Combining wine and wisdom, the Rev. Leon Hutton of St. John's Seminary leads unconventional Santa Ynez Valley junkets
It begins and ends like countless other wine tours: Strangers board a bus in a Camarillo parking lot in the morning, then return in the early evening as old friends, claiming empty tasting-room glasses stained with Santa Ynez Valley reds before waving goodbye and going home.
What sets the monthly Wine & Wisdom tours apart is what happens in between.
Like when the woman seated across from you on the bus silently crosses herself and joins in a group prayer at the start of the journey.
Or when you wrack your brain for answers during a road-trip quiz about the California missions.
Or when, during a stop at Mission Santa Inés, your de facto tour guide points out the trompe l’oeil “marble” painted on the chapel walls before he disappears into a room behind the altar. He emerges several minutes later, dressed in white robes and holding a red Bible in his hands.
“Let us pray,” he says.
Started in January, the Wine & Wisdom tours organized by St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo are about more than tasting the fermented juice of the grapevine.
The once-a-month treks to the Santa Ynez Valley also are intended to bring people together while keeping the seminary, which prepares priests and lay ministers to serve the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, in the public eye, said the Rev. Leon Hutton.
The tours likely are the only regional, general-public wine events led by a priest — that would be Hutton — who likes buttery chardonnays and who knows his syrahs from his sauvignon blancs.
He announces at the start of the tour that he is not the “wine master,” a role he prefers to leave to “the folks at each of the three wineries we’ll visit today.” Still, Hutton clearly is the man for the Wine & Wisdom job, which entails being able to field questions about local history and malolactic fermentation.
He grew up in Camarillo, attended St. John’s Seminary before his ordination in 1980 and now assists on weekends at St. Julie Billiart Catholic Church in Newbury Park. At the seminary, he is director of human formation and evaluations and is a professor of church history, with an emphasis on American Catholicism.
That explains the on-the-road quiz, which Hutton devised as a conversation starter and which includes such questions as, “How many of the mission foundations are now state parks?”
The quiz has inspired at least one tourgoer to use a cell phone to access the Internet in search of answers, Hutton said. “So we’re not above cheating, even with a priest on the bus,” he added with a laugh.
The ‘drink of the people’
As a symbol of faith and a common “drink of the people” during the time of Jesus, wine has long been studied by followers of different religions, Hutton said.
His own interest began long ago, when a wine expert visited the seminary to present a two-day seminar on grape varietals and growing regions, which at the time were still firmly rooted in Europe.
In 1975, a year before the Paris Tasting revealed California wines to be just as good as, if not better than, their French counterparts, Hutton and a group of fellow seminarians traveled to Napa to sample its soon-to-be-famous chardonnays and cabernets.
Aside from being much too far away for seminary-organized tours, Napa has long since “totally changed its culture,” said Hutton. He instead strives to replicate some of its early charm by including on the Santa Ynez Valley tours such “boutique,” or limited-production, wineries as Rusack. Located on rural Ballard Canyon Road between Solvang and Los Olivos, the winery specializes in estate-bottled syrahs and sangioveses.
“I don’t think people are really looking at it as their Wine 101 experience,” Hutton said of the tour, which he likens to a modern-day version of medieval pilgrimages.
“It’s an opportunity for people to get away from the normal experience of living, to find themselves engaged with other people on a different level, but also with themselves,” he said.
Round trip
The tour’s itinerary has two constants: It begins and ends on the grounds of the seminary and it includes time for the celebration of Mass at Mission Santa Inés.
The former gives Hutton a chance to show visitors around as the Roadrunner Shuttle bus makes its way to the seminary’s front gates.
He points to the Edward Laurence Doheny Library designed by architect-to-the-stars Wallace Neff, to land where lemon and avocado trees will be planted to replace unprofitable orange groves, and to a clutch of ’60s-era buildings slated to be razed to make way for a “small community” of homes, provided the economy gets back on track.
Yes, Hutton said in response to a question from a man on the tour, those are solar panels to heat water for the swimming pool next to the athletic field.
“Health is very important to us. We figure that the guys are going to have to last a long time,” he added.
Mass has always been part of the tour, but the timing varies. During previous excursions, the bus has pulled into the mission’s parking lot in time to catch a late-afternoon Mass after a busy day of tasting. On this Friday in mid-April, however, the mission was the first stop on the list. Hutton himself conducted the late-morning ceremony in a chapel filled with Easter lilies.
Off to Rideau
Back in clerical black with a flash of white at the collar, Hutton joined the dozen or so tourgoers as they traveled on to Rideau Vineyard on the outskirts of Solvang. They settled in at picnic tables in the shade of some oak trees for a lunch of sandwiches, tortilla wraps and salads made according to owner Iris Rideau’s New Orleans-inspired recipes.
“It helps us to not only enjoy the wine but to last a little bit longer through the day,” Hutton said of eating a hearty meal before the first round of wine tasting.
Emma Gonzalez of Newbury Park trieds just two of the wines on the pour list before finding a comfy chair with a view of the vineyards.
“I’m not much of a wine drinker,” she admitted with a laugh. She and her husband, Alfonso, took the tour as a sort of research mission for their grown children, who like to go wine tasting, she added.
After trying Rideau’s wines, fellow tourgoers Aloysius and Mary O’Flaherty of Chatsworth snapped up a bottle of sauvignon blanc to take home.
“It’s very dry,” said Mary, sounding particularly pleased by that fact.
The next stop on the tour was said to be just 10 minutes away, but that turned out to be an as-the-crow-flies estimate. After 20 minutes of hairpin turns and rolling-hill vistas dotted by cows, the bus turned into the small parking lot at Rusack.
The tourgoers stepped from the bus and wandered over to a wooden deck overlooking the vineyard, the view framed by the limbs of an oak tree. Silence fell over the group as its members took in the scene.
“I think we could get world peace if we brought everybody out here,” said Hutton.
Wine, people and song
By the time they reached Gainey Vineyard near the town of Santa Ynez, the tourgoers have had the option of trying sample-sized pours of more than a dozen wines.
Jake Congdon, a tasting-room host at Gainey, offered them eight more at a table in a private courtyard. The outdoor space is surrounded by low walls and seemingly endless rows of grapevines budding with tender green leaves.
It’s a relatively peaceful setting until — somewhere between the 2007 sauvignon blanc and the 2006 merlot — the O’Flahertys started to sing “Danny Boy.”
Hearty applause greeted their final, a cappella note.
“Oh, I could tell you stories for days,” Congdon said when asked about the tasting-room shenanigans he has seen.
The belting of “Danny Boy” barely registers a blip on his radar.
“Having a Catholic group from the seminary, obviously you guys are a little more well-behaved than some of the other groups,” Congdon said with a laugh.
It’s not the first time the St. John’s Seminary tasters have been complimented as a group, Hutton said several days later.
“It isn’t a wild and crazy experience, but it is a fun and unusual one.”
The first samples are poured for a private wine tasting at Gainey Vineyard in Santa Ynez.