Dallas Parnigoni is the winemaker at Alta Colina Winery in the Paso Robles AVA, CA. He began his career in wine in Northern Kentucky, helping establish his family’s winery, Brianza Gardens and Winery, by clearing land, installing trellising, and planting five acres of vines on limestone and shale soils. After working in the vineyard, he moved into the cellar while studying at the University of Kentucky, where he earned a degree in Food Science and developed a lasting interest in the balance of manual work and winemaking science.
He later relocated to Paso Robles, with additional harvest experience in Tasmania and the Yarra Valley, before moving to the Sierra Foothills to take on a broader production role at Val du Vino Winery and Integrity Wines. There, he worked with 19 grape varieties across multiple AVAs, gaining extensive experience with diverse sites and styles.
He returned to San Luis Obispo County to deepen his technical expertise, earning a master’s degree from Cal Poly focused on oxidation-reduction potential in red wine. In 2025, he reentered commercial winemaking, joining Alta Colina, where he applies both practical and research-driven approaches to his work.
Media Inquiries: hadley@solterrastrategies.com | https://altacolina.com/
What’s the ONE THING most unique, authentic, & memorable about your brand?
The Alta Colina vineyard has focused on farming the soil and the ecosystem more than the grapes themselves. Our founder, Bob Tillman, has fully immersed himself in this mindset of ecosystem farming, ensuring living soils with mycelium to transfer nutrients between vines and sequester carbon, diverse cover crops to feed the soils carbohydrates during the winter and fix nitrogen for next year’s crop. His engineering background gives him an understanding of systems and cycles that were lost at some point along the way in conventional farming. While my background is primarily based in the physics and chemistry of winery operations, my relatively short tenure working with Bob and the Alta Colina philosophy has been transformative. I have been challenged to incorporate and leverage the standing biological systems on earth, and the outcome has been wines that show a sense of place, honest to the varietals, ethos and land that we stand on.
Describe how and what you’d do with your winemaking career or winery business if you were not constrained.
As a winemaker, I would love to have a full university-level analytical equipment (e.g., GC-MS, LC-MS, microbiology plating equipment, etc., but I will lean into the vineyard for this hypothetical instead.
As mentioned previously, I began my career in the Kentucky wine industry. Kentucky is not exactly the premier Mediterranean climate that Vitis vinifera vines know and love. For that reason, Kentucky is primarily planted on hybrid varieties – crosses between native American varieties (think concord; Welch’s grape juice) and European varietals (Pinot noir, Cabernet, etc.). The goal in these crossings is to produce wines that taste like the European varietals but grow with vitality in the non-ideal climates of the American east.
Given this background, my hypothetical unconstrained operation would include a vine breeding program that targeted not just the cold and mildew resistance needed in the Midwest, but drought and heatwave resistance for California grape growing, not to mention the potential for resistance to phylloxera, mealybug, and other pests. If major strides were made in changing what has been planted in California to more sustainable varieties, we could drastically reduce water usage and chemical spraying while still maintaining wine quality. Germany is an excellent case study for this, where they have replanted quite a bit of acreage to hybrids to massively reduce the need for fungicide.
Of course, this would come with the most outlandish part of the hypothetical – consumers that are eager to buy wines from obscure hybrid varieties that they’ve never heard of. Compared to the obstacles Cornell University and others in the east are managing with their breeding programs, building climate-resilient varieties in California would feel comparatively reasonable.
What is the One Wine most emblematic of your brand and/or winemaking style? Tell us its story.
The Alta Colina property has one north-facing slope planted to the Alban clone of Syrah, from which we make a wine called the Old 900. Bob Tillman, the founder of Alta Colina, named this wine after the B-29 aircraft that his father flew during WWII. The Alban clone produces highly concentrated berries, and the wines show that with intense color and tannin. The north-facing aspect moderates ripening in the Paso Robles sun, slowing sugar accumulation and allowing flavor development to progress evenly. In my view, it is one of the best expressions of a northern Rhône style Syrah that our region can produce. In the winery we ferment warm and with a heavy saignée at crush, facilitating the depth of character and endless ageability that the Old 900 can produce. Read my review of the Alta Colina Syrah here.
Bonus Question: Why Winemaking?
All winemakers will tell you that this profession lives at the intersection of art, science, and manual labor. Early in my career, the teenage version of me was drawn in not only by an over-enthusiasm for drinking alcohol, but by the physical work itself. Later, chemistry and biology shifted that interest into an obsession. Winemaking allows me to work daily with plants, fungi, and bacteria, while thinking about concepts that were preposterous to the human mind until very recent history. Things like the menacing hydroxyl radical, acetaldehyde’s role in masking ester expression, chelating metals based on redox state, and the rest of the invisible chemistry happening behind scenes. In the end, the challenge is to reel all of that into an artistic expression that is receivable by our peers, and that reflects the land we stand on along with our team’s love of flavor, storytelling, and land stewardship. Knowing that the final product is ultimately building human relationships and community is all extra.