A Winery Without a Room
Fuil Wines has poured its way around Los Angeles without a tasting room of its own. That changes in 2027.
By Patrick R. Dunn
September 28, 2026
Matt Espiro Jaeger had a fedora on the afternoon I met him, and partway through our conversation he got up and led me through the back of the building into a room they call 1946. It is essentially a speakeasy, a private function room hidden behind the wine bar and brilliantly decorated, and standing in it I found it easy to picture the celebrity functions it must have hosted over the years. He wanted me to see it because this is where he launched Fuil.
The wine bar is Augustine, on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, in a building that went up in 1941 as a radio repair shop. I was there in August working my way along the San Fernando Valley wine road for the fall issue of Edible San Fernando Valley, and Fuil was one of the stories I came home with.
Fuil still has no tasting room. The fruit comes from the Santa Ynez Valley, much of it from the southwestern edge of Ballard Canyon, and the wine is made well down the 101 in Camarillo, where the winery sees guests by appointment only. The name is Gaelic and pronounced “fool,” and the winery translates it as blood, kin, land, passion, and temperament, which is a great deal to ask of four letters and a pop-up table.
Most people meet Fuil the way I did, in somebody else’s room. Over the years the monthly pop-up has turned up at Buvette in Sherman Oaks, Bodevi in San Fernando, and Vintage Wine + Eats behind the Studio City farmers market, and since this spring it has landed one weekend a month at Black Market Liquor Bar in Studio City. His events calendar has the next date. Matt pours every one of them himself.
It was only afterward, reading what others had written about him, that I learned he is an actor. We had talked about nothing but wine. He moved to Los Angeles in 2003 to act, and a few years ago he was still calling it his day job, with credits that run through film, television, and the stage, Criminal Minds among them. Like most actors coming up, he worked restaurant floors, where he became the unofficial wine guy on staff, and he kept a side job for years afterward to pay for the bottles he wanted to drink. He signs fluently and bills the pop-ups as ASL friendly, and anyone who shows a union card at the door pays less for a tasting. The wines have been poured at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. Carolina, who runs the marketing, acts as well, and the two of them met onstage twenty years ago, cast as Romeo and Juliet.
That afternoon at Augustine he sent me home with three bottles, a 2024 Viognier, a 2022 Syrah, and a 2025 Solas Nua. All three were delicious, and the Solas Nua is the one with the story.
Solas Nua means new light. In 2022 Matt and Carolina were running blending trials at their own dinner table, and Matt’s first idea was a solera-style wine. What came out of the glass was too nouveau for that, so they asked what would happen if they chilled it. The first forty cases sold out in three months. It is roughly 85 percent Mourvèdre and 15 percent Viognier, whole cluster and native fermented, released every year on May 1, and Matt has said he wanted a chilled red with a little structure to it.
Fuil describes it as red berry with a thread of orange peel, bright acid, and a little earthy funk underneath. I poured it on a hot summer night back home in Nevada, and what came across to me was a Negroni in the form of a wine. Whether Matt intended that or not, the first sip put me back in Italy, in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, sipping Negronis in the city where my Italian wine journey began.
I kept thinking about that wine while reading an August piece in Wine Enthusiast by Oset Babür-Winter. With airfare up more than a quarter in a year, fewer people are making the trip to wine country, and some wineries, from Napa to southern Oregon, have started moving their tasting rooms to where their drinkers already live.
One detail in that piece stayed with me. Broc Cellars pours in Berkeley, a long way from the vineyards it buys from, and Chris Brockway takes his tasting room staff up to those vineyards several times a year to stay overnight or camp, because soil and weather are hard to explain from a storefront in a city. Brachetto is usually the first variety picked at Fox Hill each year, and everyone on his staff knows it, because they go up and pick it together.
A tasting room in a city asks the people pouring to carry a place they may never have stood in, and Fuil has taken that about as far as it can go. There has been no room at all, only whichever bar is hosting that month, and what stands in for the Santa Ynez Valley is Matt himself, telling the story of a red that did not turn out the way he planned. A man who has made his living delivering other people’s lines has no need to perform this one. He and Carolina built the blend at their own table, watched it miss what he had in mind, and decided to chill it and bottle it anyway. When he pours Solas Nua, the guest is hearing it from one of the two people who were sitting at that table.
That changes in 2027. Matt and Carolina are taking over the Camarillo winery of Dusty Nabors, the winemaker who took Matt on as an intern and cellar rat when he was starting out, and sometime next year they plan to open a tasting room there. Fuil will have a door of its own for the first time, and on any day Matt is not behind the counter, somebody else will be telling the Solas Nua story.
Whoever that turns out to be will be handed a good one. It starts at a dinner table, with two actors who met as Romeo and Juliet tasting a blend that had come out too light and deciding to send it out the door as it was.
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Sources: Oset Babür-Winter, “If You Can’t Bring Americans to the Winery, Bring the Tasting Room to Them,” Wine Enthusiast, August 6, 2026. Cori Solomon, “Fuil Wines: Santa Barbara’s Rising Cool-Climate Winery,” The Written Palette, June 2026. “Fuil Wines, Old World Structure and New World Flavor,” Wine Along the 101, September 7, 2026. “Daily Inspiration: Meet Matt Espiro Jaeger,” Voyage LA, July 2023. Fuil Wines vineyard page, tasting notes, and pop-up listings, the winery’s Santa Barbara County Vintners listing, and Matthew Jaeger’s IMDb biography. Building history for Augustine from published records.
Patrick R. Dunn is a wine writer, educator, and hospitality storytelling consultant, and the founder of Vianarra. He works with winery owners, tasting room managers, hoteliers, and restaurateurs to find the real story of a place and teach their teams to tell it, through staff workshops and brand storytelling for wine club letters, newsletters, and social channels. A WSET Level 3 wine educator, he leads private and corporate tastings and wine education sessions. His writing appears in Edible Reno-Tahoe, Edible San Fernando Valley, and Senior ResQ Magazine. Before wine, he spent thirty years leading global crisis management and operational resilience teams across four continents, and more than a decade as a National Park Service interpretive ranger. He lives in Sparks, Nevada.
Read the Vianarra newsletter every Wednesday, for winery owners, tasting room managers, and hospitality professionals, and the Pour Story Society every other Friday, for anyone who loves wine and a good story.