A Trip to Santa Barbara Wine Country, 20 Years After ‘Sideways’

30.10.2024 - 21:03 / cntraveler.com / Michael Jackson

I'm driving bleary-eyed from Los Angeles to the vineyards north of Santa Barbara when I decide to roll the windows down and turn up the Dead, winding my way up the Pacific Coast Highway and into the slotted canyons of the Saint Ynez Valley. My exhaustion isn't due to overindulgence the night prior, though. It's because of a 4 a.m. wake up call to catch my flight from the East Coast—all so I could get myself to Buellton.

Why Buellton? Previously known as “Servicetown, USA” and home of some “famous” pea soup, this California town took its star turn in Sideways, Alexander Payne's critical darling indie film, twenty years ago this month. It acted as the home base for Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack's (Thomas Hayden Church) during a bachelors’ week in Santa Barbara County, where they spend the duration of the movie drinking, golfing, and generally debauching in anticipation of Jack's impending marriage.

I thought about inviting my best friend (also soon to be married) to join me; I was staying in the same hotel as Miles and Jack—the same room even!— but the amount of self-loathing and less-than-acceptable shenanigans the two get up to wasn’t quite aspirational. My time was spoken for anyway: I’d planned to spend the next few days criss-crossing the valley to see what’s changed in the last two decades, and what’s been preserved in touristic amber.

Wines from Alice Anderson'sLos Olivos regenerative organic wine project, Amevive.

Anderson standing among Amevive's caskets.

The longer you spend here, the more it becomes increasingly apparent that Sideways still has a big impact on tourism. My hotel, The Sideways Inn is the exact Days Inn Miles and Jack stay at, albeit with a boutique facelift. During dinner at the Hitching Post II (a family-owned steakhouse heavily featured in the film) with winemaker Gray Hartley, I was introduced to two families who had traveled from different parts of the globe just because they loved Sideways. Twenty years on, that is some serious cultural staying power for an indie drama—even if it was nominated for five Oscars and made back its budget nearly seven times over.

Hartley's take on the movie's impact—“It's unbelievable!”—is echoed by many longtime winemakers here. Dick Doré (founding partner at the excellent Foxen Vineyards) describes it as “like lightning,” recalling that the region went from a few hundred visitors on a weekend to well over a thousand in the months following the film’s release. The timing was serendipitous, as visiting journalists enjoyed and covered the wine scene on days off from covering Michael Jackson’s 2005 trial in Santa Barbara.

Chad Melville of Melville Winery gives the film credit for gently teaching a whole generation of wine drinkers about Pinot