a personJim Clendenen
Founded Au Bon Climat in 1982 and spent forty years making Burgundian varieties on the Central Coast — big hair, big arguments, and a refusal to chase ripeness when everyone else did.
The story Cited
Born in Akron in 1953, died in 2021. Santa Barbara County called him the godfather of its wine trade, and he pushed the county's pinot noir and chardonnay into export markets that had not previously looked south of Monterey.
Facts
| role | winemaker |
|---|---|
| country | United States |
| region | Santa Maria Valley, Santa Barbara County, California |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
Its kin
cellarAu Bon ClimatThe winery he built and ran.and of this page it says: Who ran it for four decades.vineyardBien NacidoWhere it lives.regionSanta Maria ValleyThe valley he argued for.
Sources
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.