Jess Jackson
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Jess Jackson
Everything is big in the United States. The strawberries decorating the enormous cheese cakes, the blockbuster movies, the new technology empires… A writer that I interviewed in 2001, just a couple of months after 9-11, summed up the situation perfectly: “Everything is bigger here, even our tragedies are disproportionate… As if man had to always appear small!” This adventure has nothing to do with a tragedy, it’s all about a fantastic wine business success story - that of Jess Jackson, the fonder of Kendall-Jackson wines.
When Jess Jackson dropped by Saint-Emilion for a day to taste the 2007 primeurs he welcomed me to his home at Château Lassègue. Several people pointed out that I was very lucky as others have waited years before obtaining an interview. It started off as expected: Jess Jackson is very, very tall, my 1.72 metres seem meagre in comparison… Jess shares his love for wine with that of racing horses. He was in a good mood that morning as one of his thoroughbreds had just won the world’s richest horse race in Dubai the day before, obtaining international recognition as this year’s best track competitor. Jess invited me to relive the event’s broadcast on his laptop. He was as enthusiastic as a child – completely ecstatic. Even though it was a bit too early in the morning, the victory was a good reason to taste a glass of 2006 Château Lassègue. If over the years, he’s become used to receiving prizes for both his wines and his horses alike, Jess is always overwhelmed when he’s awarded a new one: “We celebrated our 25th harvest in 2007, I still can’t believe it…”
But what about us? Let’s go back in time. Picture 1970 in San Francisco, Jess is a well-know lawyer, specialising in land and real-estate issues. He’ll even go on to rewrite some sections of California’s civil code. Several years later, he and his family end up buying 80 hectares of land in Lakeport in Lake county, which they decided to transform into vineyards. To start off they sold grapes to local wineries for the first seven years. Then in 1981, as the market seemed favourable, Jess decided to make his own wine. Even though he wasn’t thinking at that stage about giving up his career as an attorney for that of winemaker, Jess started to wonder and to become fascinated about the wine industry. The first bottle bearing the Kendall-Jackson label was rolled out in 1982 under the appellation of Chardonnay. A year later, this wine that had never been presented before won the prestigious Platinium Award attributed by the American Wine Competition.
This first award was enough encouragement for Jess Jackson to give up his law career in order to entirely dedicate his time to developing his wines: this is what he has done ever since with passion, paying careful attention to the preservation of traditional winemaking techniques.
The vineyards of Kendall Jackson, which extend today over more than 12,000 hectares along the coast of California, from north of San Francisco to south of Los Angeles, are still owned by the Jackson family who work full-time for the company. “When we decided to entirely dedicate ourselves to wine, I had only one idea in mind, that of creating extraordinary wines from the best Californian vineyards.” According to the California Wine Winners Book, over the past decade, Kendall-Jackson has won more gold, silver and bronze medals than any other American vineyard. When it comes to the best restaurants of the year published by Wine and Spirit Magazine in April 2006, Kendall-Jackson is at the top of the list of wine-restaurants selected in the United States. The different wines currently made by the family business are impressive, as are the above mentioned awards. However Jess doesn’t seem impressed by all this success. At the age of 77, he still continues to perfect his wines, making, for example, his very own oak barrels in France. Indeed it was in Saint Emilion that he decided to buy not so long ago, Château Lassègue with his friend, winemaker Pierre Seillan. Pierre left Bordeaux with his wife some 15 years ago to follow Jess to California, thereby offering his European expertise to New World wines. Today Kendall-Jackson wines are well-known and acknowledged throughout the Unites States. Jess’s aim of transmitting to Americans a new approach to wine seems to be a success: “Wine is very different from other alcohols and from beer; I want our industry to be independent from the images that are used to sell these products. Wine is part of our heritage, it is the traditional partner of our meals, it exists to celebrate friendship, family ties and love – the best things in life.” And this is what Jess is all about: the strength of life, a man who speaks so strongly about a passion that everything seems possible. This success story appears all of a sudden on a human scale, accessible… After a couple of hours spent in his company, Jess’s America seems a bit smaller. He himself no longer comes across as so imposing… “You should come to visit us in California in Santa Rosa, Patricia, I’ll show you around the estates and the vineyards in our helicopter.” And the grapes on the vines, are they like the strawberries on the cheesecakes, as big as plums? Everything is bigger in the United States.
Patricia Lepic
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