The owners of CaliLove combine their love of California, music and wine in the first guitar museum tasting room in the Santa Ynez Valley. You can find CaliLove's private label wines in downtown Solvang on Copenhagen Drive. They also make Pinot Noir Grape Juice! CaliLove strives to create unique, distinct, and rewarding wines through the use of old world techniques including native yeast fermentations, multi-varietal co-fermentations, and extended macerations. The wines are hand-made from grapes predominantly sourced from local vineyards. Serendipity struck when Amanda Marsh met Luke Sundquist at a music convention in Solvang. He was originally from Cape Cod living in Los Angeles working as a musician and she was living in Camarillo working on her music career as well. They clicked over their first glass of wine and soon became engaged and married.

  The Marsh family had always dreamed of opening a winery so it made perfect sense for Andy and Lea to partner up with Amanda and, winemaker, Luke. The whole family has gotten in on the act - brother Nick Marsh, 17, has a hot sauce line called Caliente Love and sister Lexi Marsh, 10, crafts CaliLove bracelets. Brother, Travis Marsh, plays with Amanda and Luke in the country rock band, Spun Honey. They will be performing at the tasting room a couple times a month as well as other local and national acts!

For more information visit: www.calilovewine.com

   Horses were a part of the Santa Ynez Valley from the early days of European settlement. Horses likely settled in the valley with the coming of Mission Santa Ines in 1804.

   How many horses were here, and the economic values of those numbers of horses, remain clouded in general estimates, and shrouded in the changing values of horses, as mechanization of farming and then transportation developed from about 1850 until now. Today's horses earn their keep by work as varied as racing, trail riding, and serving as therapists. Farm machinery, automobiles, and trucks do much of the rest with the aid of petroleum. The renewable fuel of yesteryear appears as fields of wild oats, when Spring comes around.

   The Santa Ynez Valley probably had something like these numbers of horses across two centuries. 

   The peak year for horses in mission days apparently was 1816 when Mission Santa Ines had about 800 horses. Horses served mainly in transporting people and goods, hunting, ranching farming, and protective patrols.

   Americans brought with them a few primitive steam drive threshers when they began to arrive in numbers for the gold rush of 1849. Farm work gradually mechanized in the next decades, leading to declining numbers of horses on farms here. An estimate by a promoter put the number of horses in the Santa Ynez Valley and vicinity at 338 in 1884. 

   The 2007 federal census of agriculture counted 5,613 horses and ponies in Santa Barbara County. The estimate for the county was 3,289 in 1884, when Santa Ynez Valley and vicinity

had 338 horses, putting the share in the valley at 10 percent. Areas such as those of Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, and Lompoc having urbanized more rapidly than the Santa Ynez Valley, an estimated 15 percent of the county's total, or 842 horses and ponies, might have been in the valley in 2007.

   It seems that the number of horses here today could be near the number in the prosperous years of Mission Santa Ines.

   What about the dollar value of today's horses and ponies? The agricultural census of 2007 valued the sales of horses, ponies, mules, burros and donkeys in the county at $4.2 million that year. Assuming $4 million for horses and ponies, and taking the 15 percent share for Santa Ynez Valley, our local horses and ponies brought an estimated $600,000 in 2007, at the beginning of the great recession. The average estimated sale value of each horse or pony was $7l3. Highest priced horses often go to sale outside the valley in major national auctions or international auctions. Today's local asking prices range from about $500 to $30,000, compared to selling prices of $25 to $250 in 1884.

   Economic demand for horses grew smaller in recent years. Cash receipts from farm sales of horses and mules in the United States were $1.218 billion in 2000, declining to $0.759 billion in 2010. Yearly farm sales of all livestock rose from $100 billion to $141 billion in the same years.