Meet the Winemakers: Matt Espiro Jaeger

Fuil Wines, Camarillo, with fruit from Santa Barbara County. Recorded November 5, 2026, just after harvest.

Matt Espiro Jaeger makes his wine in Camarillo, in Ventura County, from grapes grown an hour and a half north in Santa Barbara County. During harvest every load of fruit comes down the 101 in the early morning, and he is the one driving it.

His wife, Carolina, runs the marketing and the events. Everything else at Fuil, from the barrels to the compliance filings, is his. This year he took on all of his mentor Dusty Nabor’s winemaking clients, which nearly tripled his harvest. Of its seventy-seven days, there were five or six when anyone else was in the winery with him.

For twenty-odd years before any of this he made his living as an actor. He was about forty when Dusty took him on as an intern, which by his own account made him feel a little silly. Dusty was also the one who later talked him into going pro.

His tasting room is next. He takes over the lease in January and plans to do most of the conversion himself, which after hearing about this harvest did not surprise me. I told him I would try to be there.

1. Who taught you? Say the name.

Primarily Dusty Nabor. When I started the process I took classes from UC Davis, and Dusty was my primary influence. He was a mentor for years, and I interned with him when I was getting started. I’ve had a few other people too: Larry Schaffer at Tercero Wines, Steve Clifton, who was with Palmina and then went over to Vega, and Megan McGrath Gates over at Lucas & Lewellen. But my main influence, my main mentor, has been Dusty Nabor.

2. Who have you taught? Where are they now?

Oh wow. Funny, I’ve been doing this for six years now, and I never thought of myself as starting to mentor someone. But I’ve got a winemaking client right now named Martin who hasn’t launched his label yet, and I’ve been working with him. And there’s Shane Lopez, who has his own label. He’s very good at the sales side and I do more of the winemaking side, so when he has winemaking questions he reaches out to me, and when I have sales questions I reach out to him. You could say we’re mentoring each other.

3. Which vintages do you date your life by?

There are two. One is my worst vintage, and one is the vintage where I finally went, oh, okay, this is how I’m doing it. And the one came out of the other.

2024 was the year I locked in my harvest protocol for when the fruit comes in, the processes I use to make sure the fermentation is clean and that I get the wine I want. That was the year I really stepped into my own. 2022 was the worst harvest I’ve had. I lost an entire lot, my first attempt at Pinot Noir, and ended up selling some of it off for brandy and dumping the rest. It was truly heartbreaking.

4. What has changed in the trade since you started that somebody your age would notice and a new hire would walk right past?

There’s been a movement that started maybe ten years ago, the whole natural wine movement, and I think overall it was a bit detrimental, because a lot of misinformation came in and people started putting emphasis on things that weren’t quality. Quality, to me, includes how things are grown, that it’s done sustainably and responsibly. There were these check boxes you had to hit, and that was all anyone cared about.

But what did come out of it was a rediscovery of how to do spontaneous or native fermentations in a way that still gives you a clean fermentation, a return to that older tradition. New winemakers take that for granted now, but ten or fifteen years ago it wasn’t as well known. People still leaned on commercial strains, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Commercial yeasts aren’t GMO, which is what a lot of people believe. They’ve been bred, but yeast breeds really fast, so you can breed a new strain very quickly.

I do a native fermentation because I think it brings in that sense of place, my thumbprint, and part of that is the yeast living in my winery and what comes in off the fields. But there are techniques to it. You add what you need to knock down the bad yeast, you can build a pied de cuve to make sure you’re getting the good yeast, and you still sample and make sure it’s going right. New winemakers take that process for granted, but it’s an old skill and an old tradition that went away for a while and is now making a comeback.

5. Walk me through a day at the peak of harvest, hour by hour.

We’re in Camarillo and we source from Santa Barbara, about an hour and a half away, so it starts the night before. I rent a truck, usually right before the rental place closes. If I’m picking up two tons of grapes I’ll get a flatbed, drive up, and drop off the picking bins at the vineyard around seven or eight at night. Then I check into the cheapest hotel room I can find. I’ve found some very interesting hotel rooms in that area.

I’m usually in bed by eight or nine, because I’m up around four the next morning. I’m at the vineyard picking up grapes between five and seven, then I drive back to the winery and forklift the grapes off.

