The Santa Barbara Vintners is a 501 (c) 6, non-profit organization, with members including wineries, vineyards, vineyard management companies, and business/hospitality associates. We join together to promote and preserve the world-class wines of Santa Barbara County, California. Membership in the Santa Barbara Vintners provides a slew of year-round and targeted benefits for your business. Interested in joining? Click here to skip to the Membership Types section.

Santa Barbara Vintners Goals

• Build the Santa Barbara County wine brand
• Promote the world-class wine region of Santa Barbara County
• Communicate industry information and opportunities to all members
• Preserve and protect the Santa Barbara County wine region

Association Background

Begun in the spirit of camaraderie, 17 founding members incorporated the Santa Barbara County Vintners Association in 1984 with roughly 9,000 planted acres. The mission was to market and educate the public and the trade on the grapes and wines of the relatively-unheard of wine region composed of the Santa Maria Valley and Santa Ynez Valley AVAs.

The region is now internationally known and composed of seven AVAs: Alisos Canyon, Ballard Canyon, Happy Canyon of Santa Barbara, Los Olivos District, Santa Maria Valley, Santa Ynez Valley and Sta. Rita Hills.

Now, the association represents not only wineries and vineyards, but businesses, hotels, and restaurants, as well. In line with our mission to create an inclusive and collective membership, the whole region benefits from and may contribute to the success of the wine industry through membership.

Today, the region has almost 300 wineries and almost 15,000 planted acres.

Effective Use of Your Investment

At its core, our association allows all members interested in promoting and preserving the Santa Barbara County wine region the ability to leverage their dollars collectively. A great example of this is using a small amount of funding to write a grant application for an exponentially larger amount of funding. We carefully consider the most effective use of your membership dues to harness our collective power.

Association membership provides:

Marketing

• Website – Our elegantly designed website helps the consumer navigate our expansive County. Every member enjoys a dedicated webpage and the website sees more than 300,000 combined web visitors annually.
• Social Media – 15,000 Facebook followers (Santa Barbara Wine Country), 13,000+ Instagram followers (Santa Barbara Wine Country), and 5,750+ Twitter followers (@SBCWines)
• Email Consumer Marketing –  11,000+ opt-in subscribers
• Dedicated Marketing Fund – With over $380,000 exclusively dedicated to marketing to Los Angeles, we rolled out the “West of France, just north of LA,” advertising campaign, which will run until July, 2021. Results may be reviewed here.
• Public Relations – Wine, food, travel, and lifestyle media are all targeted by our PR firm out of Los Angeles. We curate media visits which hospitality and winery members host, allowing them to be part of all manner of media. Click here to see our recent report.

Events

• Consumer Events – The Vintners Festival & the recently added Wine Futures Auction are typically annual events, along various other smaller events throughout when gatherings are allowed.
• Trade Tastings – Mission Santa Barbara Wine Trade Trip brings over 40 somms & buyers from around the United States to Santa Barbara County for a 3-day comprehensive tour of SBC and our wines.
• Educational Member Tastings – Our most popular events, every month (except during harvest), the wine community comes together for a blind tasting of a specific varietal (pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon, sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, etc.), to visit a member location, and learn about each other. By hiding the labels, tasters are encouraged to learn about our region’s wines without the influence of price, brand, or reputation. Meet your partners and peers, ask honest questions of each other, sample the region’s wine, and explore how you can benefit from one another. Preferred members are offered the first opportunity to host.

Relationships

• Relationships – We hold relationships with and often partner with important members of our industry, including: California Wine Institute, Visit California, and all of the tourism associations based in Santa Barbara County, including Visit Santa Barbara, Visit the Santa Ynez Valley, Explore Lompoc, and the Santa Maria Chamber.

Advocacy

Advocacy – With almost $2B of economic impact, the wine industry of Santa Barbara County must stay engaged in policy issues that impact the wine industry. We track various County issues, as well as shepherd the wineries, tasting rooms, and vineyards through regulatory impacts, such as Covid-19.