The Fizz #42: Marlen & Cameron at Amplify Wines express the unique terroir of Santa Barbara County.
Amplify Wine's Marlen and Cameron Sosa-Porter share their experience in Santa Barbara County, how music influences their winemaking, and why they co-founded Natural Action wine club.
For the 42nd issue of The Fizz, I spoke with Cameron and Marlen Sosa-Porter, founders of Amplify Wine in Santa Barbara County, CA. This husband and wife team, born and raised in Santa Barbara County, just wrapped up their ninth harvest. I’ve been loving Amplify Wines for a few years now—the wines are vibrant and bold, and always delightful. For our interview, Marlen Zoomed in from the winery and Cameron from home with their son Miles.
In this issue, we talk about how music inspires their winemaking, how they approach blending and wine composition, as well as why they co-founded Natural Action Wine Club. We also talk through the unique characteristics of Santa Barbara County terroir, and the changes the couple has seen in their local wine industry, as well as where they hope for the industry to go.
Margot: Thanks for getting together with me. I’d love to hear about how you got started. This is your ninth vintage, how’d you get Amplify going?
Marlen: We've both been in the wine industry for about 16 years and have worked in basically all facets of the industry before we started Amplify. Cameron being more on the winemaking side, me being more on business side, we combined the two, and really wanted to make wine that we weren't seeing being made in our area. We were drinking a lot of old world wine at the time and were looking for something that was a bit more fresh, a bit more natural—native fermentation was definitely something that was beautiful in an old world wine, not as many additions.
We want to make these bright, more acidic, food friendly wines. We started with Carignan and Viognier, with about 90 cases. It's definitely been a wild ride and there has been a lot of organic growth. We've gone from working with two varieties to 20 different grape varieties this year. That's been our journey.
Up until April 2020, Cameron was still working full-time for another winery. I stopped working full-time in 2015 after we had our son Miles. That was a great experience for me to be able to be home with him, and then also focus on growing our brand. At that point we realized that was where we were headed—to continue growing that brand and work towards the goal of working for ourselves.
Margot: You're both from Santa Barbara County. I feel like it’s kind of rare for winemakers in the US to be from the areas they’re working in. At least here on the East Coast, so many people move away.
Marlen: Yeah, I’ve lived in this area pretty much my whole life. I was born in Ventura, but I moved to Nipomo in Central Coast when I was four.
Margot: How do those roots influence your winemaking?
Marlen: I think it's been huge. I mean, for me being Mexican, being Oaxacan and being raised in an area that—when I moved here it was predominantly white. It wasn't as diverse as even the Ventura area. I think that the wine industry has really changed and brought a lot of culture and diversity to our area in general. The wine industry has really caused a boom not only in wine, but also in food. You know, something like Bell's—I could never imagine a Bell's in Los Alamos that just got a Michelin star. That was something that when we were going in growing up in our early twenties, I mean, that used to be a biker bar! It has brought so much more diversity and it's been great.
Margot: That’s great to hear. On your Instagram, you mentioned you had been using only Santa Barbara county fruit for the last eight years prior to this vintage. Why has it been important for you to stay in the area and not to branch out?
Cameron: Growing up here and seeing the diversity of Santa Barbara County, and what a unique region it is geographically, there's so much to explore within the area. There's a huge range of climatic variation, soil variation, different grape varieties. Then the ability to visit vineyards, all within like half an hour of us definitely made a big difference for us. We’re also trying to elevate the voice of the area, because we have all these different sub AVAs and all this, but most people barely even know what Santa Barbara County is or where it is. That's been important for us.
This year we branched out for a couple of reasons. One, we wanted to find more organic fruit. There's still not that many options for organic fruit in California in general, but in Santa Barbara County, there's a handful of vineyards. There's more and more each day. We wanted to get organic fruit that was still reasonable. That was well farmed, but affordable. Now that we've worked with so many different sites in Santa Barbara county, so many different grapes in Santa Barbara county, we wanted to explore some different expressions of the state. It's still Central Coast, but a little further north.
Margot: What’s unique about Santa Barbara County?
