BOTTOMS UP—Four Brix Winery is ready to release its 2008 vintage products. Above are four of the six co-founders, from left, Tracy and Jim Noonan, Lora Simonsgaard and Karen Stewart. IRIS SMOOT/Acorn Newspapers In the summer of 2008, a group of friends sat around a campfire drinking their homemade “garage” wine when an idea struck.

Let’s sell this stuff, one said.

Buoyed by praise for their wines from friends and family as well as victories at the county fair, three Simi Valley couples decided to turn their hobby into a business.

Thus the birth of Four Brix Winery.

The winemakers behind the brand—Lora and Steve Simonsgaard, Karen and Gary Stewart, and Tracy and Jim Noonan—have known each other since 2004, brought together through the Rotary Club.

While Jim and Steve aren’t official club members, they’re affectionately referred to as “husbands of Rotarians.”

LABOR OF LOVE—Friends and Four Brix Winery co-owners Steve Simonsgaard, Jim Noonan and Gary Stewart rack a barrel of wine at their winemaking facility in Paso Robles. Racking is one of the last steps in the winemaking process and involves naturally filtering the sediment out of the fermented grape juice It was about 10 years ago that one of the couples started making hobby wine. The Simonsgaards were the first to join their small neighborhood winemaking group, informally called the Indian Meadows Wine Association.

From there it “mushroomed,” Lora said, with a dozen couples making the hobby wine. As a result, the cellars around the block are always full, Steve said.

The wine buffs would often donate their well-received bottles to local fundraisers, and Lora even secretly entered three wines in the 2007 Ventura County Fair, where they won second and third place.

“We were donating so much, and people were tasting it and loving it and wanting to buy it, and we couldn’t sell it,” said Lora, a certified financial planner. “One thing led to another, and we finally got pressured by our friends into starting up something.”

Four Brix Winery is named for the four regions its wines are fashioned after: Italy, Spain, France and California.

Brix—pronounced “bricks”— is a scale that measures the amount of sugar in grapes before they’re turned into wine.

While it is a winery, the couples don’t own a vineyard. Karen, a stay-at-home mom who has taken on the winery as a fulltime job, said this is a plus because they get all of the benefits and none of the hassles, such as bad years or diseased crops.

“We end up sourcing from a lot of different vineyards, and we get to pick and choose where we like the grapes best,” she said.

Whether the wine is garagemade or produced on a larger scale, the process is the same. It starts with harvest in the fall. When the grapes are ready, the group picks them up and hauls them to Four Brix’s bonded facility in Paso Robles.

There, the grapes undergo a two-week process in which they are crushed, fermented, pressed and put into barrels. The barrels are then racked, or filtered, several times to naturally remove sediment.

While the wine is racked and aging, the winemakers get to work on the blends.

“It’s fun to taste them individually and see what the building blocks are like, and then you start putting them together and see what works,” Gary said. “That’s the magical moment.”

Tracy, Simi’s city attorney, said the group knew it wanted to do blends from the get-go, not only because their hobby wines have been blends but also because the traditional wine market is already saturated.

And it’s more fun, her husband said.

“There’s a little more artistry in blending,” Jim said.

“You have to figure out the ratio of it and what tastes better,” Tracy added.

Gary agreed, saying a blend should evoke a feeling or memory.

“When I’m making an Italian blend, I hope that when I’m done it brings me back to that little restaurant in Siena and the puttanesca I was eating,” said Gary, whose “day job” is co-owner of a family roofing company.

Since all of the Four Brix founders have strong opinions, disagreements have been settled through voting. But in the end, they love all of the wines they’ve created—so much so, they struggled to choose a favorite.

With spring comes bottling season, and the winemakers spent the first weekend of March in Paso Robles filling 4,800 bottles. They estimated they’d have a total of 700 cases, or 8,400 bottles, of the 2008 vintage.

So far, the winery has six blends: five reds in the 2008 vintage and one 2009 white wine.

Scosso is Four Brix’s Tuscanstyle blend, made from sangiovese grapes grown in Westside Paso Robles that are combined with cabernet sauvignon and merlot.

Zeductive is a California blend of zinfandel grapes harvested from Paso Robles and petite sirah from Sonoma’s Russian River Valley.

Smitten is the white wine, and it’s a “stainless steel” or “no oak” wine because it doesn’t go into a barrel. This keeps the Rhone-style wine crisp and fresh, Jim said.

Temptress is a Spanish-style, tempranillo-based blend. Rhondezvous is a French wine that blends four varietals, including 10 percent counoise—a last-minute addition that gave the wine a “wow” factor, Tracy said.

The sixth wine is not a blend at all. It is 100 percent petite syrah. The group said the wine tasted so good by itself they decided to do a special bottling.

The winery will celebrate the release of the first half of its 2008 vintage at a Coming Out Party on April 24 at Lost Canyons Golf Club. The public will be able to taste the Scosso, Zeductive and Smitten as well as a surprise barrel sample from a future release.

While most of the group isn’t nervous about the release party, Tracy admitted some trepidation.

“These are like our children. We’ve put our blood, sweat and tears into them for two years. . . . You want your child to do well in school; you want your wines to do well in public,” she laughed.

After the party, people will be able to drink and purchase Four Brix wines at The WineYard in Thousand Oaks. Prices will range from about $22 to $40.

Four Brix is a member of the Ventura County Winery Association. Of the 12 local wineries that hold a membership, Four Brix is the only one in Simi.

Now that some of the wines are ready to be released to the public, the group is working to get its product out to the masses and to local restaurants.

“You don’t have to drive two hours to Santa Ynez to go wine tasting. You can go locally,” Tracy said.

Formerly a staunch Coors devotee, Steve, a building materials salesman, never imagined he’d develop a passion for vino that would take him into the time-consuming, sometimes labor-intensive business of winemaking.

But, along with the rest of his cohorts, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“We enjoy making it, talking about it. It’s a part of our lives,” Steve said.

His wife agreed.

“I don’t remember the last time I was bored,” Lora chuckled.

For more information on the winery or to purchase tickets for the release party, visit the website www.fourbrixwine.com.