What happens next depends on whether it’s a red or a white. We do whole cluster on the reds, except for our Cabs, which we destem, along with some clients’ fruit. The whites are more involved, so take our Viognier. We foot tread it and set it in the sun so it can warm up a little and absorb the phenolics from the skins. I like to leave it there for one to two hours. Then it’s a whole cluster press. We set up the hopper and the bin dumper, which goes on the forklift and lets you tip a thousand-pound bin into the hopper, and the hopper funnels it into the press. We run a press cycle of one bar, one and a half bars, and then two bars twice, and at that point we have our juice.

We rack it to barrel, because I do all my white fermentations in neutral barrels. I like the micro-oxygenation that happens there. I think it helps set the flavor and color, and studies have shown that it does. I also move some of that juice into our pied de cuve, which is the winemaker’s version of a yeast mother. It means foot of the tank in French. It’s a small fermentation that’s already going strong, and I add some of that day’s juice to it.

What I’ve skipped over is the hour or two of cleaning the day before, and then the two or three hours of cleaning once everything is in barrel. All the stems and skins and leftovers go back into the bins and back onto the truck, and I drive them to a local farm we have a deal with, Apricot Lane Farms. They’re a fruit orchard, there’s a documentary about them, and they use our pomace for mulch and compost for their trees. I can’t say we’re entirely zero waste, but even during harvest, our biggest waste-producing time, it’s roughly one garbage bag every two weeks that I can put out with my own personal trash. That’s the whole accumulation of trash for the business, because most of it goes to the farm and back into the fruit trees. So if you buy fruit from Apricot Lane Farms, you’re getting just a little bit of grapes from Fuil Wines.

Then we come back and clean out the bins. I sample the juice and get the numbers, where the acid is and where the sugar is, and I usually add a little potassium metabisulfite and a little chitosan, which comes from fungus. Those help kill or inactivate lactobacillus, which you really don’t want. The chitosan is specifically for Brettanomyces, if there’s any in there. We don’t have any in our winery, I’m very happy to say. If there’s any non-Saccharomyces yeast, it knocks it down, so we make wine and not vinegar.

The next day I come in and look at the pied de cuve. It’s big and bubbling, and I divide it evenly among whatever barrels we’re fermenting, put on fermentation bungs, which have a little valve on top, and let it start. Then I monitor it every day until the fermentation is dry.

6. What decision do you make here that you cannot fully explain to somebody else?

It would be the fact that the first thing I do when I walk into the winery, before I touch anything, is wash my hands, and anything I’m going to use, I take pure alcohol to. I think the romance for the average wine drinker is that it’s all a biosphere and it’s always balanced, and that’s never true. You’re not making it out in the woods, and if you did, you’d end up with vinegar. Every winery is its own biosphere, and that’s part of the native fermentation and putting your thumbprint on the flavor of the wine. But cleaning is sixty percent of winemaking. It’s a joke in the industry, but it’s actually true.

My father-in-law came to help me out one time because he wanted to see what I did. All we were doing was blending, taking four barrels of wine and putting them in a tank. I spent an hour cleaning the tank beforehand, fifteen minutes cleaning the pump and the hoses, five minutes cleaning the rims and the bungs of the barrels, and another ten minutes cleaning the wands that were going into the barrels. He looked at me and said, “We’re not even doing anything yet.” Then we blended everything, and that took forty-five minutes. We were there four hours, and forty-five minutes of it was the actual moving and sampling of the wine and making sure it was ready to bottle. Everything else was cleanup before and cleanup after. The look on his face was, wow, you really spend a lot of time cleaning. And yes. Cleanliness is critical to a clean, fresh-tasting wine.

It’s not sexy, so it doesn’t get mentioned in the sales brochures. Now when I walk into another winery and I see a little residual lees in a valve that wasn’t cleaned out after the last racking, I get a little judgy. On the other hand, I’ve walked into wineries where everything is shining and gleaming and labeled, with pipes running through and everything perfectly clean, and I’m like, okay, who’s your production manager? I really want to meet them.

