AUTHENTIC. BOUTIQUE. ARTISTIC. UNIQUE.
Welcome to Absolution Cellars!
We specialize in limited-production, handcrafted, single-vineyard wines from select vineyards all throughout the beautiful Central Coast. With over 20 different varieties and wines made each year, you’ll find something to please every palate. Each wine that we make is the best version of itself – a unique portrait of place and time, an honest expression of where and when the grapes were grown. Made for you to savor, enjoy, and share with your family and friends, as well as strangers, who may become one or both.
Dirk’s winemaking philosophy is to let the grapes, vineyards, and vintage speak. Wine can be unlike any other beverage in that regard, and that’s part of what makes it beautiful and unique. He partners with experienced owners and growers all over the Central Coast, allowing him access to a wide variety of grapes ideally situated to the vineyards where they are planted. His winemaking style leans more towards the Old World, while benefiting from the opportunities and creativity that the New World offers. The grapes are hand-sorted by cluster (with some whole-cluster inclusion on almost every red wine), destemmed, and sorted again by hand. Reds are fermented in 1-ton open-top fermenters, and then aged for 16-40 months in neutral barrels. White and Rosés are gently pressed the same day as harvest and then fermented and aged 5-11 months in neutral barrels. All wines are cross-flow filtered prior to bottling.
The bottles are adorned with licensed artwork from Aja Trier of Sagittarius Gallery, with each piece connected to the wine by Dirk’s interpretation of the art. Bottles are finished simply with high-quality corks, eliminating the unnecessary waste of capsules or wax.
Owner/Winemaker/J.O.A.T. Dirk Neumann first came to the Central Coast of California in 2011 from his home in Florida, regularly vacationing here one week each season, and fell in love with the scenery, the people, the climate, the farm fresh food, and of course, the wine. He started to make plans to retire there in 20+ years once he was done working in the real estate development field that had been his career since college, but one morning in 2013, he decided there was really nothing keeping him in South Florida, so he packed up everything and moved there with no particular plan in mind.
Dirk knew he liked the wine industry because of the amazing people he had met and its collaborative nature, so in 2014, he jumped at the chance to make his own barrel of wine with a local winemaker and the hobby took off from there and soon spiraled out of control. Encouraged by friends and industry folks who told him he had a knack for this sort of thing, Dirk decided to take the quantum leap in 2017, starting to produce enough wine to open a tasting room in 2020, knowing that a good red wine needs +/-3 years to be ready to drink.
Fast Forward to February 2020 when Dirk opened his tasting room in beautiful Morro Bay with 300 cases of wine. After 5 weeks of success, the pandemic changed the landscape, but Dirk used his adaptability to change, along with his sales and marketing skills from his previous career to keep the bills paid until tastings could resume. Absolution Cellars has continued to grow, doubling the size of the Tasting Room in 2024, and now produces 1500 cases annually.