CALIFORNIA MASTER READY FOR WINE FEST
There will be a lot of winemakers in Vancouver later this month for the 40th Vancouver International Wine Festival, but few if any come with the knowledge and experience of U.S. label KendallJackson’s wine master Randy Ullom.
The 65-year-old Ullom is a senior vice-president and chief winemaker responsible for the entire Kendall-Jackson portfolio, as well as the company’s Chilean operations.
Ullom oversees 12,800 acres of estate vineyards in California — all coastal and all cool — divided evenly between North Coast, Monterey and Santa Barbara counties. K-J, as it is referred to, is part of an even larger Jackson Family Wines portfolio of wineries and brands making six million cases annually in multiple countries.
Over the last 20 years Ullom has been the rock at K-J, balancing the need to be progressive and move forward while never taking his eye off the consumers that have made Kendall-Jackson so successful. The affable Ullom was the perfect fit to work under the fidgety, often litigious former trial lawyer Jess Jackson, who began his fascination with wine as a gentleman farmer.
While many Californians were building wineries and buying expensive French oak barrels, Jackson, who died in 2011, was busy buying land up and down the California coast. And what land it is! All coastal and only hillside/mountainside, it’s a brilliant collection of vineyard sites.
If Jackson is responsible for amassing the largest collection of high-altitude vineyard sites in California, Ullom was the guy who sorted them out from rootstock, clones and vines to appellations or AVAs, and ultimately, into an intricate tier of brands that makes K-J the highly successful wine company it is.
I’ll never forget travelling the California coast from Mendocino to Santa Barbara with Ullom just before the Chardonnay harvest. We travelled to numerous vineyards, Ullom to assess the grapes for picking, me to learn about all the different clones and vineyard sites that Kendall-Jackson owned. The complexity of the task was never lost on me, and we were looking only at Chardonnay.
Over time, Ullom has carefully upgraded the money-making Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve lineup by shifting the source of grapes for each key varietal wine to the vineyards best suited to the variety involved: Zinfandel is in Mendocino, the Syrah in Santa Barbara, the Merlot and Cabernet in Sonoma County, while the Chardonnay and the Pinot Noir are made with a mix of clones and vineyard sites from Santa Barbara to Mendocino.
Jackson’s deep trust of Ullom has been repaid a million times over. Over two decades Ullom has had a hand in every key K-J project, including K-J’s forays into Chile at Calina, reinvented as Vina Alcance at Bodega Tapiz in Argentina (since sold), and at the amazing bio-dynamic Yangarra project in McLaren Vale, Australia.
Ullom, who looks more like a Montana ranch hand then one of the world’s premier winemakers, has worked tirelessly behind the scenes to organize the K-J lineup into a California powerhouse. When you include the diverse offerings of Jackson Family Wines, you could say the familyowned wine giant, now headed up by Jackson’s wife Barbara Banke, is the authoritative voice of California wine.
When I asked George Rose, former vice-president of public relations at Kendall-Jackson to sum up Ullom’s success he said: “As chief winemaker Ullom has quietly achieved a consistency of quality that few large wineries of scale can boast. The secret: He has surrounded himself with some of the most talented winemakers in the business, and it doesn’t hurt that Jackson Family Wines owns some of the most prized cool, coastal vineyards in all of California.”
You will find Ullom humbly pouring his wine at the K-J booth March 1-3 at the festival. Don’t miss your opportunity to meet him; it’s the festival’s raison d’etre.