Joe Shebl is saddled up and about to proceed with the next leg of his ride into California wine lore as one of the state’s more reliable, adaptable and daring winemakers.

His new brand is aptly named “Stride,” a term that evokes strength and determination.

Think Pony Express riders, who during one romantic if brief stretch during the nation’s westward stride in the early 1860s rushed mail from Missouri to California in a bold equestrian relay of speed, muscle and endurance.

Joe Shebl can relate to that. For one, the art of his new wine label highlights a dashing Pony Express rider as seized in sculpture by his late grandfather Dr. Joseph J. Shebl.

Dr. Shebl, a radiologist, founded Salinas Valley Radiology and served as chief of staff for Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital. But he also was at home in his art studio, specializing in bronze sculptures of the sorts of characters identified with the American West, including Pony Express riders. His work has been shown in museums and galleries throughout the West, and has been featured in books and magazines. And now on a wine label.

Secondly, his grandson, Joe Shebl, replicates in vision and spirit the gumption and goal of Pony Express riders, moving with assurance and agility from swing station to swing station, quickly dropping off a packet of yearned-for mail before romping off to his next destination.

In Shebl’s case, the “mail” is wine. He’s put in stops at the wineries Rancho Victoria, Bella Grace, Perry Creek, Borjón and his own brand Fiddletown Cellars, though he may be most closely identified with Renwood, where his work with wine began in 1999 and where he returned so often over the next couple of decades that his horse may as well have been one of those mounted colorfully on a carnival merry-go-round.

Nowadays, Shebl remains in demand as a consulting winemaker, hanging out at Perry Creek Winery in the Fair Play District of El Dorado County. Perry Creek now is principally a custom-crush facility, with Shebl helping coordinate the aspirations of around 15 brands. (A couple of years ago, the Sweigart family of the Amador County winery Rancho Victoria Vineyard acquired Perry Creek from Dieter Juergens.)

Beyond his consulting at Perry Creek, Shebl is focused on Stride, which he is to introduce formally in a week or so, though wine enthusiasts already can pick up releases at his website and at Amador 360 Winery Collective, the latter either online or in Plymouth.

Up to now, Shebl has been most closely associated with the vineyards and wines of the Sierra foothills, Amador County in particular. With Stride, however, he is reaching beyond the Mother Lode. What’s more, his new line falls into the “ultra-premium” bracket, meaning they come from high-profile appellations for specific grape varieties, and they generally are priced higher than releases with which he has been closely associated.

Does this mean that Shebl is riding away from the Sierra foothills for greener pastures? “Not at all,” he says. “My roots are here,” he added as we tasted through his new portfolio at Perry Creek the other day.

He is sticking with the varietal wines for which Amador County is most respected, including an exceptionally aromatic 2018 Amador County Zinfandel ($42) that reins in all the rich boysenberry fruit, peppery spice and notes of briar that the area can deliver. In a sharp turn from how Zinfandel usually is made in Amador County, however, he blended in five percent Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon as well as five percent each Amador County Petite Sirah and Barbera.

The modest amount of Cabernet Sauvignon, he explains, was just what was needed to flesh out the Zinfandel. “It was the silver bullet,” he says of the Cabernet Sauvignon. “Sometimes, one or two percent of a different wine helps them all.”

His new lineup also includes a fragrant and generous 2018 Amador County Barbera ($60), which while unusually muscular for the varietal nevertheless retains the grape’s inherent acute acidity, adding up to a take on Barbera at once hefty yet light-footed.

He sees the higher-than-customary prices for the Zinfandel and Barbera as confidence in Amador County’s ability to produce “world-class” wines.

From beyond the Sierra foothills, Shebl has corralled under the Stride brand a lightly colored but coltish 2019 Pinot Noir from the Sta. Rita Hills in Santa Barbara County ($60), peppy with sunny strawberry and cherry fruit and just a whisper of oak (it was aged in puncheons); a solidly structured, seductively aromatic, jammy and spicy 2018 Petit Verdot from Napa Valley ($52); and a classically styled 2018 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon ($110), a svelte, layered and balanced presentation of cherries and olives, its oak reined in tightly.

All the wines are small production, amounting to around 100 cases each. Stylistically, his goals are unchanged. “I still make wines we like to drink – wines of finesse, freshness, vitality and drinkability,” Shebl says. Drinkability, he adds, is “when your mouth waters after you take a sip. It makes you want to have another sip. There’s lushness in fruit up front and at mid-palate, then a burst of acidity.” Texture also figures prominently in his winemaking maneuvers: “It has to feel as good as it tastes.”

Up to now, most Stride wines have been made at Bella Grace Vineyards in Amador County’s Shenandoah Valley, but going forward Shebl will concentrate production at Perry Creek. Bella Grace remains in his marketing plans, however. He will take advantage of caves at Bella Grace for private appointment-only tastings for groups of up to eight people, which he hopes to launch later this month.

In 1999, Shebl began to follow his grandfather’s lead into medicine by enrolling in biology courses at California State University, Sacramento. But a wine-tasting trek to Napa Valley that spring kick-started his interest in viticulture and enology, and that summer he signed on for his first stint with Renwood Winery in Shenandoah Valley. He has been scouting vineyards and making wine ever since.

“Winemaking never gets old,” he says. “People get happy with they drink wine. I pinch myself that I have this profession. It is very rewarding when you make something that sticks in peoples’ minds.”

As to his original brand, Fiddletown Cellars, which he founded in 2007 with business partner Reno Farinelli, who he subsequently bought out, he is reserving that for his Amador County Old-Vine Zinfandel, which, incidentally, is one of the 50 wines included in my “The Signature Wines of Superior California: 50 Wines that Define the Sierra Foothills, the Delta, Yolo and Lodi.”

To learn where my newly published book “The Signature Wines of Superior California” is available, please go to my website SignatureWines.us.