We’re in the process of taking over this winery and expanding, and I bought some used equipment from somebody, and I won’t say who. There were tartrate deposits all over it. I soaked it in sodium percarbonate for about thirty minutes and wiped everything off, and now it’s pristine. And I’m thinking, how were you doing this? Then I tasted some of their wines and went, oh, okay.

7. Tell me about a harvest that went wrong. Start at the beginning.

This was my second harvest ever. I was still relying very heavily on Dusty, who was an excellent mentor, but at some point you have to step out of your mentor’s shadow and do your own thing. I was leaning very natural wine, adding very little to the fruit when it came in, just a little potassium metabisulfite, around fifteen parts per million, which is almost nothing.

I was bringing in the first Pinot I’d ever made, and what I didn’t know was that the Santa Maria Valley AVA in Santa Barbara County has a particular issue with lactobacillus. And that was the year of the thunderstorms. It was super hot, then it got cold with a bunch of thunderstorms, then it got super hot again. When it’s hot the grapes start to shrivel, and right where the stem goes into the berry, little openings form into the juice. Then the storms hit and the berries plump up again, and you’d never know there had been a lot of raisining going on. So lactobacillus got into the fermentation.

It seemed like a clean fermentation for about ten days. Then in the last two days, when the yeast gets weak because it’s running out of sugar, the lactobacillus took over. Lactobacillus doesn’t just eat sugar. It can eat alcohol too, so it had plenty of food. In two days I went from making wine to making vinegar. Some of it went for brandy, and the rest I had to dump.

I reached out to any and every winemaker I could think of, Kat Neenan, and Kelsey Gorter, who’s the one who turned me on to chitosan, and she was a huge influence. Then I went to the technical symposium at World of Pinot Noir, which was a chance for winemakers to meet, taste each other’s problem wines, and give recommendations. Sadly it isn’t held anymore. I started talking to other winemakers from Santa Maria there, and I realized what the issue was.

So I went from letting the grapes come in and do their thing to adding a certain level of potassium metabisulfite and adding chitosan to knock those problems down. I let the grapes warm a little for absorption, but I make sure they stay cool and the fermentation stays cool. I do a temperature and Brix reading every day, which is standard anyway, and a full chemical panel partway through the fermentation to make sure things are going the way I want. If they’re not, I take the steps I need to.

What I learned is that the natural wine idea is very romantic, and you can do it and still be interventionist enough to make clean wine. The people who aren’t tend to dump a fair amount of wine, or release wine that’s just not very good. And what I came to for myself, because I am a bit of a hippie, is that after all the water and resources and nutrients and manpower and carbon that went into growing those grapes, dumping the wine is far more damaging than adding a little more potassium metabisulfite or a little chitosan or taking a few extra steps to keep it cool. In the long run that’s less impactful on an environmental level and a carbon level. So after 2022 I became more interventionist. On the overall spectrum I’d still be considered a low intervention winemaker, but among low intervention winemakers I moved a little higher on that scale.

8. Who is the legend around here? Somebody people tell stories about.

We know the Mondavis, the people who made California wine huge, and we’ll always owe them an undying debt for putting California on the map. We’re talking about going back to Stag’s Leap and Chateau Montelena. But Santa Barbara, as a wine drinker, was my favorite region, so for me the big names are the people who built Santa Barbara County.

I named Steve Clifton as one of my mentors, and he has been an invaluable source of information. He started Brewer-Clifton and Palmina, some of the greatest wines coming out of Santa Barbara County. Then there’s Louis Lucas, who I met randomly at Taste of Denmark in Solvang, having dinner with family, because he overheard that my in-laws were Chilean. He said, “I have the first Carménère in the county, and I’d really love for you Chileans to come try it.” I ended up talking with him about his philosophy of wine growing. He’s very much the grapes and vineyard guy, with a lot of strong opinions from many, many years of work, and I got to pick his brain.

Then I was at a festival in Solvang, and someone surprised me by bringing Richard Sanford over to try my wines. He didn’t tell me he was going to do it. He just walked him over and said, “Hey Richard, this is Matt, you should really try his wines. Matt, Richard Sanford,” and walked away. I’m like, what? So I poured my wine for him. He was very sweet and very complimentary, a very, very nice man. He tends to wear a hat, and I wear a Stetson outside because I’m very pale, so we complimented each other’s hats.