Cameron: I think the biggest factor is our mountain ranges. Our mountains are all transverse. Basically, from Canada all the way down to South America, we're the only place on the west coast that has these transverse mountains, that run east-west that open up directly to the ocean.
Because of that, even though in terms of latitude, we're about the same as Northern Africa, it's still a very cool climate. Every mile east you go, it gets about a degree warmer, so the climate changes within like a 20 mile span. You've got very different climates, a lot of variation in temperature, and that makes it very distinctive. As a result of that, you have soils that change from the coast where you have a lot of sand, these sort of Marine soils, but if you go inland, you can find a lot of calcium, limestone. You've got things like diatomaceous earth and serpentine, which you don't really see in other wine growing regions around the world. All of those factors combined to make an area that I think is very distinctive, not just within California, but within the world as a whole.
[Wine educator Elaine Chukan Brown wrote an excellent overview of Santa Barbara County terroir. Read through it here to get a better understanding of the region.]
It's been interesting to explore it and explore the grapes that we work with because, up until very recently, there was a very narrow set of grape varieties that were being explored in Santa Barbara. Chardonnay and Pinot are probably what we're most known for. There’s Syrah and some Rhone varieties to some degree, but to me, these varieties like Grenache or Carignan or Spanish whites, are much more expressive of our place than some of these earlier plantings show. I think it's a really cool region to explore because it's still finding its voice and still developing.
Margot: You mentioned that when you were just starting Amplify, you were looking to create wines that had a little bit more acid were more food friendly. How do you achieve that? Do you harvest early?
Cameron: Part of it is our climate here, just being so coastal, even if you're picking something that would have a potential alcohol of 14ish, the pH is still low. We always hang on to acid, even when sugar is a little higher. I think there's definitely been a movement for people to just pick earlier and earlier and earlier, which I just don't understand because if you listen to anyone in the old world talk about winemaking, they're always saying they want to get grapes as ripe as possible.
Obviously in California, we can take that to the extreme because we don't have the challenges that they have in Europe with harvest weather. But I think there's definitely a sweet spot where you can taste in the fruit, a change from very simple flavors to something that will be more complex. We're not talking crazy ripe—our alcohols are in the 12 to 13% range with plenty of acid, but I think there's definitely that demarcation between something that is being picked just for numbers or to be a certain style where it's all fruit and all primary and nothing else, and a style where things start to shift beyond fruit, with more herbacious notes, more spice notes.
A big thing for us is texture. I think wines become much more interesting texturally if you're allowing them to get to a riper place.
Marlen: We're in our ninth vintage, having worked with some of these varietals now for almost nine years—Viognier, Merlot, Riesling. We've realized that you can’t just treat them all the same. Some like to be picked earlier. Some like to hang on a little longer and those differences happen throughout the time we pick to the time we bottle. All of the grapes are so different, even if you pick them at the exact same time. They're all going to react in different ways, especially working naturally. There's really nothing hiding anything about the wine.
Margot: You make some interesting blends with so many different grapes—20 different varieties. What's the vision behind the grapes and blends that you choose?
Cameron: In terms of blending, we usually start from a place of what do we want the end wine to be? Often that's not necessarily the flavor profile. It could be more conceptual. For Mixtape, we wanted it to be something that has very clearly disparate elements coming together that make something that's a uniform whole. Before we did our first vintage of Mixtape, we were tasting these wines that were blends of white and red grapes that had juiciness and a freshness to them, but also that had depth. They weren’t all glou glou fruit bomb kind of wines—they had a little something more to them.
How do we achieve that in terms of great chemistry—what grapes do we need to work with that have elevated acid or this amount of tannin? Once things are actually in the cellar and you're tasting them, we can sort of dial it in a little tighter and go, okay, this turned out to have a little more tannin than I was expecting, so let's only do 20% of this and, you know, it's a little acid deficient, so maybe let's bump this grape to 40% from 30% or something like that. With Lightworks, that's not a blend, but just in terms of concept, we’re thinking about music, about the producer J Dilla and the idea of looping and sampling and how music can apply to wine.
