Villa Creek owners, bottom from left, JoAnn and Cris Cherry, and their chef, Tom Fundaro, inside the restaurant.
This weekend, as Rhône wine producers from around the world converge in Paso Robles for the 16th annual Hospice du Rhône, Cris Cherry will be serving many of them dinner at his well-known Paso Robles restaurant, Villa Creek.
He will also be pouring his Villa Creek wines at the event —wines with names such as Avenger, High Road and Mas de Maha that have been receiving accolades almost from the time they were introduced five years ago.
Cherry never planned to be a winemaker. He grew up in his family’s Mexican restaurants in San Diego and Vail, Colo. It was second nature for him to follow in his father’s footsteps, so he started looking for a restaurant to own and run with wife JoAnn while they raised their family.
He found that place in what was then sleepy Paso Robles.
With only a couple of other “fine dining” spots in town at the time, Cherry converted an old cocktail lounge at Pine and 12th streets into Villa Creek restaurant.
He named the restaurant after his family’s small dairy farm on Villa Creek Road in Cayucos, and he started
creating recipes based on his travels through Mexico and the Southwest United States.
The restaurant opened in 1998, and three years later he did two things: first, he hired chef Tom Fundaro to take the lead in the kitchen; second, he started to think about wine.
“The restaurant had an emphasis on fine wines from both inside and outside the area from the beginning,” Cherry explains. “We’re a big wine industry hangout because people can come in and check out wines from the south of France or Spain or Australia or Lebanon.”
But it was Cherry’s friendship with young Paso Robles winemakers Justin Smith, Matt Trevisan and Mat Garretson that started his fascination with winemaking.
As Cherry watched Smith and Trevisan work together to create Linne Calodo, he started to think he could do the same.
With no formal winemaking training, he started buying barrels and grapes, and he made 300 cases in his first vintage in 2001.
“Most of my training has come from tasting wines from all over the world, and then having a great quiver of friends to bounce ideas off of,” Cherry says.
He adds, “Most of the winemakers here who I think are doing a great job have learned by doing.”
Coming into his own
After making wine for five years at Denner Vineyards, he built his own small winery in 2006.
About seven miles west of town on curvy Peachy Canyon Road, the winery is not much more than a barn on Cherry’s 70-acre property. The soils and elevation are perfect for growing grapes, and he plans to plant his own 10-to 12-acre vineyard in about two years.
Although he opens the winery for special events and club members, it is usually closed to the public and there is no tasting room. There is, he notes quickly, the restaurant, where he sells his wines by the bottle and glass.
Cherry finds his fruit through per-acre contracts, which ensures the grapes come from the same blocks each vintage.
Those vineyards include the very highly respected James Berry Vineyard — owned by the Smith family—Denner Vineyard, Booker Vineyard and Ohana Vineyard.
His current production is just under 3,000 cases a year, and he plans to keep it small.
Most of his wines are red Rhône blends, using syrah, Grenache, mourvedre and tempranillo grapes, and his skill in crafting these blends into rich, fruit-forward wines has been recognized by wine critics around the country.
Most recently, Robert Parker’s independent consumer guide to wines rated his 2005 Avenger a 93 points on its scale of 100, giving Cherry high marks for “innovative packaging, blending and unbelievably fair prices.”
Now that the restaurant is celebrating its 10-year milestone and the winery is built and producing wines, Cherry is already contemplating what his “phase 3” would be.
But he and JoAnn are not in any hurry. “We were very ‘less is more’ from the start,” Cherry says. “We’ve always approached things as a marathon as opposed to a sprint.”
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