Page 104 - SLO Visitors Guide Fall 2025

104 FALL 2025 slovisitorsguide.com
Wine Tasting
Exploring the sustainable, eco-friendly
charm of Shale Oak Winery
On an unassuming road just
off Highway 46 lies Shale Oak
Winery. With its multicolored
stained-glass windows and slanted
roof, it looks like a church. How-
ever, instead of serving up sermons,
they serve up high-quality wine in
their SIP-certified tasting room.
At Shale Oak Winery, they’ve
taken sustainability in practice
a step further by designing their
entire facility to be Gold LEED
Certified.
LEED stands
for Leadership,
Energy and
Environmental
Design. Accord-
ing to LEED, “The
LEED plaque on a
building is a mark of
quality and achievement in green
building.”
Owner Al Good dreamed of
a vineyard, winery, and tasting
room with very little impact on the
environment. His dream became
a reality. Everyone at Shale Oak is
committed to the vision of sustain-
ability. Lead Winemaker, Curtis
Hascall, has been with the winery
from the beginning and is equally
committed to Good’s vision. “From
the beginning, one of our goals was
to get that Gold Certification, so we
worked with Studio 2G Architec-
ture down in San Luis Obispo. They
helped guide us in that direction.
We opened the production facility
and did our first harvest in 2010,
and then the tasting room opened
in 2011.”
Despite the beautiful stained
glass, the tasting room was not de-
signed to look like a church but in-
stead to reclaim
water. Both the
tasting room
and production
facility have
pitched roofs so
rainwater will go
down the slope of
the roof. It then passes
through drip chains and is filtered
through the rocks. It then goes to
the reclamation pond/water feature
just outside the tasting room. The
pond then flows into a pipe that
flows directly to the catch basin
that pumps the water to 5 hundred-
thousand-gallon tanks. The roofs
are pitched so perfectly that water
beads up during a heavy fog, and,
of course, that is also collected.
“My favorite part is the water
collection because that’s such a big
issue around here, and to capture
all that clean water is beneficial for
our vineyards and our landscape.
It’s cleaner water than the well
water around here. It’s not the
cheapest thing to set up. It’s not
economically the best, but it’s
important.”
What else makes the buildings
and property so special? The whole
property is set up so that all rain-
Discover Shale Oak
Winery’s innovative
practices and a unique
approach to wine