About The Valley Project
The Valley Project is a love letter to Santa Barbara County's geography, founded by the late winemaker Seth Kunin and his wife Magan, who carries it forward. The premise is simple and brilliant: small-batch wines made from each of the county's distinct AVAs, poured side by side so you can literally taste how the region's east-west valleys, marine fog and wildly varied soils shape the same state's wines differently a few miles apart.
The schoolhouse-styled Funk Zone tasting room makes the lesson visual: an epic wall-sized hand-drawn chalk map of the county's wine regions rises behind the bar, with jars of soil from the very vineyard sites displayed beside the bottles they produce. Staff walk visitors through the map as they pour, making it one of the most genuinely educational tastings anywhere in the county.
Tucked on East Yanonali Street among the Funk Zone's galleries and tasting rooms a few blocks from the beach, it is an ideal first stop of a Santa Barbara wine day: after one flight here, the rest of the county's tasting rooms make a great deal more sense.
