Niner Winery in Paso Robles offers garden-grown produce along with flavorful wine
Story by Aja Goare
Photography by Zweifel Studios
Doubled over, collecting sun-ripened tomatoes from her sprawling plant, Fiona Bond loads up her basket with fresh produce she grew from seed. These blood red fruits are destined for the kitchen at Niner Estate Winery, where her husband will carve up the globes as part of a delectable dinner offering. “Having an extremely skilled farmer growing food just outside your kitchen is really special,” says Jacob Burrell, Niner’s Executive Chef. “It’s pretty amazing to serve someone a tomato, just picked, still warm from the sun.”
Knowing the source of our ingredients is increasingly uncommon in a world of commercialized food chains. But just as their relationship as husband and wife is built on trust in their home, their reliance on one another as gardener and chef produces an intimate connection between the earth and the plate. “Everything we grow goes into the [Niner ecosystem] in one way or another — food to the kitchen, cut flowers to the tasting room, herbs are stored and dried for products or the kitchen,” explains Fiona, Niner’s Horticulturist and Provisions Manager.
Fiona has built out the property’s garden since 2021 to include between 200 and 300 cultivars of produce, such as eggplant, tomato, broccoli, lettuce, borage, artichoke, five types of garlic, flatleaf parsley, garlic, chives and kale. She manages 20 different fruit trees, and creates branded ceramic mugs and bowls for the tasting room. What is now a labor of love and a career that feeds her soul was born of an immediate need to literally feed herself when she was laid off during the Great Recession in 2008. “I had to find something to pay my rent,” she recalls. “I’d always been really interested in food and passionate about food. I thought that I’d love to learn to grow food and there were tons of apprenticeships for farming where you can live and work on property, so it also solved my housing dilemma.”
Growing fruits and vegetables at Love Apple Farms in Santa Cruz was an opportunity to learn the homesteading life while maintaining a stable place to live and a source of income. And it soon became the meeting place for Fiona and her future husband. Jacob was working at the three-Michelin-starred restaurant Manresa under esteemed Chef David Kinch, who was an early adapter of the farm to fork movement. “I had started picking up at the farm as a way to get more acclimated with the farm and its possibilities,” Jacob recalls. Fiona adds, “Jacob would come pick up produce for the restaurant and I’d make him little bouquets.”
Their early interactions budded into a romance and the pair eventually left together for Post Ranch in Big Sur, where Jacob worked as chef de cuisine and Fiona built out the restaurant garden and farm. After a few years on the Central Coast, the duo moved to Bali, Indonesia, as Jacob was brought in for consulting work. They took on their own project in Bali before later returning to the U.S. for family. Here, they had their own two children.
Working together at Niner is more than a collaboration; it’s a welcome shift from the daily responsibilities that come with parenting. “We both work a lot and have two kids — ages 5 and 9 — so balancing the workload with all our schedules, there’s not a ton of room for leisure at home,” says Fiona. “It feels nice to show up to work and be excited to look at things on the list and think I want to do all these things.”
For Jacob, the experience of cooking with farm fresh produce is a luxury that he calls “magical.” Each season is a blank slate, a new opportunity to create.
“I enjoy the sauce work we do through the seasons,” says Jacob. “In colder months, we do more wine-based sauces. Butter and cream come out. In warmer months, we “cook” less and it’s almost exclusively olive oil-based dressings and marinades and such. I’ve really looked forward to our garden’s eggplant the past couple summers.”
From Fiona’s garden to Jacob’s skillet, the flow of food is direct and pure. For an establishment known for its wine production, the cuisine at Niner is a study in sustainability and a performance for the palate.
