Ep 182 Pull Up a Chair: Paso Wineries with Restaurants – Featuring CASS Winery | Bianchi Winery

🍇 Where Wine Takes You, Episode Highlights 🍷

What happens when the tasting room decides you should probably stay for lunch?

This week on Where Wine Takes You, we’re digging into a side of Paso Robles wine country that has been evolving for decades: wineries with real restaurants, real kitchens, and chefs who are thinking about what’s on the plate with the same intention that goes into what’s in the glass.

And Paso has some history here. JUSTIN Vineyards & Winery was putting real money and intention behind winery dining decades ago with Deborah’s Room, an early fine-dining experience at the estate that eventually became The Restaurant at JUSTIN, today a MICHELIN-starred restaurant. That early commitment helped establish the idea that a Paso winery could be a destination for dinner, not simply a tasting stop.

That tradition keeps getting stronger. In 2026, Wine Enthusiast included Niner Wine Estates Restaurant on its list of the Best Winery Restaurants in the World, giving Paso some very timely international love for just how serious the food side of wine-country hospitality has become.

Wine Enthusiast:

https://www.wineenthusiast.com/best-winery-restaurants-2026/

Because harvest schedules are harvest schedules, Adam changes up the normal format and sits down for two separate conversations. First, it’s CASS Winery co-owner and co-founder Ted Plemons, whose story includes Paso dirt, a trip to South Africa, a few consequential bottles of Syrah, and an early belief that food, wine, hospitality, and the land could all be part of the same experience. Ted shares stories from more than two decades at CASS, how the property has grown, and why building around good people has remained such a big part of the philosophy.

Then we head to Bianchi Winery with winemaker Todd Weiher and Chef Gregg Wangard, who is leading the new Melo Mela Kitchen. The conversation gets into the relationship between chef and winemaker, why acidity matters at the table, Gregg’s belief that his best cooking happens when he’s trusted to take chances, and what changes when a winery stops treating food as an accessory and builds a restaurant people might come back to on its own.

For our Travel Paso Spotlight, we turn up the volume for the 13th Annual Whale Rock Music & Arts Festival, returning September 19–20, 2026 at Whale Rock Vineyard at Castoro Cellars. What began as a 30th-anniversary party called Beaverstock has grown into two days of music, art, wine, food, yoga, family fun, and su