After recently selling his world-renowned Calera Wine Company, located high up on Cienega Road 20 minutes outside Hollister, Josh Jensen, 73 (he likes to add “and-a-half”), is retiring for the second time in his life. The first time was when he was in his 20s. He said he was a big believer in retiring first, then working hard for the rest of his life, which he has done for the past 42 years.
As if taking a page out of James Michener’s novel, The Drifters, which was about America’s disenchanted youth during the Vietnam era as they backpacked across Spain, Morocco and Mozambique, Jensen, instead, found his way to France, settling in Burgundy, where he began his 40-year search of fine wines.
Jensen grew up in a small town in the East Bay. In 1957, he was a high school sophomore who played football, but loved tennis. It was about that time his parents bought a horse ranch in southern San Benito County, so he became familiar with the county and Hollister at an early age.
On a recent day, he sat in khaki shorts and a T-shirt on a wooden bench overlooking the rolling Diablo Range that stretches between Mount Harlan, where his winery sits, and the San Joaquin Valley. His plans for the day included a game of tennis in Hidden Valley with old friends whom he described in “varying degrees of old,” with the youngsest being 62 and the oldest tipping 85. He said they are the most diverse group of people he has ever been with: a Japanese-American who just retired as the professor and headed the graphics department at San Jose State; a retired Jamaican professional soccer player; and a Mexican-American doctor.
Jensen went on to relate how after high school he attended Yale and then Oxford, where he said his studies were mainly about avoiding the military draft to during the Vietnam War. He also joined the rowing teams for both universities. He said with pride that he was able to row in the Oxford-Cambridge race on the Thames River in London, where a million spectators watched.
Early on, he had developed a passion for great food and wine.
“I had a mentor growing up who was one of my dad’s lifelong friends — Dr. George Selleck, who was a dentist in San Francisco,” Jensen said. “He was an extraordinary wine collector and a great chef. He and his wife had six-course meals of fine French cuisine. By the time I turned 21, I had tasted all the great wines of Europe at their house. He also collected California wines when nobody was doing that.”
After college, Jensen began hitchhiking across Europe. Even though he was frugal when it came to where he slept, when it came to his second passion, fine dining, he sought out as many of the Michelin 3-star restaurants in France that he could. Eventually, he managed to dine at seven of the 10 in the country.
In the summer of 1970, he found himself on the doorstep of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, in Côte d’Or, the most famous Pinot Noir estate in Burgundy. He said today their bottles cost thousands of dollars each. But back then, he was able to earn himself three bottles for 10 days work as a grape picker. He knew college-level French, which was handy, but said the fieldworkers and their wives honed it to perfection, beginning with as many swearwords as he could handle. He was eager to learn. Besides picking, he also “punched” the grapes with his feet.
“I’d do that then go out in the fields and pick all day long and then come in for the evening punch-down,” he said. “Back then, we did it with our feet. Today, we have this labor-saving brass cylinder with a pneumatic piston that punches them down. We still do it with our feet if we have just a half ton of grapes in four-foot-deep tanks.”
Jensen hadn’t quite made up his mind about what he wanted to do when he came out of his first retirement, but he definitely knew what he did not want to do. He didn’t want to be a dentist, like his father. He didn’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer, banker, or stockbroker. As his list continued to grow, his friends started to call him a bum who eats and drinks well—thanks to an inheritance from his grandfather—but doesn’t have a job.
That’s when he began telling people he was enjoying his retirement early, while he was single and didn’t have any responsibilities, and was dating beautiful women while dining in some of the finest restaurants on the planet. He told them after retirement that he would work hard for the rest of his life.
When he returned to San Benito County, Jensen began searching for land that contained limestone, which he said provides the best wine-growing locations in Burgundy. So, too, he reasoned it would be the same in California. He thought it would only take a couple weeks to find the right piece of land. It took more than two years. During that time, he often volunteered at Chalone Vineyard in the Gavilan plateau, where he did whatever was necessary, from picking grapes, gluing irrigation hoses, to racking wines.
The first piece of land he bought in 1974, he said, was five miles back into the wild country of the Gavilan Range, 2,000 feet above sea level. He and one other man cut oak and pine trees and cleared chaparral brush in preparation for planting 500 vines as a test plot. He bought the property where his winery now stands in 1976. The former property was a rock-crushing plant that had been built in the 1950s. He said Archie Hamilton, whom he described as the hard rock mining entrepreneur in the county for decades, was preparing to crush limestone there.
“He owned the big limestone deposit up on the mountain that I eventually bought later on from his widow,” Jensen said. “That was in 1982, and it gave us a much-needed creek and a site for a reservoir. Most of our vineyards are now on that property.”
To start buying property and build his company, he used part of the inheritance from his grandfather and brought on three partners — his parents and an old family friend, Bill Reed, who was a wealthy Seattle lumberman. Over the years, Jensen was able to buy out Reed and his father’s interests.
