a kid in a candy store when he gets access to something interesting.
Winefullness Magazine: Stanley and Elena have worked in a variety of careers. Would they say that this is the hardest?
Yudy: I know for fact that this has been the hardest. This has been really challenging. We don't come from a lot of money and nobody in our family has been a business owner. Elena was the first. Our parents came here with this dream of wanting to have a better life, what we all consider the American Dream, and Stanley and Elena bought their house and had good great corporate careers that afforded them a lifestyle. They travelled the world and were doing amazing things with the life that they've been handed, but once they were introduced to wine something happened to Stanley and he told Elena it was something they were meant to be doing in life.
Some of us are lucky enough to find our purpose and Stanley found that gift in making wine. A lot of people have referred to Stanley as a savant because he's able to do something so incredibly special.
A lot of people have been doing it a lot longer with more of a formal wine education and training, but Stanley is so committed with a drive and innate knowledge of how to make great wine.
Winefullness Magazine: Do you think tariffs might damage your business?
Yudy: We are absolutely concerned about the tariffs, and in the anticipation we ordered double the barrels we needed for the next couple of years. We ordered bottles that are imported, as well are corks, and we're going to have to pay for them up front and it's a big hit financial hit, but we need to be strategic as a small business and anticipate the slowdown of business. We will never compromise on the integrity and quality of the wine.
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And with that our time is at an end. A couple have just entered to enjoy the conversational charms of Yudy, and the beautiful charms of the wines that Stanley has produced.
This is a Latino/Mexican story of dreaming, and once again I've seen what can happen when an instinctive winemaker is shown faith by others, and I can only savour the fact that there are many more winemakers like Stanley who feel something inside that won't be quashed until they have shown the world skills that others work hard to achieve, if they are given a chance.
So far this had been an early highlight of the visit to California, but it has got me excited at what can lie outside the corporate hedge fund executives who love their wines, but fail to have the kind of relationship with the grape that wineries such as TOP have.
TOPS Revealed
The TOP Tasting
Joule - Central Coast
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This Rosé is a great opener and gets me excited right from the start.
It's 58% Grenache, 34% Mourvédre and 8% Roussanne, so we're right in Paso Robles country.
I'm getting a slight taste of a summer field that is strewn with slivers of red fruit at first.
By the end it's got more fruit than a grocery store and it just comes to life.
Precession - 2021 Central Coast
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There's a slight creamy nuance to this wine that interests you right from the start.
Then I'm getting spicy dark fruit and oodles of rich blueberries and blackberries before chocolate makes a tasty entry.
Elena's Cuvee - 2021
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With fruit coming from one of those excellent growers TOP use you know that something very special is heading your way, and it's a marriage of red and dark fruit lying on a woody bed with hints of enticing spice.
This wine is big, bold and beautiful and those contained tannins go towards making this a very special wine.
Inertia - 2021 GSM
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Come in blackberries and black cherry and say hello to the room.
There's a wonderful perfume in this wine and I spent a lot of time just chasing it through the wine.
I'm enjoying the hint of coffee, crushed stalks and subtlety that makes this a great wine to have at the end of the evening as you sit and run through the great day you've had.
