‘I will die owning Eberle.’ How the godfather of Paso Robles wine made his mark on SLO County

The tasting room at Eberle Winery seems decidedly casual and relaxed, with a comfortable air not often found in some more recent additions to the Paso Robles wine scene.

And perhaps that low-key ambiance is working: after all, Eberle Winery is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.

Visitors to the space take in the comfy chairs arranged around the fireplace, a long bar for the still-free wine tastings, some bistro tables and a covered deck for those who want to linger, the clink of glasses, the hum of conversations and, nearly always, founder and owner Gary Eberle with one or both of his beloved standard poodles, Sangiovese and Barbera.

As one longtime Eberle customer puts it, the space is “a little like coming home.”

Why so laid back?

“The wines speak for themselves,” Eberle said.

His favorite is the winery’s backbone varietal, cabernet sauvignon, because of its complexity and changing personality, he said.

“With a cabernet, every 10 minutes in the glass … it’s a different wine,” Eberle said.

There is one caveat: “I do wash down my Advil earlier in the day with our viognier,” the 79-year-old admitted.

Eberle is almost always at the winery’s tasting room, interacting with customers, telling stories and answering questions — either at his usual table-side seat outside the front door when the weather’s nice or inside by the fireplace.

“Robert Mondavi told me to sit at the table out front, make people laugh and they will remember you,” Eberle said of his friend and mentor. “He taught me how to be P.T. Barnum for the wine industry.”

Some area experts describe Eberle as the godfather of Paso Robles wines, the father of syrah in California and the United States.

During the winery’s four decades on 65 acres at 3810 Highway 46 East, the wines and its owner have accumulated hundreds of international, national and regional honors — including being the wine of choice for President Ronald Reagan when he traveled to China. (The former president even served it later at his ranch in Goleta.)

Nearly 200 of the gold, double gold and platinum awards are displayed at the tasting room and entryway, around the necks of some winning wines or housed in shadowboxes or frames.

Last year, the winery entered 17 competitions, winning 160 medals — 60 percent of which were gold or higher — with 16 taking home best of class.

“Those aren’t on the wall yet,” Eberle said with a wry smile. “We’ve run out of room.”

Eberle owes a lot to his mentors, noted Paso Robles winemaker says

At heart, Eberle is a wine salesman and storyteller, with a streak of grill-master thrown in as he plies his customers with free appetizers on random weekends (check the website on Wednesdays for info on the following weekend’s treats).

Playing on his strengths and knowing his weaknesses was something Eberle learned well from his three mentors: Mondavi, Penn State coach Joe Paterno and Cliff Giacobine, Eberle’s late, much older half brother who was instrumental in luring the younger man into the Paso Robles wine scene.

“I was a good winemaker ... but I wasn’t great,” Eberle reflected. “I was never the best winemaker in Paso.”

So, since 1997, he’s set out to hire the best and concentrated on what he does well: selling the wine they make.

About a dozen winemakers Eberle mentored through the years — including Tobin James and Tom Myers, now at Tobin James Cellars and Castoro Cellars, respectively — have opened their own successful wineries, he said, and they’re still close to their guru.

That pleases him immensely.

“I never wanted an assistant winemaker who didn’t want his own winery,” he said. “And I want them to succeed.”

Eberle’s current winemaker is Chris Eberle, no relation, who worked briefly for Eberle Winery before training in Australia, New Zealand, Germany and South Africa.

The younger man focuses a lot of his attention on the winery’s viognier, racking up a lot of awards for them since he rejoined the staff in 2015.

Mondavi also taught Gary Eberle that owning a winery is more than just making great wine.

“He told me that we’re in the hospitality business,” Eberle said. “If they’re having fun, they’ll remember … and a bad experience will be magnified 20 times down the line.”

So he added detailed training programs for his hospitality staffers. Many have gone on to lead tasting rooms at other wineries.

“I’m as proud of them as I am of the winemakers,” he said.

Winemaker took a circuitous route from Pennsylvania to Paso Robles

How did the gawky son of a divorced mom in a small town in Western Pennsylvania get from there to Paso Robles?

