Full Belly Files | Pouring My Wine at Your Cooking Class

This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on July 14, 2023. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Over nearly a quarter-century of enjoying Santa Barbara County wines and the past decade of reviewing the entire Central Coast for Wine Enthusiast, I’ve accumulated a rather ridiculous amount of bottles that are tucked into every spare corner of my home.

In addition to the three refrigerated cellars I have — which are almost entirely taken up by the rotating cast of 300 or so wines that need to be reviewed monthly — I have bottles filling cardboard boxes, racks, and tables amidst bikes, fishing poles, and golf clubs in the garage; in a 20-year-old Costco rack by the dining table; and in plastic bins under my bed. There are racks and/or boxes in almost every closet, including the entry hall closet, the guest room closet, and the closets of both children, and I even converted our old water heater closet into its own mini-cellar of sorts when we went tankless.

Despite its breadth, this is no showcase cellar — it’s more of a controlled mess. There aren’t any crazy-expensive bottles beyond the $150 mark, nor multi-case stashes of a special cuvée, nor much international wine at all. Given the nature of my job, the collection is primarily individual bottles from across the Central Coast.

While my curation strategy sits somewhere between carefully considered and rather random, I have made a point over the years to keep verticals made by standout producers, or sourced from single vineyards, or otherwise wrapped in a noteworthy pedigree. There’s also plenty of stuff that I just found interesting and thought others would too.