France helps ex-Bay Area winemaker fulfill dream
Making wine in the Bay Area was becoming too tough for Jonathan Pey. Climate change was decimating his vineyard’s yields. Selling bottles was more competitive than ever. And buying a new plot of land looked prohibitively expensive.
So the winemaker decamped to one of France’s most storied wine regions: Beaujolais.
It sounds counterintuitive, but Pey believes establishing a new vineyard and wine label proved much easier in this historic area, in the southern reaches of famed Burgundy, than it would have been in California. Not only do the weather conditions in Beaujolais appear more merciful, he said, but Pey was able to buy his parcel for a mere fraction of what a similar vineyard would com
mand in Napa or Sonoma counties.
When Pey, who made wine here under the Pey-Marin and Textbook labels, told some of his Bay Area friends that he was buying a vineyard in Beaujolais, a few were incredulous. They’d expected him to buy something in Napa, Sonoma, Lake or Mendocino counties. He’d looked at listings in each of those places, he said, “but I just couldn’t consider buying a vineyard (in California) with such risk from drought, forest fires and their smoke.”
On some level, Pey’s Morgon project is the fulfillment of a personal dream; he lived in France as a teenager and has always loved the country. But his migration also speaks to the increasingly exclusive nature of wine in Northern California, where even a seasoned industry veteran may begin to see land ownership as untenable for both environmental and economic reasons. While it’s not yet common for Bay Area vintners to move to France — though Pey also isn’t the first to do it — many have left for other parts of California or the U.S., seeking affordable land and more predictable weather.
In the Beaujolais village of Morgon, Pey found a 4-acre plot that satisfied all his requirements: It had old vines (planted in 1953), interesting soil (chunks of pink granite), elevation (over 1,300 feet, with views of Mont Blanc on clear days), plentiful groundwater and a humane price (which Pey declined to disclose).
He bought it in December 2021 and harvested his first grapes this fall. By the spring, he expects to bottle the wine. It’s Gamay, as virtually all red Beaujolais wines are. He doesn’t know exactly how the finished product will taste, but so far, Pey said, the wine is bright and fruity — “a jackrabbit of acidity,” he said.
Before the move, Pey had been making wine in a particularly punishing corner of the Bay Area: West Marin. In 1999, he and his late wife, Susan Pey, started leasing a vineyard outside the town of Nicasio, just 5 miles from the Pacific Ocean on an old dairy farm. Its Merlot grapes struggled to ripen in the cold, windy weather. Soon, the Peys grafted the vines to Riesling and Pinot Noir, two grapes that can thrive in cooler climates.
They made wine initially under the Mount Tamalpais Vineyards label, then started PeyMarin in 2002. The couple were inspired by a rich but forgotten history of winegrowing in Marin County, which peaked in the 19th century thanks in large part to sacramental wine production at the Mission San Rafael. “We wanted to revive it,” Pey said.
But even after planting the cooler-climate grapes, keeping the business alive remained
“I just couldn’t consider buying a vineyard (in California) with such risk from drought, forest fires and their smoke.” Jonathan Pey, Pey-Marin and Textbook winemaker
challenging. “The weather’s terrible, yields are horrible, and there’s no water,” Pey said.
Plus, it wasn’t cheap: Marin isn’t known for wine, yet its high real estate costs mean that leasing farmland here is costly. In 2004, the Peys started making Cabernet Sauvignon from Oakville, Napa Valley, under a label called Textbook — which proved much easier from a farming and a marketing perspective. Still, both the Marin and the Napa wine efforts were “bootstrapped,” Pey said, requiring the couple to “max out our credit cards.”
Susan Pey died in 2016. A few years later, still grieving her death, Pey decided to get out of the two wine labels. He sold Textbook to Distinguished Vineyards & Wine Partners, which also owns Argyle Winery in Oregon and Markham Vineyards in Napa Valley. (He still consults for Textbook.) For PeyMarin, however, he didn’t anticipate finding a buyer. Because of the worsening drought and water restrictions, the West Marin vineyard was barely producing fruit at all anymore. Last year, he announced he had shut down Pey-Marin for good.
He knew he couldn’t escape climate change by going across the globe. But he figured maybe he could find a place that felt a little easier than Marin.
Pey considered several regions of France. Champagne, Bordeaux and most of Burgundy were out; too expensive. The Loire Valley, especially the Cabernet Franc-rich area of Chinon, appealed.
“But I kept coming back to cru Beaujolais,” Pey said. Cru Beaujolais refers to wines made from the 10 highest-quality subregions — known as crus — in the region. Morgon, where Pey landed, is one of these crus.
Cru Beaujolais is considered the pinnacle of what this region can produce: The wines are structured, age-worthy and complex, with the top bottles commanding $60 or more. However, these formidable wines remain in the shadow of Beaujolais’ more famous output — the inexpensive, playful Beaujolais nouveau. These young wines are released the third week of November each year, a quick-turnaround product of the just-completed harvest season. They’re simple, inexpensive and not designed to age.
Pey dislikes nouveau, regarding it a poor reflection of Beaujolais wines’ full potential. But for many Americans, Beaujolais and nouveau are synonymous. “We have to teach people that not all Beaujolais is going to be $7.99 at Trader Joe’s,” he said.
When Pey first visited the vineyard that he ended up purchasing, it felt like fate. The seller was Maison Louis Jadot — one of the largest players in Burgundy and Beaujolais, and, incidentally, Pey’s first employer in the wine industry. That, coupled with the extraordinary physical features of the site, made it seem like this was meant to be. He could hardly believe that he was able to afford it.
Buying farmland in France as an American is not without its bureaucratic headaches. Once he had entered into an agreement with Jadot, Pey had two options: Either post the transaction in the local town hall, giving an opportunity for owners of neighboring parcels to preempt the sale; or submit to the Société d’Aménagement Foncier et d’Etablissement Rural, a public system in France that vets farmland sales to ensure that land is distributed equitably. (The goal is to prevent wealthy people from owning too much land and to allow smaller-scale farmers to add to their holdings to become profitable.) The SAFER route required Pey to submit to extensive interviews with French government officials, who vetted his worthiness as a Beaujolais vigneron, or wine grower.
“They wanted to make sure it wasn’t a flip,” he said. He had to prove that he spoke French, that he was an experienced winemaker and that he was serious about the vineyard. Obtaining a winemaking license and setting up the business added a few more logistical hassles. But he was ready to go by harvest 2022.
Four acres isn’t much, but the vines are planted in a dense pattern — 4,000 vines per acre, about double the standard of a Bay Area vineyard. Still, Pey has resigned himself to low yields, at least for the time being: He’s in the process of converting the site to organic farming, which tends to decrease the vines’ output (perhaps by as much as 30%) during the transition.
The growing conditions in Beaujolais this year weren’t perfect. Hail in the spring reduced the crop load. Irrigation is mostly illegal during the summer months (standard in French wine regions), which exacerbated a hotter-than-usual summer. Even with those challenges, though, Pey said it felt easy compared with West Marin.
The new venture is bittersweet, Pey said, without his longtime winemaking partner, Susan Pey. Yet her death may have been a catalyst for him to make the leap to France.
“When you face the loss that I’ve faced,” he said, “you just think, ‘Let’s do it today.’ ”