Desparada Chelle Mountain Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc York Mountain 2023

In the remote, rugged hills of California’s York Mountain AVA, just west of Paso Robles and perched above the Pacific’s coastal fog line, there’s a place where the wild edges of winemaking still thrive. This is the home of Desparada, a small, deliberate wine project rooted in the land’s quiet resistance to being tamed.

Vintner Vailia Esh named her label Desparada, a female spin on an old Spanish word that describes a rebel or an outlaw. That’s how she sees her wines: as a method of resistance to the status quo. Her wines aren't destinations, but reflections of where things are right now—weather, soil, vine, and self. Every bottle is a kind of journal entry, written in acidity and mineral by a woman who is untethered from society's expectations.

Vailia's free spirit draws her to vineyards that are rich in history but now overlooked by the big business of the wine industry. The York Mountain AVA is one of California’s smallest and most storied wine regions. With elevations climbing to 1,800 feet, volcanic soils, and a climate shaped by maritime air and dramatic diurnal swings, it is a place that defies uniformity. Everything grows with tension here—slower, leaner, and full of character. That’s precisely what drew Vailia to the high slopes of Chelle Mountain Vineyard. It is farmed organically, without irrigation, and the vines are old enough to have found their footing in fractured shale and sandstone. The result is Sauvignon Blanc unlike any other—a wine less about tropical fruit and more about structure, energy, and place.

The wine rested on its lees for ten months, untouched, gathering texture and subtlety. By the time it was bottled the following summer, the Sauvignon Blanc had become something elemental—something that felt shaped by stone and sky more than fruit or flower. The 2023 Desparada Sauvignon Blanc opens with austere grace: green almond, lemon pith, and crushed wet rock. With air, it blooms into hints of yuzu, fennel fronds, and dried chamomile. There’s a salty snap on the palate, like biting into preserved citrus with a breeze of sagebrush in the distance. It’s not the Sauvignon Blanc of grassy exuberance or New World opulence. It’s something more inward. More weathered. More itself. More Desparada.