Today we’d like to introduce you to Natalie Siddique & Ryan Pace.
We both had quite different journeys into the world of wine!
Ryan very much grew up around wine. He lived in Napa until he was ten, where his dad was the GM for Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in the 80s to the early 2000s (an exciting time for California wine!). Their family then moved to the Santa Ynez Valley, where his father pursued other GM winery positions and then later helped found a custom crush facility there. Ryan was pursuing an education and career in music at the LA Music Academy but eventually worked his first harvest as a cellar worker for his dad in 2008.
He quickly caught the wine bug and began working harvests for wineries all over the world—including France, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Napa, and Chile— gaining experience with a variety of different philosophies and approaches to viticulture and winemaking. Amidst those harvest experiences, he also completed a degree in Wine & Viticulture at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. Eventually, Ryan settled into a winemaker position and spent 7 years at Byron Winery in Santa Maria Valley. In 2016, we together started Outward as a side project with just two barrels of northern Rhone-inspired Syrah.
Natalie on the other hand, grew up far from wine country in Cincinnati, Ohio—born to two immigrant parents; one from Russia and one from Bangladesh. Her tie to these very diverse cultures inspired her to pursue a degree in International Relations at Boston University and a career in diplomacy. Internships and jobs led her all over, including studying in Russia, stints at the State Department in DC, and the United Nations Development Program in Bangladesh. Eventually, a change of heart compelled her to shift gears, and she moved to California to start an entrepreneurial venture in the rock climbing industry through a Cal Poly incubator program.
Meanwhile, we met through rock climbing, which has and continues to be a major passion in our lives. It also happens to coincide quite well with exploring wine regions around the world and is in large part an inspiration for our label designs and the name, ‘Outward.’ Not long into the relationship, Natalie was unsurprisingly pulled into the wine world as well. She began working harvests on the Central Coast, we spent a vintage in Chile together, and then came back and started Outward. As of 2020, we both began our transition to the full-time pursuit of our winemaking journey with Outward.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Starting a winery as a bootstrapped startup is in itself an uphill battle, and in all honesty, is not an easy or even a very “smart” business plan. Essentially everything in wine involves a long-term commitment (e.g. buying grapes, aging wine, planting vineyards, etc.), which means it requires many significant upfront investments that generally take a long time to produce a return. You really have to love wine to want to do this from the ground up!
While it’s definitely advantageous to enter the wine industry with ample funding and/or capital to work with (think fancy multi-million dollar wineries, estate vineyards, and tasting rooms), if you’re passionate, patient enough, and willing to get creative, you can absolutely produce excellent wines—just perhaps with a more gradual and lo-fi approach. For many years, we were too small and couldn’t afford to have our own production space, so we moved 5 different times since 2016 to different shared winery spaces. Not necessarily ideal, but it gave us the time and resources we needed to get the brand going and build confidence in what we were doing.
With that said, it’s been a year of big, exciting changes for us! We just recently moved into our own winery space in the funky seaside town of Grover Beach, which is essentially just a warehouse that we’re converting into a winery. Though definitely an industrial zone, we’re really excited to make it our own, including building out a nice area to host visitors, a full kitchen (we love to cook!), and hopefully a small climbing wall to keep ourselves entertained! We are beginning to offer private by-appointment tastings, and are excited to eventually start hosting some fun events and parties.
Being a small business owner is an endless puzzle, and though trying at times has been an incredibly rewarding experience, and growing at our own pace and by our own means feels like a lasting and authentic approach. Fortunately, winemaking is really an artistic pursuit that consistently keeps this all creative, constantly evolving, and overall a lot of fun.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We are focused on producing small-lot, site-specific wines that collectively showcase the diversity of terroir across California’s Central Coast. We source grapes from expressive vineyards that span the region; including Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Monterey counties. All of the vineyards that we work with are farmed using organic and/or biodynamic practices and are located in close proximity to the cold Pacific Ocean.
In the cellar, we strive to minimize inputs throughout the winemaking process in order to allow for a clear picture of what the site can provide naturally and to give the wine a true sense of time and place. To that end, we utilize native yeast to carry out fermentations, age exclusively in old French oak barrels, and bottle without fining or filtration.
While we do our best to allow the wines to speak for themselves, we also recognize the role and impact of the human element in terroir. Our hands and our decisions are reflected in the wines that we produce, so it is not only an expression of site, but it is our expression of site.
Our winemaking approach is informed by the places we have traveled, the background and experience we have in the wine industry, the wines we have enjoyed and been inspired by, the food we prepare and consume, and the friends and mentors that we consult. All winemaking dogma aside, at the end of the day our goal for these wines is for them to be delicious and to provide pleasure to everyone who consumes them.
Have you learned any interesting or important lessons due to the Covid-19 Crisis?
Life is short. Pursue what you love.
Contact Info:
- Website: outwardwines.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/outwardwines
Image Credits
Personal Photo Credit: Summer Staeb, Nadine Wendorff