When he walked away I bent over the table and was breathing rather heavily. In my past life I was an actor for twenty, twenty-five years. I’ve worked with Kevin Costner. I’ve met George Clooney. I’ve met huge actors and I’ve never been flustered or intimidated. My wife looked at me and said, “Are you okay? What just happened?” And I said, “That was Richard Sanford,” and she said, “Who?” She couldn’t understand why I was freaking out, because she’s seen me work with A-list celebrities and just go, whatever, we’re working. I didn’t expect it either. My heart was racing. I kept it together while we were talking, and as soon as he left I had to bend over the table and breathe for about a minute.

And there’s one more, Ken Brown, one of the people who put the Santa Ynez Valley on the map. We’ve never met in person, though I highly respect his winemaking. We were at a pouring event, maybe our third or fourth year making wine, and someone came up and said, “We were over at Ken Brown and they said we had to come try your wine.” Pardon my language, but how the hell did anyone at Ken Brown try my wine and start recommending it to people? I have no idea.

So I’ve had a few close encounters, and they’ve all been very positive, I’m happy to say. Steve Clifton is a friend to this day, and he has been very, very generous with his knowledge and his experience.

9. Is there something that happens at the end of crush every year? Same thing, same way.

I started one this year. Up until now I’ve had a smaller harvest, and it was always Dusty and me in the winery. This was the first year I took on all his winemaking clients, my harvest almost tripled, and I did it by myself. Of the seventy-seven days of harvest, I think I had five or six where someone else was in there working with me.

At the end of harvest this year I took two days where nobody talked to me. Then I went and got an old-school shave, which I’d never had before, the hot towel around the face with the nose sticking out, the whole nine yards. And I said, I’m doing this every year. Every year I’m going to take a couple of days where I schlub out and nobody talks to me, and then get my hair cut and a traditional hot towel shave and just relax it out.

And we always open a nice bottle of wine. Funny enough, it’s never from Santa Barbara. This last time it was one from Paso, and the time before that a nice French wine. Just be a consumer for one night. If you’re making a product, you have to find those times when you’re still a consumer, so you’re also a fan of it. You have to love it, because it’s a ton of work.

10. What do people outside the trade always get wrong about this work?

I’ve got a pet peeve I always go off on, so here we go. You’re not allergic to sulfites. Sulfites are not what’s giving you a headache, unless a doctor has diagnosed you as allergic to sulfites, which is possible. Just like a package has to say it contains nuts, a wine has to say it contains sulfites. That doesn’t mean sulfites are bad for you. If you can eat French fries and dried fruit without getting a headache, it isn’t the sulfites. French fries carry about six times the legal limit for wine, and dried fruit about ten times. And the average wine has about a third of the legal limit or less.

What it most likely is, especially for people who say red wine gives them headaches and white wine doesn’t, is pollen. White wine tends to have more sulfites, because there aren’t the same tannins to protect it. Red grapes are fermented on the skins, there was pollen on those skins, and I bet you have hay fever. Take a Claritin or an Allegra or whatever your allergy medicine is before you go wine tasting. I can almost guarantee you won’t get a headache, assuming you’re not drinking the whole bottle by yourself. That’s a whole other reason for the headache.

11. What’s the first thing you got wrong, and who caught it?

Boy, I’ve gotten so many things wrong that it’s hard to remember the very first one. It would have been when I was still interning with Dusty. I was working the bottling line, on the corker. It’s a pneumatic corker, but it’s one bottle at a time, and I was getting backed up, probably a case worth of filled bottles waiting. Geena Bouché, who was running the filler, said, “Hey, you have to make sure you’re corking these in time, because right now, in the bottle but uncovered, is when the wine is most fragile. In the tank or the reservoir it’s safer. Right now is when it’s most vulnerable until you cork it, so keep up with the flow.” What I’d been doing was putting in each cork and looking at it to make sure it was just right. That was the first time I thought, oh God, I might be damaging the wine. She said she’d hold off filling for a while, which slowed us down, and I realized that needed to go faster. The focus was getting the cork in the bottle. I want to give her a shout-out. She lives in Ventura, and she taught me that.

