Wine

Published: Friday, Sep. 04, 2009

Wine Notes: Meritage

Collective tasting room offers 10 bars for wineries to rent in one large space

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For a small winery, opening a tasting room can be the ideal way to introduce new wines to the public and the most profitable way to sell them.

It can also cost tens of thousands of dollars to build, if not hundreds of thousands, and the monthly rent can be budget crushing.

Ron Mullins, a real estate broker in Paso Robles, has a solution. He and business partner Bill Ridino are creating a new concept that will enable wineries with small budgets to have a premium location in the heart of downtown Paso Robles, and yet share the cost with up to nine other wineries.

“Our idea here is to allow them to have a presence downtown on the park and not have all the expense of going in and setting up their own tasting room,” Mullins explains. “It isn’t going to be any different than having a tasting room at their own site winery.”

Mullin’s concept is called “Meritage.” It consists of 10 tasting room bars, lined up on one long side of his 6,000-square-foot tasting room, each with its own nine-foot counter, server and signage. The space will be richly decorated, with mahogany bars, manufactured granite countertops, bamboo floors and a high, black-beamed ceiling.

“We want to set a tone that is something that has a nicer atmosphere than anything else in Paso,” Mullins says.

Mullins and Ridino — who owns William Ridino Construction — did the layout and overall design themselves. They are being aided by Marlow Interiors, a Paso Robles design company, to do the interior design.

The building is owned by Mullin’s mother, Vickie Mullins, who bought the former community arts theater in 2003, along with the adjoining structure, which houses her real estate agency, Prudential Hallmark Realty.

It’s in that office that her son works and can conveniently oversee the new project.

In addition to the lush tasting bars, there will be two large lounge areas, carpeted and furnished with comfortable sofas and chairs for customers to relax and sip wines. There will also be flat-screen televisions throughout the space, which will show images of the participating wineries’ vineyards, winemakers and wines.

It will cost a winery about $2,500 a month to lease space in Meritage, but compared to setting up a dedicated tasting room downtown, that is a veritable bargain. All the sales proceeds go directly to the wineries, and they will have the option to rent the space for winemaker dinners and other winery events.

The concept is not only a first for Paso Robles, but also for California. Mullins and Ridino traveled to Northern California to get ideas for the tasting room, and admittedly “borrowed a lot of other peoples’ good ideas,” but didn’t find anything truly comparable.

Napa does have tasting rooms called “collectives,” which feature multiple wineries in a single tasting room, but there is generally only a single tasting bar with one server pouring all the wineries’ wines.

“Going to Napa, we bounced around these collectives, but never really found what we were looking for as far as the right model,” Mullins says.

So they decided to create their own.

They are also working to allow the “Picnic Law” to apply to the space, so customers can buy a bottle of wine to share in the lounge areas, and select from a menu of wine pairings that include cheese from neighbor Vivant Fine Cheese, as well as tapas prepared by local caterers.

A factor that the partners say is an advantage is that neither Mullins nor Ridino have any background in the wine industry. It is a plus, they say, because other tasting rooms with multiple wineries under one roof have failed because there was perceived competition between the owners and the leasing wineries.

“Fortunately for us, we’re not in the wine industry, we’re all in the real estate industry, and we just happen to be renting to wineries,” Mullins explains. “So we won’t be in here pouring our label and competing with the other wineries.”

The first winery to commit to the project was Roxo Cellars, owned by the Culp and Steel families. Since Roxo exclusively makes port wines, and most SLO County wineries make wines other than port, it is an ideal fit. Mullins says there are an additional four to five wineries close to signing contracts, and he is hosting a preview open house Wednesday only for wineries to generate more interest and awareness in the project.

And he’s not just looking for North County wineries. “We’ve had strong interest from as far north as the Santa Cruz Mountains,” Mullins says, “down into the south part of our county.”

Meritage Tasting Room

Address: 810 11th St., Paso Robles, CA 93446

Phone: 805-235-2308

Founders: Ron Mullins and Bill Ridino

Projected Opening Date: Oct. 1

Web site: Under development

Janis Switzer can be reached at 434-5394 or via e-mail at janisswitzer@yahoo.com.