Ep 175 Legacy and Lift-Off: OGs & New Blood – Featuring Still Waters Vineyard | Truss Wines

🍇 Where Wine Takes You, Episode 175 Highlights 🍷

Legacy and Lift-Off: OGs & New Blood

In this episode of Where Wine Takes You, Adam brings two generations of Paso Robles wine together for a conversation about roots, risk, reinvention, and what it takes to keep building when the business gets complicated.

Paul Hoover, owner and winemaker at Still Waters Vineyards, brings the long view. Paul is a Cal Poly agriculture guy, farmer, former hospitality executive, longtime business leader, home-winemaker-turned-estate-winemaker, fisherman, and one of the most approachable voices in Paso wine. His stories stretch from a formative wine education fueled by an employer’s monthly bottle allowance to buying the vineyard that became Still Waters during an earlier downturn in the grape market.

Paul also breaks down the current wine-business correction with refreshing honesty. The COVID years created extraordinary direct-to-consumer demand, wineries increased production to meet it, and then the market shifted before all that slow-moving inventory reached the end of the line. Paul calls it an “I Love Lucy” moment. More wine keeps coming down the conveyor belt while the industry tries to figure out where to put it.

Across the table is Kyle Jury, founder and winemaker at Truss Wines, representing the next wave. Kyle arrived at Cal Poly thinking architecture might be his future, moved into agribusiness and winemaking, interned at JUSTIN, and spent nearly nine years at Booker Vineyard, where Eric Jensen became both a mentor and a major influence on his winemaking and entrepreneurial outlook.

Kyle launched Truss in 2022 with a tiny Chardonnay project, an old high-school drawing of a truss bridge, and a name that came to represent architecture, support, collaboration, and the structure of his growing family. Today, Truss is based at the former TH Estate property in the Willow Creek District, where Kyle is shifting the focus toward estate-grown Syrah, Grenache, and Mourvèdre while continuing to make smaller amounts of coastal Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. His goal is not to abandon Paso power, but to find balance, elegance, acidity, and, true to the brand, beauty in structure.

What makes this conversation special is the handoff happening in real time. Kyle listens to Paul’s stories not as a history lesson, but as fuel. Paul looks at the next generation not as competition, but as proof that the work continues. As Kyle puts it, Truss started on second base with a special Willow