“Disneyland and I are the same age.”
    Wait, you didn’t ask how we came up with the winery name?  We are so used to that being the first question that anyone asks that we have come up with several short, snappy answers like that one.  Another is, “Insane seemed like a bad name for a winery.” (Clearly, we have no career as stand up comics!)   But the name is only part of the story of the saga that lead to the creation of Midlife Crisis Winery.  Read on and learn a more than you ever wanted to know about us.

    The Midlife Crisis Winery is a VERY small winery.  Just the two of us, Kevin and Jill Mittan, operate the winery so we wear many hats as the only staff.  We are the winemakers, the cellar workers, the bottling line and the marketing and sales persons and regularly fulfill that great nebulous job description of “other duties as required.” 

    We have no winery building of our own nor do we grow our own grapes - yet.   Midlife Crisis does have a tasting room in downtown Paso Robles with our tasting room manager, Allison, there when we can’t be.  We make wine on weekends around jobs in Los Angeles in television and feature films (we are worker bees in post production – which is all the stuff that happens after shooting before release).   We are in our fourth vintage.  Our 2004 wines are entirely sold out, our 2005 wines are fast approaching sell out; the 2006 wines are ready and waiting to be bottled and our 2007 wines have finished fermentation and are now aging quietly in their barrels. We have been fortunate to win a whole bunch of awards for both vintages and to have lots of you taste our wines in our tasting room or at wine events and embrace our wines.  We do thank you.

    The winery is the result of years of daydreaming about doing something else besides the day jobs (which we have not been able to shed yet) and that restlessness that we all feel in adulthood.   Most people satisfy those urges with a great vacation or a Porsche and are over their “midlife crisis.” We, unfortunately, are too highly type A personalities to settle for anything that simple.  We had to have a plan for the future that would allow us to work but be something we really loved.  We had been passionate amateur winemakers for a long time and always wondered what it would be like to take the plunge to become commercial winemakers.  We knew we loved creating wine because it was something real and totally different than the world of our day jobs.  The final product in television, representing all the hard work of the dozens of people like us, is just a series of electronic signals sent out into the ether for you to choose to view or not.  Wine is real and can be shared.   It can turn a dinner of leftovers into a celebration of family and friends.  And we can say, “ I made this,” too!

    Just to let you know, we are not totally crazy.  We do come to winemaking with real training and knowledge.  We have been making wine for several years as amateur winemakers.  We built a mini-winery in our garage in LA and made LOTS of wine for family and friends for free.  We studied at UC Davis and with a commercial winemaker in Camarillio and spent time with winemakers and grape growers throughout the central coast.  Our “garage wines” have won over 60 regional and international awards.

    The decision to try winemaking full time came in 2003 when all our middle-aged angst came together with a great real estate market in LA.  The decision was really a huge leap of faith for two normally very cautious human beings to chase this dream. By April of 2004, we had sold the house in LA, bought the property that will eventually be home to the winery and vineyard.  We crushed our first grapes in August 2004  (it was Zinfandel) and the Midlife Crisis Winery was no longer a dream.
 Today we produce a whole bunch of wines that are an eclectic mix of Italian, Rhone and Bordeaux varietals including Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay, Syrah, Sangiovese, Barbera, Merlot and Zinfandel.  We also have a big red blend and two sparkling wines that are names after our Australian Shepherds (the real owners of the winery).   We will introduce our Nebbiolo in 2006 and plan a super Tuscan blend (aka Chianti) and a white blend down the road when we can.

    We have given ourselves over to the dream.  We have learned a lot along the way – including that chasing this dream is a lot harder than we thought it would be. But, the winery - this crazy dream - is also infinitely rewarding in ways we could never have imagined.  There is more to the crazy dream coming in the future.  We hope to build a sustainable winery on the land (which we have named the Crisis Solved Vineyard) along with some vineyards and whatever else we figure out. We hope you will come and share a little of our dream when you can.  Visit us here online regularly to see what is happening.   Or come see us at our tasting room in downtown Paso Robles at 1244 Pine Street – maps and directions are included under the tasting room tab here on the website.

Jill and Kevin Mittan

Owners and Winemakers