San Diego’s Best-Kept Wine Secret — Vesper Vineyards and Stehleon
San Diego County is not famous for wine. It is famous for beaches, biotech, the Navy, and fish tacos. When people think about California wine they think Napa, Sonoma, Paso Robles, Santa Barbara — not the inland valleys north of the city where avocado groves and citrus orchards have given way, in places, to Syrah and Grenache Blanc and Malvasia Bianca growing on hillside vineyards that nobody outside of Southern California has heard of. Alysha Stehly has been making wine from 100% San Diego County grapes since 2008, when she and her husband Chris Broomell co-founded Vesper Vineyards in Escondido. The San Francisco Chronicle named them Winemakers to Watch in 2014 — the first Southern California winemakers to receive that designation. Her father Al, a third-generation California farmer who spent twenty years managing citrus and avocado groves before someone asked him about planting wine grapes, runs Stehleon Vineyards alongside her. The whole family is in it. And the wine, by all available evidence, is worth the drive.
In This Profile
Alysha Stehly — The Winemaker Who Stayed Home
Alysha Stehly grew up around vineyards because her father was managing them. She went to UC Davis — the most respected viticulture and enology program in the United States — graduated, worked her first harvest as a cellar hand at Three Sticks Wines in Sonoma, and then did something most serious California winemakers don’t do: she came back to San Diego County.
She could have stayed in Sonoma. She and Chris could have set up in Paso Robles or Santa Barbara where the infrastructure for craft winemaking is established and the audience already exists. They chose San Diego County instead, for reasons that are partly practical — her family’s vineyard management network, her father’s land relationships, her own deep knowledge of the county’s microclimates — and partly philosophical. San Diego County was a wine region that needed people to believe in it. Alysha and Chris believed in it.
On the question of being a female winemaker in a field that has historically skewed male, Alysha is characteristically direct. She doesn’t see it as a defining characteristic. “When I was in college it was almost a 50/50 split of males and females in all of my winemaking classes,” she says. “If you want to be treated like an equal, then act like one. Putting winemakers into a category based on gender is ridiculous. When it comes to being a winemaker, I think it all comes down to the ability to handle the work, the hours, the ever-changing job description, and the criticism. Doesn’t matter if you’re male or female.”
She also teaches viticulture at MiraCosta College in Oceanside — covering vineyard site selection, design, planting, pest management, disease, and more in a single course. The practical and the theoretical run together for her in a way that is evident in the wines: she visits her vineyards at least monthly, wants to know exactly what she is getting before harvest, and works with minimal intervention once the grapes arrive. The vineyard does the work. The winery gets out of the way.
Vesper Vineyards — Natural Winemaking in San Diego County
Alysha and Chris Broomell co-founded Vesper Vineyards in 2008, the year the financial crisis hit and most people were pulling back from new ventures. The winery focuses exclusively on San Diego County fruit — sourcing from McCormick Ranch, Highland Hills, Orfila Vineyards, and other county growers — and produces a range that reflects the county’s unusual varietal diversity: Sauvignon Blanc, Torrontés, Syrah Blanc, rosé from multiple vineyard sources, Carménère, Malbec, and Syrah.
Vesper’s Natural Winemaking Philosophy
Alysha and Chris made the decision to move Vesper to natural winemaking — no added sulfites, native yeast fermentation, minimal intervention throughout production. The decision was not taken lightly. “I didn’t sleep well for the first year,” Alysha says. Natural winemaking eliminates the conventional safety net: added sulfites that prevent oxidation, commercial yeasts that produce predictable fermentation, fining agents that clarify the wine before bottling. Without them, the winemaker depends entirely on the health of the fruit and their own knowledge and attention. Chris reminded Alysha that she would be there the whole way and that if anything went wrong she had the expertise to catch it and fix it. The natural Vesper wines are the expression of that confidence. They reflect San Diego County terroir more directly than conventionally produced wines from the same grapes would — which is precisely the point.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s 2014 “Winemakers to Watch” designation — the first time that recognition had gone to Southern California winemakers — brought Vesper national attention that the wines have sustained through consistent quality and a production philosophy that has only deepened since. The occasional big risk, as Alysha describes it, is the whole point of running a small independent winery: freedom to do things that commercial operations cannot.
Stehleon Vineyards — A California Farming Family Makes Wine
Al Stehly founded Stehly Grove Management in 1990, twenty years before he made his first wine. He managed citrus groves and avocado orchards across San Diego County — a third-generation California farmer who understood the land’s rhythms, its water needs, its seasonal demands. When a client asked him about installing a wine grape vineyard, he took it on as a novel challenge rather than a business plan. He attended classes at UC Davis, networked with other growers, and gradually realized that the grapes his management company was growing were good enough to make serious wine.
The name Stehleon was a middle-of-the-night revelation from Lisa Stehly — a combination of the family name and the lion head that decorates their front yard, photographed and turned into the winery’s logo by a family member. The first Stehleon vintages were produced under a custom crush arrangement with Vesper before Stehleon established its own urban winery in Escondido in 2013 and opened the tasting room in January 2014.
Why San Diego Wine Deserves Attention
San Diego County’s wine identity problem is not a quality problem. It is a perception problem. The county has 20 distinct microclimates created by the interaction of Pacific Ocean influence, coastal marine layer, inland heat, and elevation changes across a landscape that rises from sea level to over 6,000 feet within the county’s boundaries. That diversity — more than most California wine regions can claim — allows San Diego producers to grow varieties that simply don’t work in more famous but more climatically uniform regions.
The land preservation argument that Alysha makes is also genuinely significant. San Diego County’s agricultural land is under sustained development pressure — the county sits at the edge of one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States, and every avocado grove sold to a developer is gone permanently. Wine grapes offer economically viable farmland use that can compete with development economics in ways that other crops cannot. A vineyard that produces wine sold at $25–$50 a bottle generates different revenue per acre than one producing table fruit. If Alysha’s local sourcing commitment helps farmers stay in farming, the wine is also land conservation.
“Nowadays, people care about where their food comes from and how it was grown, but they don’t think about where their beverages come from,” Alysha observes. “Hopefully making wine from San Diego grapes can make them think twice about supporting local and have pride in what is grown here.” The locavore logic that has transformed American food culture is slowly reaching wine — and San Diego County has a genuinely compelling local wine story to offer when it does.
Visiting the Sans V Tasting Room
Both Vesper Vineyards and Stehleon Vineyards pour at the Sans V Tasting Room — a shared tasting room inside the urban winery facility in Escondido. The setting is the opposite of the estate winery experience you’d get in Napa: an industrial park address, a little white sign on the side of Enterprise Street, and a tasting room that opens into the working winery with windows looking directly into the production space. The vibe, as one visitor described it, is one hundred percent relaxed.
Visit Information — Sans V Tasting Room
Address: 298 Enterprise Street, Suite D, Escondido, CA 92029
Phone: (760) 741-1246
Hours: Saturday and Sunday, noon–5pm, or by appointment
Tours: Winery tours available at $20 per person, including a tasting flight
Groups: Six or more guests are asked to call or email in advance even during regular hours
What to expect: Tasting flights featuring both Vesper Vineyards and Stehleon Vineyards wines. Windows into the working winery. A temperature-controlled space — dress warmly. One hundred percent San Diego County wine from producers who have been making it since 2008.
Frequently Asked Questions
n’t a famous region. It’s more like the best-kept secret.”