“I paid $57 an acre, and at the time I thought it was a pretty good deal,” he said as he told one of his favorite stories. “But I ran into this old-timer who lived in Gilroy who loved deer hunting and hunted on the property before I bought it. We chatted for a bit and he asked what I paid for the property. I said that’s confidential. He said ‘I heard you paid $57 an acre.’ I told him he was right and that I thought I got an especially good deal. He says, ‘I think you sort of over-paid.’”
Jensen said nothing much has changed on that land since then. There are no paved roads, no electricity, no phone service, and no access other than across someone else’s property, which has been allowed all over the years.
He said he learned the trade as he worked in it and that his volunteering at Chalone was invaluable. He said he knew how the French produced fine wines, but there is a significant difference in trying to do the same in a hot, dry landscape, such as found in San Benito County. Even with those differences, Jensen is still connected to France through the French oak barrels he uses.
“We use them exclusively for aging our wines,” he said. “We almost had to go to Burgundy to place an order with coopers (barrel-makers) over there. That’s an essential part of flavor structure of great French Burgundy. It’s special wood, grown in French forests where the trees are spaced out so they grow up straight and have few limbs so there aren’t any knots. They’re harvested when they’re the right size and shape, at about 60 years old. You saw them into three-foot lengths and air dry them for three years.”
Of his 26 employees, Jensen said half have worked for him for 15 years or more and all have been offered jobs by the new owners. Most, he said, are Mexican-Americans. He said it would not be possible to grow grapes in California without the help of Mexican-Americans.
“They’ve been indispensable,” he said. “They’re smart, honest, we pay them better than our competitors. We want them to learn, so they stay and we don’t have to keep training high school kids.”
Jensen said he sold the company because his three children aren’t interested in running it. After he and his wife divorced more than 20 years ago, they primarily stayed with her in the Bay Area and weren’t exposed to the winery very much, he said. Over the years, each sought out a different career path.
“It’s my own fault they aren’t working in the wine business,” he admitted. “Literally, from almost the day they were born, I told them to find their passion and do it, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
Jensen said one daughter is an opera singer as a member of the San Francisco Opera’s Chorus and sings with the San Francisco Orchestra Chorus. His other daughter has obtained a master’s degree in social work at New York University. And his son works for a hedge fund.
Over the ensuing four decades, he has focused primarily on growing his business and its reputation. A big part of this effort involves traveling every year to France.
Jensen said on Aug. 18, now that he has sold his company to Napa Valley’s Duckhorn Wine Co. he will remain another four years as a paid consultant. When asked what that entails, he smiled and said he would be going to fine restaurants to be the entertainment, where people would pay $125 to dine and drink Calera wines as they listen to him expound how they are made.
When asked where San Benito County stands in the world of wine, he said the sale of Calera to the highly regarded Duckhorn will surely raise the county’s profile.
“They’re highly respected and a number of the top managers and the main owner told me he’s been collecting our wines for 20 years,” he said. “We’re known by the cognoscente (discerning experts), but nobody really knows where Hollister is. A lot of people make the worst assumption that Hollister is in the San Joaquin Valley, where you cannot make world-class wines because the days are too hot and the nights too warm.”
If one were to challenge that statement, Jensen dismisses the vast vineyards of San Joaquin Valley as “jug wine,” referring to Gallo. While he might dismiss their wines, he called them the giants of everyday-priced wines. He said if he had one piece of advice for someone entering the wine business, it’s don’t try to compete with the Gallos of the world.
When it comes to prime real estate for his wines on retail shelves, Jensen said that when he sells a case of wine to a distributor, he asks them not to sell it in grocery stores, with a few exceptions, such as the Marina Safeway in San Francisco. He said his wines are sold in 47 out of 50 states and 22 foreign countries.
“Our monster market is Japan,” he said. “We sell 30 percent of everything we make there. It’s a sophisticated wine market and I’ve made it a priority to travel to Japan every year to put on seminars and wine tastings. It’s the one place on Earth where our wines have a following.”
Calera company produces about 35,000 cases annually. Jensen said this year’s grape harvest was fast approaching, and by Sept 1, they would begin making their way down from the hills to the presses.
“This year, the wine is probably going to be known for the extreme hot summer, which is not good for the grapes if they’re near harvest,” he said. “It can dehydrate them; it can even raisin them, if it’s too extreme. This year, that’s not the case because it rained so much our reservoir not only filled up, but it did so on Jan. 23, which has never happened.”
Aug. 14 was Jensen’s last day of ownership of Calera. Until 2019, he will rent the home he had built next to the winery and sold along with the company, as he travels promoting wines for the new owner. Meanwhile, he will be building a new home just down the road.
For more information about Calera or Duckhorn, visit their websites.
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