Kendall Jackson Winery

Jess Jackson's stable carries on with Banke

By 2003, Jess Jackson needed a hobby, if that is the word. Jackson wanted something that would take him away from his core business. He had tried a few things along the way, all of them unsatisfactory, costly, or both.

“He was a very good golfer, something like an 8 handicap,” said Jackson’s widow, Barbara Banke (who once shot a hole-in-one en route to an 18-hole total of 101). “But he didn’t want to be out on a golf course every day. So one day he said to me, ‘I’d like to buy a few horses that might be able to run a little.’ I told him to go ahead. He had dabbled in horses before, and he needed something that might get him to back off his micromanaging in the wine business.”

Jackson, who had been introduced to racing through an uncle and great uncle 40 years before, started out by buying a 50 percent interest in one horse. The old joke came into play: He got the end that eats. He might have been looking for horses that could “run a little,” but this horse could run very little.

“He was just a horse,” Banke said. “But before long, Jess had bought 300 more.”

Among them, of course, were Curlin and Rachel Alexandra, who combined to make the Horse of the Year title Jackson’s private preserve from 2007 through 2009. But Jackson’s roughshod run in Thoroughbred racing ended in April, when at 81 he died after a three-year battle with a rare form of skin cancer.

“He thought he was going to beat it,” Banke said. “He was just as determined about that as anything else. He kept saying that he would be around for a long time. It was not easy, but he was never in much pain, right to the end.”

Jackson had his detractors, and some of his actions − such as withholding Rachel Alexandra from the 2009 Breeders’ Cup because of his disdain for Santa Anita’s hybrid racing surface; suing advisers whom he alleged had cheated him; and peeking under the carpet where some of the game’s thornier issues had been swept − were unpopular in some quarters. But no one cheered his passing, if only for selfish reasons. The alarmists could see an already dire horse shortage worsening if the post-Jackson Stonestreet Stables downsized. It has been happening to racing right and left: The deaths of Allen Paulson, Bill Young, and Bob Lewis, just to name three, have left gaping holes that have been difficult to fill.

Reserve Wine & Food Pairing at the Kendall-Jackson Wine Center ...

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit the Kendall-Jackson Wine Center near Fulton, at the northwest edge of Santa Rosa, in Sonoma County.

I work for a winery that produces 3,000 cases of wine each year, all the varietals unblended, all the grapes from one organically grown vineyard. Our Chardonnay is from great grapes, and we let them shine, fermenting and holding the juice in stainless steel, and foregoing secondary, malolactic, fermentation.

Kendall-Jackson is the opposite of the winery I work for in so many way. First, it is a giant, a Goliath, no longer merely a single winery entity, but an empire made up of many successful wineries, about three dozen, bought up by the late wine industry icon Jess Jackson .

Looking at Kendall-Jackson as a stand alone winery, ignoring Matanzas Creek , Murphy-Goode , and the other wineries within it’s domain, Kendall-Jackson produces about 5 million cases of wine each year. The most popular Kendall-Jackson wine sold is their Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay , accounting for roughly 20% of their wine quantity sold, or 1,000,000 cases each year.

Stylistically, this Chardonnay is significantly oaked. The wine also undergoes malolactic fermentation; a secondary fermentation that changes malic acid, the green apple flavor notes often found in the juice of Chardonnay grapes, and converts it to lactic acid, cream or butter notes that do not exist in Chardonnay grapes. It is often suggested that this wine packs a sugar punch, either from adding back sugar directly or in the form of added grape juice concentrate.

Kendall-Jackson has a Chardonnay with dominant oak, toast, cream and vanilla notes, buttery, smooth, sweet, and round. It is worth noting that none of these are notes or attributes that come from the Chardonnay grape, all are winemaking manipulations.

There are many in the wine industry who suggest privately that good grapes don’t need such manipulations, winemaking tricks, and that Kendall-Jackson’s style spawned a host of heavily manipulated cheap wine imitators, notably Two Buck Chuck, similarly producing wines without variety correctness, vintage variations, or sense of place.

There are others who would characterize such assertions as “sour grapes.”

It could easily be argued that most consumers of wine prefer the complete predictability, the absolute consistency, that a bottle of Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay offers; that sameness of experience being preferable to the unpredictability of a single vineyard designate wine, a wine held in stainless steel without malolactic fermentation, a wine showing different fruit notes year to year, as terroir – the interplay of land, weather, and grape within a vintage – and the changes that brings to the wine, becomes a factor in the final bottled product.

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