SANTA YNEZ GENERAL CANDLE

The 5 pm stagecoach from Santa Barbara arrives with a clatter of hoofbeats, raising a rich, dusky scent from the baking earth. Passengers alight from their journey across the chapparal covered San Marcos Pass, arriving weary yet beguiled by the heady bouquet of the Santa Ynez Mountains: sweet artemisia and bitter chapparal sage on the sunny ridges, aromatic fennel and herbal bay laurel in the canyon bottoms. Now resting on the Tavern's veranda, the passengers watch as the lowering sun burnishes the golden hills spooling out before them, their scent of curing hay and buckwheat carried aloft by the faintest Pacific zephyr.