SAMsARA’s Led Zeppelin Wine Experience Takes Tasters on Trip Through Time

Music and wine have an uncanny way of bringing people of different walks of life into the same room for a shared experience. And while it’s not uncommon to find both around local tasting rooms all over Santa Barbara, you’re less likely to find an experience that combines a curated wine and music pairing through local vintage wines. This transcendental wine-tasting experience is precisely what SAMsARA’s Goleta tasting-room team would like guests to enjoy through their curated wine and music pairings. This month’s theme: wines from SAMsARA’s 2013 harvest to the tune of Led Zeppelin’s “Ten Years Gone.”

Tasting current-release wine is the norm at most places, but tasting vintage wine offers the unique opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of the wine. Tasting vintage wine is not so common in Santa Barbara, especially compared to regions such as Burgundy or Bordeaux, where archeological evidence dates viticulture practices back to the Roman era and sometimes even older. Santa Barbara wine country, which was first designated in the ’80s with the Santa Maria AVA, followed by Santa Ynez Valley, Sta. Rita Hills, and Ballard Canyon AVA, is relatively young. There just isn’t much “old” wine to taste. This is part of the reason most tasting rooms stick to pouring current releases for their tasting flights while reserving their vintage wines for club members’ shipments only.

SAMsARA Wine Co.’s winemaker, Matt Brady, believes offering library wines is part of what makes their tasting-room experience special, and his passion for music from artists such as Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin helped to create a truly one-of-a-kind tasting experience. In fact, this may be the only time you have the opportunity to experience this particular retrospective lineup, as only about five cases of this wine remain in existence.