A Rosé Day Marked by Pink Ash at Paradise Springs Winery

This spring and summer we've visited Paradise Springs Winery multiple times as its a convenient central destination for our friends living throughout NOVA. However after spending time with owner Kirk Wiles and winemaker Rob Cox at an event at Hawkley Brewing, we targeted visiting the winery for their annual Rosé Day. This day celebrates pink in all ways and in particularly the rosé wines from the winery's Fairfax and Santa Barbara locations. 

We hadn't tried any of these left coast wines and fortunately there was a bottle of the Pink Ash Sparkling Rosé ($75) ready on our arrival. The wine is a 60% Pinot Noir - 40% Chardonnay, méthode champenoise sparkler - very fruit forward, lively effervescence and a long satisfying finish.  Yet what immediately caught our eye was the beautiful artwork embedded in the label that obviously represented the traditional Paradise Springs logo. And the back label explained it was the work of actor-artist Billy Zane and that a third of all proceeds are donated to rebuilding communities affected by the 2017 Thomas Fire and later mudslides. 

Later Kirk poured us a sample of their 2025 Pink Ash Rosé ($35) - where the inaugural 2022 vintage was the impetus to the Zane collaboration. They met at a dinner party and conversed about the Santa Barbara winery, Zane's art work, and eventually about the recent natural disasters -- and decided to act.  The soon to be released rosé was crafted from grapes grown at the historic Sanford & Benedict estate in the Sta. Rita Hills, so at that location, Zane spread a canvas on the ground and created a label using ash and mud from the disasters -- plus a splash of rosé wine. See Billy Zane’s Righteous Rosé Label for the complete story. And we will provide a full review of the 2025 vintage once we open one of the bottles we purchased. 

Finally, this visit illustrated once again the difficult, onerous, and expensive aspects of viticulture where rows of normally flourishing estate vines had disappeared or showed signs of vine death. These vines were lost during The April Freeze That Rewrote the 2026 Vintage and will eventually be replaced with Cabernet Franc. This is a tedious, time consuming, and expensive process that requires removing the dead vines by cutting the stems at soil level and excavating the root system. This involves digging a trench 2–3 feet from the stump to locate and extract the major roots, ensuring no bud-bearing chunks remain to resprout. Then replanting involves thorough soil preparation and careful installation of new vines.  The soil must be amended with organic matter and deep plowed to break up compaction and improve drainage, potentially leaving it fallow for 1–3 years if soil-borne pests are a concern.  

This is a sober reminder that we need to support our local farms and vineyards. Vineyard life may seem glamorous, but in reality it is difficult, expensive, and prone to the whims of nature.