A 1962 football scholarship to Penn State (coached by Paterno) led him down south to a National Science Fellowship in cellular genetics at Louisiana State University, degrees in biological sciences and vertebrate zoology and a career in genetics.

After socializing often with an opera-and-wine loving professor, Eberle had a revelation, maybe even an epiphany.

“I realized I have a really good palate for Bordeaux and that I didn’t want to be a geneticist. I wanted to be an alcoholic,” Eberle frequently quips, tongue planted firmly in cheek.

So, he took a sharp turn westward.

He earned a UC Davis doctoral degree in fermentation science in 1973, learned about Paso Robles while schlepping around the state’s coasts with two professors and then returned to the Central Coast.

Why such a drastic change so quickly?

“I’ve tried to answer that question for myself, so many times,” he said. “I was fed up with academic politics and tired of looking through a microscope, searching for something new and exciting.”

Eberle and his 17 partners built the Estrella River Winery and its science-quality lab on 176 acres of the barley-and-safflower-growing Quenzer ranch on Highway 46 in Paso Robles, paying about $50 an acre.

Eberle planted the state’s first 100% syrah vines there in 1975, and made the winery’s first vintage in 1976. Immediately, his wines began earning awards.

At time there were only three wineries in Paso Robles, he said: Pesenti, York Mountain and Rota.

Realizing that there were smaller markets off the beaten path for easy airline access, Eberle bought “an underpowered 180 Comanche plane and started criss-crossing the country, selling wine,” he said.

“I wasn’t trying to put Paso on the map then,” he said. “I was still at Estrella, but the Eberle Winery was in my mind. If Paso didn’t succeed, Eberle wasn’t going to succeed. It was one of those chicken-and-egg things. Every time I’d say ‘Eberle’ or ‘Estrella,’ I said ‘Paso Robles’ twice.”

He exchanged his interest in Estrella for about 4,000 cases of 1979 wine that he’d made and bottled there but was allowed to put the Eberle label on them.

Eberle paid $18 a case for the wine and sold it for $150 a case. That became the seed money for Eberle Winery.

After it opened, he helped found and joined several wine groups, including one pushing to have the Paso Robles region registered as the country’s eighth official American Viticultural Area.

There were about 20 wineries in Paso Robles by then, Eberle said.

Today, the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance’s website estimates there are more than 200 wineries in the area.

‘There is nothing else I want to do,’ Paso Robles winemaker says

Since he stepped down as winemaker in 1997 and then retired in 2005, Eberle and his winery have survived a global pandemic, recessions, severe droughts, nearby wildfires and a 17-month hostile takeover by three of his now former partners, including his sister-in-law.

“A year after I got the winery back, we were operating in the black again,” he said, noting that he has only two partners now, vineyard manager Howard Steinbeck and Dick Woodland.

And that’s in no small part due to Eberle’s influence.

Eberle’s substantial “physical presence gives Eberle Winery a sense of place,” according to a profile on the Wine History Project of San Luis Obispo County website.

“Wine is about passion — a passion for life, a passion for food, a passion for people,” Eberle was quoted saying in the Wine History Project. “I am in the winery seven days a week because this is what I truly believe in. … I am living my dream.”

He says he’s the only person in California to win three prestigious wine-industry awards: The Wine Lifetime Achievement Award, the Mondavi Hospitality Award and the American Wine Legend Award, which he received at the 21st Annual Wine Enthusiast Wine Star Awards in 2020.

However, honors, accolades and banquets are not why the shorts-wearing entrepreneur continues to do what he does, long after many people his age have retired.

“I have good people, five managers that make this winery hum,” he said. “My goal is to get out and talk to people, harass them, make them laugh. I will die owning Eberle Winery. There’s nothing else I want to do. I enjoy this so much.”

About Eberle Winery

The tasting room on Highway 46 is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., seven days a week, closing only on Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Tastings are free, but it costs $25 for a two-hour combination tasting session and tour of the vineyard, deck and underground wine-aging cave. For reservations, go to the booking website.

For winery details, call 805-238-9607, go to the Eberle website at eberlewinery.com.