This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on August 25, 2023. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.
When I first met Aaron Walker more than a decade ago, we were in similar stages of our personal and professional lives. We both had young children and were settling into the long-term groove of our careers — he as winemaker for Pali Wine Co., me as wine writer for this newspaper and other publications — so we became friends rather quickly after hanging out for this 2012 article.
I was already friendly with numerous other vintners at that point, but Aaron was maybe my first true peer of that group: close to my age, similar family setups, working for a paycheck, and living in downtown Santa Barbara (not the Santa Ynez Valley). We hung out quite a bit, especially during the annual run of New Noise Santa Barbara — the music festival and conference I co-founded and helped run from 2009 to 2015— and even got into trouble in New York City, New Orleans, and San Diego together, connecting almost entirely by coincidence each time.