Usually it starts one of those two places—either a wine that we're conceptualizing based on an idea of other blends traditionally and how we can put our own spin on them, or we're trying to conceptualize something that's more abstract and how to put it in a more concrete form.
Margot: It sounds like music really inspires your winemaking and your concept, why is that? How do you channel that inspiration?
Cameron: We're both musicians.
Marlen: Cameron’s a musician. That's his first passion, and that’s really why we bonded. We've been together for 16 years. We initially bonded over music and music was something that for both of us as teenagers, changed our lives, and we have memories of that. That's been constant in our relationship and it has been part of the winery.
My father was a musician. My uncles are musicians. I played the flute and the piccolo and did marching band. When we decided to start the brand, we actually found our name by flipping through CDs, because we knew that we wanted to have it be something with a musical meaning. We chose Amplify, which was a song that Cameron wrote when he was a teenager with his friend. It was a song called Amplify the Autumn. We just thought Amplify as in amplifying the soil and giving you something that's really vibrant. It's been the thread that holds Amplify—it's our family and our story. Miles loves music and has grown up with music—he’s named after Miles Davis.
It's drawing inspiration from a different type of art. As much as winemaking is a craft, to us it's also an art. Now that we started our wine club, we’re being able to share that more of like, this is who we are. We’re happy to include our playlist and include the original music that Cameron has written and worked on in the wine club newsletter. We’re really happy to be able to share that part of us.
Margot: That’s amazing. You all are part of the group that co-founded Natural Action wine club. Can you tell me about why you decided to get that started?
Marlen: Natural Action started really organically—again, we really bonded through music. Our friends Khalil and Teron started the Westside Winos, which Cameron found in the pandemic and he was like there's this dope set that these two guys that are also into natural wine have. We started tuning in every Wednesday night. Cameron started messaging back and forth with them and we became friends. We had also become friends with Eric from Good Boy and had also known Justin from Lane Tanner. When she started working there, we were making wine over at our friend Kevin's place, which was right next door.
Eric had the idea of doing something after George Floyd's death. And we all had more time on our hands, we were at home, and started talking about making a difference in the wine industry. There's so much talk on Instagram or social media about these things that need to change, but how do we actually put that into action where people benefit from it? We’re trying to take a really horrible situation and do something positive, affecting and creating these opportunities for BIPOC students and the BIPOC community, the young BIPOC community that wouldn't have resources accessible for them.
All of us at Natural Action come from different backgrounds, we all look different and we all have different experiences, but we really, as a whole look like the United States looks like now. At Natural Action, you could find somebody that you look like, or who represents you. I think that's very powerful. It's been a great humbling experience because of the response that we've gotten from it. I mean, we really didn't know what the response would be and it's been overwhelming.
Margot: How have you seen the wine industry in Santa Barbara change, and where do you hope that change is going?
Cameron: The diversity of styles in Santa Barbara, just from a purely aesthetic standpoint, for a long time there was just one dominant mode for the most part, which is probably the case in a lot of the new world where it was all about big ripe lush, crowd pleasing kind of wines. I think now you have a lot more people embracing the characteristics inherent to the area—brighter acid, more freshness and wines that are really expressive beyond fruit.
There’s the shift towards more and more organic farming—it’s still very much the minority, but you're seeing more and more people who feel like they almost have to convert to organic or regenerative farming because the pressure from winemakers is such that they have to go organic if they want to continue to sell their fruit, which is great. Certainly more natural winemaking. Basically any new winery I see, it's almost always, younger people working naturally.
Part of the reason we started Natural Action was out of a desire to bring more diversity to the wine business and not just in a paying lip service sort of way. There seems to be a genuine desire to do so, and to empower people whose voices have been marginalized or not given the opportunity to participate in wine across the board. Not just in winemaking or vineyard work, but the whole spectrum of the wine business—being a general manager, being a somm, all of those things. I think there's a lot of positive change coming to Santa Barbara.
Margot: Where do you hope to see that change going?
Marlen: There has been a lot more awareness around inequities around vineyard workers and they’re standing up against that. This harvest, for example, it was really hard to get crews to pick grapes. I feel like they'd had enough. There was awareness brought to the issue of being overworked, underpaid, not being given any benefits and really just being taken advantage of in a way that has been happening for decades. These are the people that are farming, picking, working in wineries, are 50% of the labor force in the wine industry.
