News that Jess Jackson had died shortly before Easter at the age of 81 hardly came as a surprise. It was well known that Jackson, a giant in the California wine industry, had been battling cancer.
What is difficult to fathom is that this lion of California wine would succumb to anything. I didn’t know him well, but I knew him well enough to know that Jackson was among the most determined vintners of our time.
Jess Stonestreet Jackson was a native of San Francisco and a practicing attorney when he founded Kendall-Jackson winery in Lakeport, Calif., in 1982. That would be in Lake County, well north of the Napa Valley, and hardly the place you would expect to discover a budding wine dynasty.
Some would argue that Kendall-Jackson rode the Chardonnay wave of the early 1980s to fame and fortune. Others would say that K-J started the wave, which continues to this day, for Chardonnay is the most widely sold and consumed white wine in America. No matter how you view it, Kendall-Jackson and the ubiquitous "Vintner’s Reserve" Chardonnay launched what became the vast Jess Jackson wine empire.
The world learned two things about Jackson from his Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay: he was a marketing genius and knew what consumers wanted.
From a marketing standpoint, the term Vintner’s Reserve was controversial, since the wines were produced in prodigious volumes and anything but "reserve." The Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay also had a secret that was eventually outed during a contentious lawsuit involving a former K-J winemaker: The Chardonnay was slightly sweet, with a level of residual sugar that was higher than the industry standard at that time for a dry table wine.
Jackson knew that American consumers talked dry wine, but they had slightly sweeter tastes than they were willing to admit. Others imitated the K-J style, and Chardonnay sales skyrocketed at a time when consumers were just beginning to drink varietally labeled wines. It was a bygone era when most restaurants offered a white and a red house wine; no one ever asked for a glass of Chardonnay. That was prior to K-J.
Jackson’s energy and creativity were legendary. He didn’t stop at Kendall-Jackson and didn’t stop at wine. At the time of his death, the Jackson wine empire included the following: Kendall-Jackson Wine Estates, Cambria, Edmeades, La Crema, Cardinale, Lakoya, Hartford Family Winery, Verite, Atalon, Carmel Road, Murphy-Goode, La Jota, Freemark Abbey, Byron and Arrowood in the United States. Jackson also owned Chateau Lassegue, a Saint-Emilion Grand Cru, in Bordeaux; Tenuta di Arceno in Tuscany; Yangarra in Australia; and Calina in Chile.
He also invested heavily in thoroughbred racehorses, including the champions Curlin and Rachel Alexandra. He was a founding member of Family Winemakers of California. He remained proud to the very end that Jackson Wine Estates had remained family owned throughout the era of big corporate takeovers in the California wine industry.
The Jackson I knew seldom paused or slowed down. It seemed he was always up to something. I remember well the last time I saw Jess. It was a few years ago, and the occasion was the reinvention of the Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve line.
It had grown so large that K-J often relied upon purchased grapes to meet its quota.
In a move to bolster quality and value, Jackson ordered the transition of the Vintner’s Reserve wines to estate-grown grapes only. This was possible because Jackson had been on a buying binge, acquiring some of the choicest vineyards in California as vineyard prices fell during the recession of 2001.
I tasted the new Vintner’s Reserve wines alongside Jess, comparing them qualitatively to other California wines similarly priced in the $14 to $25 range. This was the essence of Jess Jackson. He was confident the K-J wines would prevail when tasted side by side against the competition.
As was often the case, Jess Stonestreet Jackson was a man who knew when he had the goods.
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