12. Is there something you still do the way you were taught, even though you know a faster way exists?

It would be something Dusty told me early on, and it was about patience. I tend to let things settle before moving on to the next step. There are people who do their SO2 additions within a few days of dryness and have ways to blow off the CO2 so it doesn’t cause a problem. But partly because of how small our production is, and mostly because it’s the way I was taught, I like to give the wine a good month in barrel before any SO2 additions or a full top-up. There’s carbonic acid that’s been created, and it needs to degrade out of the wine and blow off as CO2. There are things you can do to speed that up.

But I think of fermentation as a time of great change. It’s like the wine is going through puberty, and you have to give it a little time to find its new equilibrium before you start the next step. So after harvest the wine is largely left alone for a month. Then I test it to see if I can add a little SO2 to protect it, and if I can, I give it a top-up. It doesn’t go into full aging mode for another couple of months. I don’t take off the fermentation bung for a couple of months, so it can find its footing.

13. What were you taught that you’ve since stopped doing?

I won’t say stopped doing, but a lot of cleaning is done with pressure. You put some percarbonate on, let it sit to break up whatever’s there, because it can dissolve the cell walls of biological material, and then you use the pressure of the hose to wash it off. That’s my own thing. I have to get in there and scrub it. I have to know that my own hands scrubbed it and I saw it happen. I’m not necessarily going to scrub the entire thing if it’s looking okay, but especially the tough spots. No, actually, that’s not true. Even if it’s just a quick wipe-down, I have to go in with my own hands and wipe it or scrub it, depending on the situation.

14. Is there a tank or a piece of equipment around here that has a name?

Not yet. But I just gave the hopper a whole renewal, so I have a feeling it’s imminent for the hopper, and probably the forklift too. I’ve called the forklift Bertha a couple of times, more as a joke, but I think she’s going to end up as Bertha. And the hopper will probably be something like Hal the Hopper.

15. Somebody walks in knowing nothing about wine. What do they already know that you can build on?

You know flavor. You’ve been eating and drinking things your whole life. You know what a raspberry tastes like. We had that snooty sommelier period of, no, this is the flavor it tastes like. But with the exception of green pepper, which is pyrazines, and vanilla or cream, which is the vanillin from the oak and is literally the same molecule, everything you taste in wine is a combination of molecules that your brain picks up and says, oh, that reminds me of this.

I remember pouring for a woman from Thailand who told me about a fruit called mangosteen. I’d never tried it, but she described the flavor to me, a note she was getting out of one of our whites, and I said, yeah, that works. If you think it tastes like something, you’re right. Period. It’s what your nose catches and your tongue catches, and your brain puts it together based on your own experience. If it doesn’t taste good to you, you’re right. If it tastes great to you, you’re right. And it doesn’t matter if I, as the winemaker, come up and say there’s an objective flaw in this wine. If you like that flaw, congratulations, you found a wine you like.

Take the whole barnyard Burgundy thing, where there’s a little Brettanomyces in the wine. Some people can’t handle it at all, and for some people it’s not Burgundy without it. You’re both right. I’m not looking to test anybody on a wine. There was a study done in a California tasting room and a French tasting room, with the same result: when they removed the tasting notes, they sold more wine.

16. Whoever pours this wine for a stranger, what do they need to know that isn’t in the tasting notes?

Our flavor profile is very much cool weather. We’re aiming for complexity, so you’re not going to get one big juicy cherry note. If something starts in one place in your mind and goes to another place, even if you can’t quite describe either one, that’s what it is.

And what isn’t written anywhere is that I spent twenty to twenty-five years in the entertainment industry, and to me wine should tell a story. So I try to make sure it starts in one place and ends in another, ideally starts in one place, goes somewhere else, and ends in a third, and leaves you with that.

The other thing is that there are really only two people in this winery. My wife does the social media and marketing and helps with our events, and I do literally everything else, from the winemaking to the compliance to sourcing the fruit to making sure we have the right insurance.

17. What would someone have to watch you do to understand this wine? Something the glass doesn’t give them.

Oh God. It happens at least once every harvest. They would have to watch me when I just sit there for a second and think, now what? What am I going to do? That moment before I have the answer. No winemaker would ever let you see it, because it’s them at their lowest point. Sometimes it happens during blending trials, sometimes during harvest. You’d see the look on their face when they have something and no idea what to do with it, and that lasts anywhere from thirty seconds to maybe five minutes. Then you’d see their face as the answer hits them, the relief and joy and excitement, going from sheer depression, ready to give it all up and wondering why they ever started this, to, oh my God, this is it.