They're kind of the unseen, forgotten people that really make it happen. There are a lot of wineries where the winemaker writes work orders and the people that are actually touching the wine are never seen, never heard of, and they're not ever asked to be seen or heard. I think for the first time, that's changing. There are people working in various parts of the Vitners Association, for example, like my friend Jessica who started working with The Red Cross, I think, to get all of the vineyard workers vaccinated.
There’s a younger generation of winemakers that are paying attention to these issues. It’s not just an environmental issue. It's a humanitarian issue. If we, as one of the largest industries in our area, start to make the change, I hope that that's something that gets everyone else moving—apples, strawberry industries, they need to make those changes as well.
[Learn more about farm workers’ issues, struggle, and rights at United Farm Workers.]
Margot: Absolutely. Where do you find your joy in your work?
Cameron: It's definitely the physical process of creating wine in and of itself. As challenging and difficult it is when you're working 12 to 16 hours every day during harvest, there is definitely joy in that because you're seeing your creative ideas come to fruition and become concrete. Seeing what works, what doesn't, adapting into the moment—that feeling of creating on the fly in a way that's different from music. Music is just all in the abstract and you can kind of do whatever you want. Whereas wine, you're dealing with nature, with something concrete, you're dealing with something that forces you to adapt, which has its own creative inspiration. A lot of ideas that you haven't thought of might occur then and lead you in a different creative direction that's maybe more interesting than what you initially had.
The process year round of spending time with the wines and seeing how they evolve in barrel, tasting them on a weekly basis—to me, it’s a very meditative, contemplative time to be there, topping barrels, listening to music. I find joy in learning new things from vineyards that you've already worked with for several years, and also exploring new grape varieties or new places that you are working with the first time. All of those things.
Margot: It sounds like there’s a lot of joy!
Marlen: Yeah, definitely. It can be frustrating too. The wine industry is not easy, and most of the time it's not glamorous. It's a lot of physical hard work. Most of it is physical labor—boxing up shipments, that sort of thing. I think the thing for us that's rewarding is that we get to spend time with our son. We have the flexibility to have a family business where he is growing up in this. Being able to see his parents work hard—that's really special to me. Even on our hardest, most craziest days, we can sit down with our crew and talk about wine, talk about music, bring it back to what really inspires us, tasting through the wines and learning.
You really never stop learning in wine. Every vintage is a different experience. Some are easier, some are harder, but at the end of the day, you're proud that you made it through. This is the first year that I've stepped back a little bit more in the winery. I think we've both realized we don't have to do everything. I can go and do what I'm best at, which is running the business side and being a mom. That's where I want to be. Cameron is in the winery and we both balance each other out. The first eight vintages, it was just the two of us, and that was crazy. We did basically 2000 cases by ourselves. That's something to be proud of, you know.
Margot: I love that you're turning a page into a new era of Amplify.
Marlen: Right.
Margot: You just announced a wine club—I just signed up, so excited to get my first shipment. What inspired you to start it?
Marlen: We were really hesitant to start a wine club, to be honest with you. I had come from a winery where I managed the wine club of 5,000 and helped a merge of two very big wineries. I was hesitant to for a while, but now we work with so many different varietals and we're doing Natural Action and seeing the fun in that. It's really a separate business, the wine club part of the wine industry. I think that's exciting for me, especially. We're going to be able to put out wines that are going to be exclusive to the wine club that are geared toward our customers that have been following us for a very long time.
I’m excited to have people come taste with us and come visit and we can walk you in the back and have you taste things out of barrel and be able to give you that experience. Both of us come from hospitality and that's just the other part of Amplify. We love to host people. We love to share the wines. We love to give you a great experience.
Margot: I'm super excited for the wine club, and for Amplify’s future and growth. Thanks for taking this time with me. Hopefully I can come and visit you all in real life soon.
You can support Marlen and Cameron by purchasing Amplify Wines on their online shop and signing up for their wine club. Follow them on Instagram here.
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