August 21, 2018 – Life in preternaturally sunny Carmel Valley, the home base of artist, composer, musician, restauranteur and wine maker Walter Georis, often feels like a blissful, endless summer.
But as devoted surfers and anyone familiar with 1960s Southern California pop culture may recognize from the image engraved into the bottles of Georis’s new wine label, the name The Endless Summer refers to the seminal 1966 Bruce Brown surf movie. And for Georis personally, the new wines are an expression of a time and place in his life and a deep well of inspiration.
“It’s really about the wine and putting that in a package that relates to my experience when I was young,” Georis says.“The source was an artistic process, an artistic movie.”
Georis is no surfer—“I’m a terrible swimmer” he says—but after immigrating with his family from Belgium at the age of 11, he grew up in the epicenter of California surf culture, in San Clemente.
“It was an exceptional time in California,” Georis recalls. “The surf industry was just at the beginning—there were no pros, and it was not a competitive sport. At that time, people surfed because they loved to surf, it was just about connecting with the water.”
Brown explored that passion with The Endless Summer, documenting the travels of a pair of young surfers as they chased favorable weather and superb waves around the world.
Georis’s own passion at the time was music, and Brown chose him and his San Clemente-based band, The Sandals, to compose and play the music for the soundtrack. (Georis’s brother Gaston, proprietor of La Bicyclette in Carmel, was also a member of the band—see them play the theme song and reminisce with Brown in a music video shot at the Georis tasting room here.)
Later, Georis approached Brown, a friend, about making a line of wines in homage to the film. Brown liked the idea and gave Georis the rights to The Endless Summer name and the artwork for The Endless Summer album cover.
Georis says he’s been working on the concept for about 10 years, and began moving it forward two years ago.
In creating the deliciously bright, crisp and fruit-forward wines for the label, Georis and his wine maker, Dane Sanvido, were aiming for something that, like surfing, has broad appeal yet delivers a surpassing experience.
“We wanted to try something you could have on the beach,” enjoying a free lifestyle, Sanvido says. “It’s a little bit of a lighter style wine, fun and nice and vibrant.”
Georis notes that the new wines are food friendly, reflective of the local terroir and veer from the ordinary when it comes to varietals—the white is made mostly from Chenin Blanc, the Rose, Syrah, and the red, 100% Grenache made subtly and pleasantly smoky by the 2016 Soberanes fire. Each varietal is made in small batches of 200-300 cases.
Price-wise, at $30 per bottle, the new label falls between the wines made for the acclaimed flagship Georis Winery and Georis’s more casual Cowgirl Winery.
Aptly, The Endless Summer wines launched in early August, with tastings and bottles for purchase available at the spacious adobe Georis tasting room at 1 Pilot Rd. in Carmel Valley. A release party is coming this fall, and an Endless Summer tasting room is planned for 2019 just across the street, in the former Talbott space right next to Georis’s Corkscrew Café.
Georis says he’s working on the new tasting room design as he always does, starting with with a few ideas and letting it develop organically.
“What I do not want is a tiki hut approach. I want it to be a clean, contemporary presentation,” in keeping with the contemporary nature of the wines, he says.
Meantime, Georis is especially excited about the beautiful Endless Summer bottles, each engraved with the iconic movie album art, and each made in a different gorgeous color, sealed with synthetic corks in even more hues. In short, a bottle you may not want to toss after enjoying its contents.
“Our packaging is killer,” Georis says. “Probably the best recycling for glass is to enjoy it as an empty bottle.”
About the author
SARAH WOOD—founding editor and publisher of Edible Monterey Bay—has had a life-long passion for food, cooking, people and our planet.
She planted her first organic garden and cared for her first chicken when she was in elementary school in a farming region of Upstate New York.
Wood spent the early part of her career based in Ottawa, Canada, working in international development and international education. After considering culinary school, she opted to pursue her loves for writing, learning about the world and helping make it a better place by obtaining a fellowship and an MA in Journalism from New York University.
While working for a daily newspaper in New Jersey, she wrote stories that helped farmers fend off development and won a state-wide public service award from the New Jersey Press Association for an investigative series of articles about a slumlord who had hoodwinked ratings agencies and investment banks into propping him up with some early commercial mortgage securitizations. The series led Wood to spend several years in financial journalism, most recently, as editor-in-chief of the leading magazine covering the U.S. hedge-fund industry.
Wood now lives with her family in Washington, DC, where she is a freelance writer and manages communications for Samaritan Ministry, an antipoverty and antiracist nonprofit that provides struggling Greater Washington residents with highly personalized and compassionate life counseling and coaching.
