San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Big-name winemakers find ‘magic’ in Paso
When Eric Jensen sold his Paso Robles (San Luis Obispo County) wine brand Booker Vineyard to one of the largest U.S. wine conglomerates, he expected some peers to label him a sellout. But he didn’t anticipate that the sale would turn him into a mentor to some of the industry’s most in-demand winemakers.
“Not a day goes by that somebody doesn’t call me,” said Jensen, who sold Booker to Constellation Brands for an undisclosed sum in 2021 but remains involved in the winery. “It put me in a different circle of trust.”
Many calls come from a surprising place: Napa Valley.
Some of the region’s top winemakers have found a new muse in the lesser-known Paso, which they’ve quietly made a second home. Situated halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, winemakers are drawn to Paso for many of the same reasons as tourists. They’re intrigued by not only the diversity of wine grapes and soils but also Paso’s unpretentious, small-town feel and experimental spirit. Above all, it’s an affordable alternative to Napa and Sonoma Wine Country. There are no five-star resorts. Wine tasting fees are still reasonable: $24 on average.
“It’s much more intimate. It’s like Napa 30 years ago,” said Juan Mercado, one of the founders of the heretical Napa Cabernet brand Realm. Mercado arrived in Napa in the 1990s, but when he left Realm in 2018 for a new challenge, he landed in Paso, where he’s purchased three vineyards and started a Rhone-inspired winery named Riise.
Many have followed Mercado, like Tony Biagi, who started his career at Duckhorn and now consults with several premium Napa Valley brands. The region has also attracted Realm partner and winemaker Benoit Touquette, who has legends like Screaming Eagle and Ovid on his resume, and Helen Keplinger, another revered Napa winemaking consultant for brands like Grace Family Vineyard and Kerr Cellars, founded by professional golfer Cristie Kerr. They all live in Napa but have purchased land in Paso.
“The people (in Paso) are so open-minded, so supportive, so welcoming. We’ve really enjoyed that community and gained an appreciation for how incredible the terroir is,” said Keplinger. “There’s heaps of potential in the soils.”
But this migration is more complex than good people and good dirt. All of these winemakers have achieved great success in Napa Valley, nabbing top scores from critics for wines that their clients sell for hundreds of dollars a bottle. Yet when it comes to the growth of their personal passion projects, their renown doesn’t get them a vineyard, winery or fancy visitor center. Instead, most purchase grapes and produce a few thousand cases at a custom-crush winery.
“Napa’s gotten to the point where it’s hard to purchase land. You typically have to have made your money in something else,” said Mercado.. “In Paso, if you make a wine and it’s great and it sells, that project allows you to grow with the little help of a bank, like most businesses in the world.”
Biagi, who bought a 7-acre parcel in Paso, said he’d “love to own something” in his home of Napa Valley, but in Paso, “you can still get world-class property for something that makes sense.” Keplinger, who juggles consulting with two personal wine brands — Keplinger Wines and Vermillion — tried to purchase land in Napa, but “nothing panned out,” she said. In 2021, she and her husband, DJ Warner, bought a 75-ace plot in Paso and planted a 20-acre vineyard.
“A lot of the magic in Paso,” Keplinger said, “is that you have these winemakers who purchased a property and they have their own brand, their own wine, their own vision and dream.”
It was Jensen who first proved that in Paso, small producers can make it big without a sizable nest egg or generational ties to the wine industry. Jensen started Booker in 2001 after making wine with two of Paso’s early cult producers, Saxum and L’Aventure. Booker quickly acquired a following, too, as much for its approachable, balanced and reasonably priced wines as Jensen himself, who is refreshingly raw, unpolished and outspoken. After 20 years of building Booker, he did what no one expected and few others have managed: He went corporate.
But if he started Booker in Napa, Jensen knows he might not have been so lucky. The cost of land, grapes and production in Napa Valley is so high that it’s difficult to scale small, premium brands. He estimated he can scale Cabernet in Paso at $1,800 per ton compared to $4,000 per ton in Napa.
The majority of the Napa wineries — like Rombauer and Silverado Vineyards — that have sold in recent years were already major players in the national market. Only a few small Napa producers with next-to-zero assets have managed to sell, namely Dave Phinney, founder of the Prisoner, and Dan Petroski of Massican.
But Paso may not always be a haven for small producers. Land prices are on the rise, and several of America’s largest wine corporations have taken notice of the region’s potential. A decade after the Wonderful Company (the controversial owners of Fiji Water) purchased Paso’s Justin Winery & Vineyards, the region is experiencing a consolidation boom. It started with Constellation’s 2021 acquisition of Booker. One year later, O’Neill Vintners and Distillers bought Rabble Wines, a trendy, low-cost Paso brand known for its augmented reality labels; Gallo purchased Denner Vineyards, one of Paso’s trailblazing wineries; and the publicly traded Duckhorn Portfolio bought a 289-acre Paso vineyard.
Then last year, Treasury Wine Estates made a blockbuster deal. The conglomerate purchased Daou Vineyards for just shy of $1 billion — likely more than any of Napa Valley’s most notable winery deals to date.
Still, Biagi isn’t worried that Paso will ever become the next Napa.
“I think what saves Paso is its proximity to the Bay Area,” he said. “It’s a three-hour drive from San Francisco, so it’s always going to be a little more quaint.”