Seal Beach Winery Tasting Room, Los Alamitos, CA

The Seal Beach Winery tasting room is located in Los Alamitos, California, which is about halfway between Huntington Beach and Anaheim, making it one of the few Orange County tasting rooms in the region. Because the local Orange County winemaker scene is a small one, whenever we can support a local business by visiting their tasting room, we do. We had high hopes for the Seal Beach Winery tasting room in Los Alamitos, California. Unfortunately, everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong.

About Seal Beach Winery & Winemaker Michael Dawson

Winemaker Michael Dawson created Seal Beach Winery in 2009 after a successful career as a radiologist. In fact, it’s Michael’s previous career in the medical field that piques the interest of many wine lovers who discover this local Orange County winemaker. After all, there aren’t many winemakers out there that can boast about having an undergraduate degree from UC San Diego in biochemistry and cell biology and getting their Medical degree from USC.

As in his previous career in Medicine, Michael went “all in” when he realized he wanted his second professional act to be in viticulture. He applied to California’s famous UC Davis enology and viticulture program and combined his background in cellular biology with his passion for wine.

In 2006, Michael began experimenting with home winemaking. The project had him driving to small vineyard sites in Santa Maria, selecting his grapes from the grower, and hauling them all back in the bed of his pick-up truck. As Michael developed his own style of wine, he took the next big leap and created his bonded winery, Seal Beach Winery. With Seal Beach Winery, Michael wanted to create wines at an accessible price point from varieties that included popular grapes like Pinot Noir but also more esoteric grapes like Tempranillo. 

On paper, this all sounds great. And it takes a lot of grit to make such a dramatic mid-career shift, which is to say that we really wanted to like this winery. Unfortunately, our experience visiting the tasting room left a lot to be desired. 

First Impression & Experience

Seal Beach Winery offers a six-pour tasting for $20 per person. The winery waives the tasting fee if two bottles are purchased. Additional wines by the glass, including Muscat, Rosé, Pinot Grigio, Sangiovese, and GSM, are also available, as are several wines on tap.

The tasting room itself is quaint, it has a decent amount of seating and includes a tasting bar, communal table, and several free-standing tables. The way the space is designed, it seems as though Seal Beach Winery is used to serving dozens of guests at once. That, coupled with a number of positive reviews online, would suggest that this tasting room excels at providing a high-quality experience for local wine lovers. Unfortunately, our visit did not mirror that.

So what went wrong? We arrived at Seal Beach Winery ten minutes before they opened, only to see the first employee arrive precisely at the time they were supposed to open. Five minutes later, a second employee arrived. 

We didn’t want to rush the door, so to speak, so we waited a few minutes before entering the tasting room. Despite there being two employees, and no one else in the tasting room, they continued getting ready and basically ignored us. You can imagine how awkward that was. When the employees finally acknowledged us and began pouring the wines, things didn’t get much better.

The Wines

Despite the rocky start, we went ahead and purchased the tasting. The first pour, a 2020 Seal Beach Winery, Sauvignon Blanc, California, didn’t resemble any of the Sauvignon Blancs we’ve ever tried. There’s no vineyard designation or appellation on the bottle, so it’s hard to say where the grapes came from. The taste was “off,” but not from the bottle being corked, it just didn’t taste like a Sauvignon Blanc – at all. We couldn’t score this one more than 75 points.

Next came the 2017 Seal Beach Chardonnay,  Los Alamos Vineyard, Santa Barbara County. The tasting notes for this wine indicate a lean, mineral finish, which sounds appealing, but the pours we tried were the complete opposite. The wine was over-oaked and seemed quite manipulated. Again, 75 points.

The 2016 Natalie Grace Pinot Noir, Rancho La Vina, Santa Rita Hills, is part of Seal Beach’s secondary, limited-release label. The 2011 vintage scored 93 points by Wine Enthusiast, so we thought this bottle had promise; but, again, the wine was just average.

The one bright spot in the tasting was the 2016 Seal Beach Merlot, McGinley Vineyard, Happy Canyon. Easily the best wines out of the bunch and had true Merlot qualities. Overall, a decent wine. We gave this 85 points.

The final two wines in the tasting, a 2016 Cabernet Sauvignon and a 2016 Syrah from the Natalie Grace label, didn’t do anything for us either. We went so far as to try two of the wines by the glass – the Sangiovese and the GSM – to see if there was a hidden gem in there, but the wines were just “okay.” 

Closing Thoughts

As we mentioned at the top of this post, we really wanted to like this wine and the winery, but everything fell short. In addition to below-average wines, the staff pouring the wines knew very little about them and about wine in general. To top things off, they didn’t seem to care about us as customers and were generally rude.

Most of the wines were in the ’70s and low 80’s, with us giving one wine, the Merlot, an 85.  It may have been out of pity. Overall, not much good to say about this place. Below-average wine.  Rude tasting room attendants. A bad wine club. Maybe we just caught the staff on a bad day, but that doesn’t make up for just average wines.