About Thacher Winery
The KR brand on Thacher's 1920s barn is old Paso shorthand for the Kentucky Ranch, a horse-breeding operation on land that was part of a 4,000-acre Spanish land grant until 1869. Sherman Thacher, a former Santa Cruz brewmaster whose great-grandfather founded the famous Thacher School in Ojai, attended a wedding at the ranch with his wife Michelle in 2003; months later they bought 52 acres of it, complete with the landmark barn, barley fields and a riparian corridor that hosts bobcats and the occasional mountain lion.
Since the 2004 founding under the grasshopper label, Thacher has become the standard-bearer for a lighter Paso: minimal-intervention wines with native ferments, no added acid, water or nutrients, and alcohol levels well below regional norms. The estate Homestead Hill vineyard, first planted in 2007, joined a solar-powered winery completed in 2008, and today roughly 5,000 cases span some twenty bottlings, from heritage Zinfandel to carbonic Valdiguie and a field blend of eleven Southern French and Spanish varieties. Sherman has also planted twenty heirloom apple varieties, reviving the ranch's century-old orchard history in an apple-grape cider. Tastings pour beside the hundred-year-old barn on Vineyard Drive.
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