If it were possible to see that, I think you’d have a real appreciation for what goes into every bottle, and why there’s a different price point for boutique wines like ours, where it’s a handful of people putting their heart and soul into something, compared to a large industrial operation. I don’t want to get sued, but think of a Two Buck Chuck. Nothing against those wines, because everybody needs to come to wine some way, and those are very friendly wines. They’re the ones that shake your hand and welcome you into the world.

Different wines have different purposes. Our bottles are between thirty and sixty dollars, and I would hope nobody spends fifty dollars on a bottle and brings it to a three-year-old’s birthday party or a frat party where nobody’s going to enjoy it. By the same token, if you’re sitting down to a beautiful dinner to celebrate the day, I’d hope you’d find something a little more special than a two-dollar bottle.

18. What’s your favorite wine that you don’t make? Describe it without using tasting notes.

It’s the same grape, Barbera, from two makers who do it slightly differently, one in California and one in Piedmont. In California it’s Portalupi. Their Barbera is everything California Barbera can and should be. The other is a very small winery run by two brothers in Alba, Manera Fratelli. I ran into their wine six or seven years ago at a tasting out here, and when my wife and I went to Italy I made sure we stopped in Alba, because I wanted to see their facility and meet Carlo face to face. What they’re doing with Barbera is just magic. Their Barbaresco too, but for me it’s Barbera, and it’s those two.

19. When you make a great one, do you know right away? What comes to mind when it happens, a place or something you remember?

You know right away if it’s going to be bad. Spectacular, I have a pretty good feeling at the end of harvest, but I don’t really know until blending trials, because you never know what direction a barrel can go. There are so many variables. I’ve likened winemaking to alchemy. There are something like ten thousand taste compounds, and we only know the chemistry behind a small share of them. We know maybe ninety-three to ninety-five percent of winemaking, but there’s this little bit we still don’t know, and that’s where the superstitions come from.

Every winemaker I know has superstitions. I know people who only rack their wine at the full moon, because they feel it pulls the wine away from the lees, like the tides. We celebrate certain Celtic harvest holidays. Partly that’s our tradition, I’m very, very Celtic, but it’s also a little bit of hoping for next year. When Yule comes, we always open a bottle of our own wine, hoping the next year is going to be great for this winery and this wine.

So the blending trials are when I know, and I’m still surprised sometimes. We’ve had a couple come out great that I didn’t think were going to be, and that’s still part of the fun.

20. One pour, one stranger. Which wine, and what do you say before they taste it?

I pour our reserve label Syrah. I tell them it’s unlike most other California wines, a low alcohol wine with a lot of earth and spice in it, very intentionally. Especially if they’re a newer wine drinker, I hope they take away the idea that California wines aren’t monolithic, Central Coast wines aren’t monolithic, and Santa Barbara is a very special wine region that can do things the other AVAs just can’t. Every AVA is like that, but when people say, oh, I’ve had Central Coast, and they mean a lot of Paso, I tell them it’s a totally different region. The Central Coast runs from Monterey to Ventura. Monterey is different from San Luis Obispo, which is different from Paso, which is different from Santa Barbara, and if you go inland, the Santa Cruz Mountains. It’s so diverse.

I’m a huge proponent of Santa Barbara County, and our Syrah is trying to plant a flag. We all know California Syrah, fifteen percent alcohol, big cherry, big chocolate, big pepper. This is saying it can also be more Northern Rhône in style, dried herbs and earthiness and mushroom and olive, and a really interesting and complex experience.

Bonus. What does this work take away from you that people don’t see?

Time is a big one. But the only one who really sees the other part is my wife, and it’s mental energy. Part of that is just running a business, but winemaking specifically has so many variables. Think of a computer that’s always running a couple of programs in the background that have to do with the wine. There’s never a time when it isn’t in there. My wife comments on it, and she understands it, but it’s just always there.

Recorded over Zoom on November 5, 2026, for the Meet the Winemakers oral history series. Answers are drawn from the transcript and edited lightly for length and clarity.