Team
Espiro Jaeger
This winery started as Matt’s baby, but Carolina has come on board & it’s now a labor of love between us both.
A Couple of Fuilhardy Dreamers
Our Story
We are Matt and Carolina, a husband and wife winemaking team living a life imbued with wine. Call it mild insanity, or a foolhardy fancy, but we made the leap to pursue a winemaking dream and haven’t looked back.
Since we met nearly 20 years ago, we’ve been bonding over wine.
From our first date to our engagement and wedding, wine has been a part of our journey. It only made sense to dive headfirst into producing our own bottles in the style we love the most.
“Wine is the only work of art we can enjoy with all five senses” - Matt
Our Wines
CALIFORNIA FRUIT, OLD WORLD STRUCTURE, IRISH HERITAGE
Fuil is an extremely small production, boutique winery, specializing in the wines of the Santa Ynez Valley in Santa Barbara County. All our wines are sourced from sustainably managed, certified organic, or biodynamically farmed vineyards. Our goal is to join the beautiful aromas and flavors the California Coast has to offer with the structure and complexity of Old World winemaking.
Fuil is a Gaelic word meaning blood, kin, land, passion, and temperament. When it was time to go looking for a name for our winery, reaching into Matt’s Irish background seemed like the perfect move.
Everything we do is connected to nature. We celebrate the variations from year to year, striving to bring out the unique characteristics of our California vineyards. Our wine is responsibly sourced and made to ensure those who come after us can keep up this 9000-year-old tradition.
We carefully time our harvests to pick the best possible grapes, and use native yeast and whole cluster fermentation to produce elegant wines. We even turned to Matt’s Celtic ancestry to ground our naming and release schedule.
From the heart
Wines That Reflect the Land We Love
Meet Fuil
MATT
The Winemaker
I grew up in rural Wisconsin, in beer and brat country, to parents who rarely drank. So when my father took a community college wine appreciation course, it was a big deal, because he had to drink a whole bottle of wine every week. Witnessing him analyze the color, aroma, feel, and taste of the wine, I was enthralled. The sound of a cork popping and wine pouring became a call to conversation with my dad. Since then wine has played a pivotal role in my life. In my 20s and 30s, I even took on extra jobs so I could afford the wine that made an impression on me. Now I get to make wine that makes an impression on others.
CAROLINA
The Beauty and The Brains
I moved here from Chile with my parents at the age of 2, and grew up with wine as an everyday part of life. My family saw wine as a beverage that naturally accompanied a family dinner. It wasn’t meant to distract or even fuss about. But when I began working in restaurants and wine bars, I was introduced to a world where wine brought about discussion, reverence, and, for better or worse, scrutiny. I formed a new found respect for the beautiful art that goes into winemaking. The fact that one sip can tell you all about where, how, and near what something was grown. It can tell you its experience as a living fruit, the weather it endured, the care that was taken, the bed that it rested in and its crawling bedmates. The path of the sun, the feel of the temperature. It can tell you more about itself than any other thing I’ve consumed. And it forces you to listen. As a filmmaker and storyteller, this resonates with me deeply. Being with Matt as a partner in life and in wine has been such an incredible blessing where I continue to learn more and more every day.