On first encounter, the story of Scar of the Sea sounds familiar, similar to many a California winery. There’s Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from some well-known Santa Barbara sites, namely Bien Nacido, which makes sense: one of the founders, Michael Brughelli, sells grapes for Bien Nacido. The wines are quite good, and the name is particularly catchy one — with a story that concerns a seaside church in Tasmania, and stained glass, and the other founder, Mikey Giugni, slightly misreading the phrase “star of the sea.” Two young guys, making wine in Santa Barbara. You might be thinking: I’ve heard this one before.

The twist came when the first bottles showed up at my door. They were not Pinot or Chardonnay. They were cider. Specifically a 2014 barrel-fermented cider from a blend of arcane apple varieties, including Red Astrachan and Mutsu. (The ciders include a vintage, although technically ciders can’t list vintage dates.) There was also a single-varietal cider from the tart, dark-skinned Arkansas Black, as well as a hopped cider, which adds a beer-like accent to their work.

Certainly Giugni and Brughelli aren’t the first winemakers, in California or elsewhere, to embrace apples alongside grapes. As cider’s defining moment comes upon us, with a grand surge of quality in American ciders and a respect at the table from coast to coast, a growing number of prominent California winemakers have decided to try their hand, including Wind Gap’s Pax Mahle, Lone Madrone’s Neil Collins and Sebastopol’s Horse & Plow.

But none have made it as big a part of their repertoire as Scar of the Sea. In fact, cider accounted for nearly 40 percent of the 1,300 cases the winery — the cidery? — made in 2015.

This collision of drinks reflects a cultural shift, a growing understanding that cider, so often lumped together with beer, actually has far more in common with wine. Its fermentation and aging is almost exactly the same. And at its simplest, it requires just one ingredient.

As such, cider has that same potential for transparency that wine does, that ability to reflect its origins. (Nothing against beer, but beer is a composition of ingredients, often from different places, and brewers play a far bigger role in its creation.) And farming apples is not wildly different from farming grapes You might listen to the two men discuss their orchards —“dropping fruit when bunches are too close together,” “getting the right set” — and easily be convinced they’re talking about grapes.

In a way, Giugni’s background set him up perfectly for this. He grew up in Napa Valley, surrounded by wine, although not in a wine family: His family owned Giugni & Son Grocery in Saint Helena, and his great-grandparents owned the Oakville Grocery for nearly 50 years. He grew up drinking old Napa wines, but for much of the time since his ancestors arrived in the 1860s, the valley was in mixed agriculture.

He headed south to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo for an engineering degree, at which point he encountered Brughelli, five years his senior, the winemaker at Kenneth Volk Vineyards. Brughelli hired Giugni, but Giugni eventually decided to try making wine elsewhere, namely Tasmania, where he was taken by Delamere, a small winery that made both sparkling wine and ciders. He returned, found an orchard near Avila Beach (San Luis Obispo County) and reached back out to Brughelli.

“When Mikey showed me the cider, I was a little suspect,” Brughelli recalls. “But I tasted it in barrel and was blown away, and then I tasted it in bottle and was haunted by it in a good way.”

Brughelli left his job with Volk and took a position with the Miller family, selling grapes from their famous Bien Nacido vineyard. In 2012, he and Giugni set up shop in part of a facility located on the vineyard, the former Tantara winery, and launched Scar of the Sea. (Because cider and wine often involve different fermentation bacteria, each is now made at a different location.)

Their roster — still Pinot and Chardonnay, plus hard cider and a forthcoming natural sparkling Chardonnay from Paso Robles grapes — does seem a bit ad hoc. The two acknowledge they had no greater plan for Scar of the Sea, aside from showing off the bounty of the Central Coast, in this case with two fruit instead of one.

In which case, if we have a sense of what the Central Coast tastes like in grape form, what about apples? I put it to them. “Smoky aromas,” Giugni suggests. “Flintiness,” Brughelli counters. “Stone fruit.” “Banana candy runt flavors.”

Of course, it’s an open question what California overall tastes like in apple form. Apples have never been as big a part of its agriculture as they have in many eastern states or Washington. While California has 615,000 acres of wine grapes, just 15,000 acres of apple orchard remain, half the acreage in 2000. Even in Sonoma, where the Gravenstein is a cultural staple, orchards have for decades been losing to vineyards, and the Central Coast was always more occupied with other fruit. Which meant, as Brughelli and Giugni discovered, its apple market was stagnant. Fruit was sold on the cheap to make non-alcoholic cider and juice, if farmers even bothered to harvest. “A lot of these orchards have hit rock bottom,” Giugni says.

Cider became, then, less a matter of reviving tradition than of making a statement about the fuller scope of the region’s bounty. The 2014 cider came from a west Paso Robles orchard planted in 1984. For the new vintage, they looked farther north, to the town of Aptos just outside Santa Cruz. There they found an old Newtown Pippin orchard planted by the grandfather of Kyle Theriot, a friend who works nearby as the viticulturist at Ridge Vineyards and farms the orchard on the side.

Of course, the Scar of the Sea ciders cost around $25 per bottle ($12 per half bottle) while their Pinots range from $46 to $60. There’s a reason, aside from the low price of apples and the high price of grapes: We have a sense of relative quality in wine, but it’s tricky to comprehend it in cider.

The partners are trying to persuade wine buyers to feature their bottles next to wines. And they’ve succeeded with at least at two San Francisco restaurants: Commonwealth and Petit Crenn, the latter of which is inspired by Dominique Crenn’s familial roots in the cider stronghold of Brittany.

“I don’t really want to be on a beer list,” Giugni says. “I want to be on a sparkling wine list.”

Jon Bonne is a contributing writer and author of “The New California Wine.” Email: food@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jbonne

From the notebook

A range of Scar of the Sea bottles is available locally, both wines and cider, including their newly released 2015 petillant naturel Chardonnay ($28, 11% alcohol), a tribute of sorts to the new vintage.

2014 Scar of the Sea Arkansas Black California Hard Cider ($24, 10%): This will be harder to find than the regular Hard Cider ($13, 9%) but the tannic side of this heirloom variety makes this bracing and intense, with rich fruit and poppy-seed spice — a cider for winter, with a savory depth that’s rare in California examples.

2014 Scar of the Sea La Bella Rose Vineyard Monterey County Pinot Noir ($38, 13.1%): The star of Scar’s wine lineup is the exquisite 2013 Bien Nacido Block Q Pinot Noir ($60, 13.7%) but I’m fond of this new release from Pommard-clone fruit in the Salinas Valley, one of the best Pinots I’ve had from this part of the state in recent years. It’s delicate in its mineral side, but with a bass tone of rich fruit, plus rose and black sesame accents, there’s an impressive complexity.