Coomber Wines serves the community one glass at a time

OCEANSIDE, CA – There are plenty of places in Oceanside to enjoy wine tasting, thanks to an explosion of tasting rooms in recent years. Each of these wine tasting venues has its own unique twist on wine production and service. At Coomber Wines, the house specialty goes beyond any of their excellent wines, because every glass they pour is brimming with community.

The patch dropped by Coomber Wines for their monthly dog ​​adoption event to get the scoop from owners Skip and Maureen Coomber.

After checking out all the available furry friends with Maureen, we sat down to enjoy a glass of exceptional Pinot Noir from Coomber Wines, while Skip gave us some insight into how they’ve been spending their time during COVID and plans to celebrate the 3rd anniversary of Coomber Wines Tasting Room here in Oceanside.

Before we jump into what’s happening now, can you give us a brief history of Coomber Wines and how you got started?

“Well my wife and I have always loved being hosts and we’ve had a lot of parties at our house and we’ve really enjoyed that and that led to us starting to make our own wine and eventually having wine made for us .”

“In 2009 it was in the depths of the recession so people weren’t buying as many grapes as before. We were very lucky and were able to get some incredibly rare grapes from a very famous vineyard called Beckstoffer Georges III vineyard in Rutherford So it’s a very famous vineyard because it used to be owned by BV Georges de Latour vineyards and it’s the vineyard for his private reserve wines Just fantastic soil and conditions of perfect culture.”

“So we were able to buy grapes from them and normally, only two people making wine, we couldn’t buy it. But, they kept selling us for several years because we paid our bills and the hardest part for vineyards is to get paid for. We ended up with this huge inventory and it just kept growing. All of our wines, people asked us what our specialty was, our specialty is great dynamic Californian wines in that style. You’re not going to find anything moderate here.”

“I used to sell our wine to local restaurants in town, but we really wanted to open our own tasting room. After searching all over the area, we ended up with this place. We hired a consultant who now handles everything for us and who is very wise and knowledgeable and he had run a number of different restaurants and then he found and designed this place and it was brilliant.”

“We tried to keep everything as original as possible. The brick was there. We developed the style that I call industrial elegance. We have this little electronic grand piano with old barrels and steel. We also trying to make it simpler and kinda self serve for people you know the heaters are guest controlled and the water is a triple osmosis and highly alkaline water system that people can just stand get it themselves and not have to wait for someone to bring it. We want people to feel at home and comfortable.”

Just like the Patch, you have a hyper local focus. Can you tell us more about this?

“Early on, we said, look, this is going to be about the people of Oceanside and we’re going to look at the tourists as the icing on the cake. We had this idea of ​​these wine racks for the locals and they have their name or their People love to bring their friends and family over and show off their wine rack and they love it.

“We’ve been very lucky during COVID because our members have been really supportive. We emailed all of our members and asked them if you were going to buy, if you were going to buy us an extra bottle or two a month that we will keep our employees who want to work and keep their jobs. And we’ve had a lot of people do that. It was really cool.

Our wine club is a community and these people have really proven it during the pandemic. So it worked well for us and people supported us and we supported people in return. To our knowledge, we were the only place in California that had live music almost all the time because Oceanside didn’t care. We had tables eight feet apart here on the outdoor patio. We built this blanket on it, but during COVID we had tables of people turned besties coming here. We want it to feel more like a family place where you can bring the kids and the dogs.”

“We love our member nights on the first Monday of every month when we are closed to the public and all members can hang out together, it’s a really fun time. It’s a wonderful community here in Oceanside and very unique. So yes, we are super local. We don’t even ship our wines.”

So you’ve been through Covid and you’re fully open again, what are you going to do to celebrate the big three year anniversary in May?

“We’re just starting to work on it, but we’ve been really busy. We have big wine pairing dinners and we’ve had a wedding and other special events and we’re pretty lightly staffed. We have also a Mother’s Day event with MainStreet Oceanside in May and we are opening another location in Downtown Vista in June But for the anniversary we will do something fun and it will be on a Sunday and we will invite the whole community.

We know you will jump!

Visit their website to keep up to date with everything happening at Comber wines.