Halter Ranch: Ronald Reagan Hangout Becomes Sustainably-Certified Winery

Planted just ten miles from Paso Robles' famed Highway 46 wine route, Halter Ranch is a sustainable vineyard deeply rooted within California's history. The property made its Hollywood debut back in 1990 when its rumored-to-be-haunted Victorian farmhouse appeared in the creature-feature Arachnophobia. The house was built in 1885 by the property's first owner and has since been fully restored. That's not its only claim to fame, though -- Ronald Reagan announced his second-term run for governorship at the ranch in 1967 near the property's 3,400-foot airstrip. But of course, we visited Halter Ranch to check out the incredible wine it makes through sustainable practices.

The vineyard and winery is located on Paso Robles' somewhat-controversial Westside. In 2007, a proposal was made to split the Paso Robles AVA into east and west sub-appellations at the Salinas River and its parallel, Highway 101. An AVA is a wine grape-growing region in the U.S. distinguishable by geographic features and the Paso Roble's one, established in 1983, is California's largest. The proposal polarized Paso's wine community and with good reason. The Paso Robles Westside AVA would have become home to the area's more extreme weather conditions, making it neither homogeneous nor ideal. The proposal was withdrawn in 2009 for new proposal suggesting 11 separate and much smaller AVAs.

The original ranch that Halter Ranch now sits on was a 3,600-acre holding owned by San Francisco wholesale butcher, Edwin Smith. He moved to Paso Robles in 1874 (known then as Las Tablas). During the 1900s the property was broken up after the demise of Smith's business. In 1943, 1,200-acres were purchased by the MacGillivray family who introduced the property's first grapevines in 1996.
Just Say No to Certified-Organic

It was June of 2000 when Swiss-born Hansjörg Wyss (Hans for short) purchased 900 acres of what was to become Halter Ranch. The name Halter is Wyss's mother's maiden name. In 2008, Hans ranked number 164 on Forbes list of billionaires, and he is the second richest person in Switzerland. He established the Wyss Foundation back in 1989 which helps place large swathes of land under government protection. The foundation's efforts have led to over 4 million acres of land being declared as national parks!

So it comes as no surprise that Hans approached Mitch Wyss (no relation), a conventional kiwi farmer at the time, with one specific mission: "To see our vines stay in the ground for over 100 years."

Mitch confesses, "Farming conventionally, I knew this wasn't possible at all. If you give these vines water, fertilizer, water, fertilizer; its like giving your kids a coke and a candy bar everyday for lunch! You end up with sterilized vines that collapse in about 15 to 20 years."

Insectaries, owl boxes and raptor perches also pepper the landscape. If a block becomes plagued with pests, they call in the mobile chicken coop. Towed by a biodiesel-powered ATV, the coop is solar powered such that the doors opens automatically at sunrise. The 40-some chickens not only supply the land with much needed nitrogen but the employees also get a couple of dozen eggs every day.