About Matt Murphy, Co-Founder and President
As the visionary president of Presqu’ile Winery, Matt Murphy has
guided his family’s efforts to establish Presqu’ile as one of the Santa
Maria Valley’s defining wineries, recognized for making balanced and
sophisticated cool-climate wines. From his earliest work directing the
planting of the Presqu’ile Vineyard to his role overseeing the design
and construction of Presqu’ile’s state-of-the-art gravity-flow winery to
shaping the elegant stylistic identity of the winery’s Pinot Noirs and
Chardonnays, Matt’s leadership has established Presqu’ile as one of
California’s most exciting new wineries.
Matt grew up
in El Dorado, Arkansas. The eldest son in a family of wine lovers, he
was exposed to fine wine at a relatively early age, including many of
the great wines of Burgundy. Matt also often spent harvest season at the
family’s farm in neighboring Louisiana, where four generations of the
Murphys have been growing corn, soy and rice since the 1930s. While
studying molecular, cellular and developmental biology at the University
of Colorado at Boulder, Matt followed his emerging appreciation of fine
wine, and his love of the land, and worked a summer at Signorello
Estate in Napa Valley. At Signorello, Matt found that he loved working
in the vineyard, and the collaborative nature of making wine.
After
university, Matt headed west, and took a position in the cellar at Santa
Maria Valley’s Ambullneo Winery. There, Matt spent three years learning
viticulture and winemaking from the ground up—experience that planted
the seed for what would become Presqu’ile. Matt also became good friends
with Ambullneo’s talented assistant winemaker, Dieter Cronje. The two
found that they shared strikingly similar philosophies about
winegrowing, winemaking, and the relatively untapped potential of the
Santa Maria Valley to make some of California’s finest cool-climate
wines.
In 2006,
building on his family’s shared love of wine and agriculture, Matt and
his parents, Madison and Suzanne, began an extensive search for the
finest vineyard land on which to found Presqu’ile. Though this search
spanned the entire West Coast, they were thrilled when it ultimately led
them back to Santa Maria Valley—an area whose wines the Murphy family
had fallen in love with. In 2007, Matt and his family acquired 200 acres
of highly prized land on the cool, sandy-soiled south side of the
valley, where the region’s most elegant wines come from.
In the years
since, Matt has guided Presqu’ile, developing the vineyard, building the
winery and creating a small portfolio of acclaimed wines in
collaboration with his parents and siblings. “Around the world, the
greatest wineries are multigenerational family endeavors,” says Matt.
“This is the model we are following. We are a very close family that
loves doing things together. Presqu’ile is an extension of this. We are
building Presqu’ile together. We all share the same vision for quality,
and the same desire to establish something special and enduring.”
5391 Presqu'ile Dr
Santa Maria, CA 93455