Page 104 - SLO Visitors Guide - Summer 2026

104 SUMMER 2026 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. Howev-
er, 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 fur-
ther by designing
their entire
facility to be
Gold LEED
Certified.
LEED
stands for
Leader-
ship,
Energy
and Envi-
ronmental
Design. Ac-
cording 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 tast-
ing room
opened
in 2011.”
De-
spite the
luminous
stained glass,
the tasting
room was never
meant to evoke a
church. Its design is rooted
in something far more elemental:
water. Both the tasting room and the
production facility are crowned with
precisely pitched roofs that guide
rainwater along their slopes, where it
travels down sculptural drip chains
and filters through beds of stone.
From there, it collects in a serene
reclamation pond just outside the
tasting room before flowing through
a pipe into a catch basin. The basin,
in turn, pumps the water into five
100,000-gallon storage tanks. Even
the region’s dense fog is put to use—
the roofs are calibrated so meticu-
lously that moisture condenses and
beads along their surfaces, becoming
part of the harvest.
Discover Shale Oak
Winery’s innovative
practices and a unique
approach to wine
Shale Oak Winery awarded ‘Winery of the Year’ at the 2026 San Diego International
Wine & Spirits Challenge.
“My favorite part is the water
collection,” one team member ex-
plains. “It’s such a big issue around
here, and capturing that clean water
benefits both our vineyards and
the landscape. It’s actually cleaner
than the local well water. It’s not
the cheapest system to build—it’s
not even
the most
economi-
cal—but it
matters.”
That
philosophy
extends
across the
entire prop-
erty. The
land itself is
contoured
so that every
drop of rain
naturally
finds its way
toward the
catch basin.
Materials have been chosen with
equal care: the wood framing the
entrance was reclaimed from a train
trestle at Vandenberg Space Force
Base; countertops are formed from
recycled crushed glass; cabinetry
is crafted from bamboo. Even the
faint sulfur scent in the restrooms
speaks to intention, a byproduct of
using reclaimed groundwater.
The buildings are fully solar-
powered and quietly intelligent.
Motorized
windows
respond to
shifting tem-
peratures,
opening
automati-
cally when
the outside
air cools and
drawing it
indoors with
the help of
fans. Sen-
sors ensure
that energy
isn’t wasted,
shutting
off heat
when rooms are unoccupied. In the
tasting room, a fireplace fueled by
denatured alcohol emits nothing
more than water vapor.
“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 for our landscape.”
– Curtis Hascall