Coomber Wines Serves Up Community One Glass At A Time

OCEANSIDE, CA —There are many places in Oceanside to enjoy wine tasting, thanks to an explosion of Tasting Rooms over the last several years. Each of these Wine Tasting venues has its own unique spin on producing and serving wine. At Coomber Wines, the specialty of the house goes beyond any of their excellent wines, because every glass they pour is overflowing with community.

The Patch dropped by Coomber Wines for their monthly Dog Adoption event to get the inside 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 Coomber Wines exceptional Pinot Noir, while Skip gave us the rundown on how they spent their time during COVID and plans for celebrating 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 enjoyed being hosts and we hosted lots of parties at our house and we really enjoyed that and that led us to start making our own wine and eventually having wine made for us."

"Going back to 2009 and it was the depths of the recession, so people weren't buying grapes to the extent that they had in the past. We were very lucky and were able to get incredibly rare grapes from a very famous vineyard called Beckstoffer Vineyard Georges III in Rutherford. So this is a very famous vineyard because it used to be BV vineyards Georges de Latour who owned it and this is the vineyard for his private reserve wines. Just fantastic soil and perfect growing conditions."

"So we were able to buy grapes from them and normally just two people making wine, we wouldn't be able to buy it. But, they kept selling to us for a number of years because we paid our bills and the hardest thing for vineyards is to get paid. We ended up with this huge inventory and it kept getting bigger and bigger. All of our wines, people asked what our specialty is, our specialty is big, vibrant California wines in that style. You're not gonna find anything subdued here."

"I was selling 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 location. We hired a consultant who now manages everything for us who is very wise and knowledgeable and he had run a number of different restaurants and then he found and designed this location and it's been great."

"We tried to keep everything as original as we could. The brick was here. We developed the style that I call industrial elegance. We've got this baby grand electronic piano along with old barrels and steel. We also try to make things simple and somewhat self service for people. You know, the heaters are controlled by the guests and the water is a triple osmosis, high alkaline water system that people can just get themselves and not have to wait for someone to bring it. We want people to feel at home and comfortable."

Much like the Patch you have a hyper local focus. Can you tell us more about that?

"From the beginning we said, look, this is going to be about the Oceanside people and we will look at tourists as icing on the cake. We came up with this idea of these wine lockers for locals and they have their name or their business on it. People love to bring in their friends and family and show off their wine locker and they love it."

"We were very fortunate during COVID because our members really supported us. We sent emails to all of our members and asked if you are going to buy, if you would buy an extra bottle or two a month from us that will enable us to keep our employees that want to work and keep them employed. And we had a lot of people that did that. It was really cool.

Our wine club is a community and these people really proved that during the pandemic. So it worked out great for us and people supported us and we supported people back. To our knowledge, we were the only place in California that had live music almost the entire time because Oceanside didn't mind it. We had tables eight feet apart here in the open air patio. We built this cover over it but during COVID we had tables of people become besties while coming here. We want it to feel more like a family place where you can bring the kids and dogs."

"We love our member evenings on the first Monday of every month when we're closed to public and all the members get to hang with each other, it's a really fun time. It's a wonderful community here in Oceanside and very unique. So yes, we're hyper local focus. We don't even ship our wines."

So you made it through Covid and you are fully open up again, what are you going to do to celebrate the big three-year anniversary in May?

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

We know that you will Skip!

Visit their website to keep up on everything happening at Coomber Wines.