Archie McLaren’s Indulgent Life

Archie McLaren, the Santa Barbara–residing bon vivant responsible for creating and sustaining the Central Coast Wine Classic for the past three decades, may never have stumbled into fine wine if it weren’t for smoking weed — specifically by pretending to puff on his first joint, which was rolled by a burly Black Panther in Memphis during the heat of the civil rights movement almost 50 years ago.

McLaren was hanging at the house of his good friend Russell Sugarmon, a Harvard Law–educated African American who founded the first interracial law firm in Memphis and had made paparazzi-like headlines for marrying a white German woman. An athlete his whole young life — high school tennis champ of Tennessee who won a scholarship to Vanderbilt, traveling handball wizard, etc. — McLaren never smoked, so he tried the do-not-inhale trick probably around the same time as a young Bill Clinton.

It didn’t work. Minutes later, McLaren was mesmerized by the amazing smells wafting out of the kitchen, where Sugarmon’s wife was whipping up one of her fancy feasts. “I’d never had anything more exciting than a cheese dog, but [the weed] exploded my ability to experience aroma and flavor,” recalled McLaren recently. “I had a transcendent case of the munchies that night. It changed my entire life.”