Page 97 - SLO Visitor's Guide - Winter 2023

Wine Tasting
Shale Oak Winery gets the gold
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 leader- ship, energy, and environmental design. According 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 Archi- tecture down in San Luis Obispo.
They helped guide us in that direc- tion. 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 designed to look like a church but instead to reclaim water. Both the tasting room and production facil- ity 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.
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