How a millionaire became a billionaire by mass-marketing banality as ‘premium wine.’

Book Review: ‘A Man and His Mountain’ by Edward Humes

How a millionaire became a billionaire by mass-marketing banality as ‘premium wine.’

ROBERT DRAPER

Oct. 25, 2013 3:12 p.m. ET

Shortly after finishing “A Man and His Mountain,” Edward Humes’s biography of Kendall-Jackson winery founder Jess Stonestreet Jackson, I went to my local grocery store and, for $12.99, purchased a bottle of the winery’s signature product, the Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay. It had been years since I’d had a glass of it. But the taste remains unforgettable: oaky and cloying, redolent of budget-hotel bars, a kind of polyester wine. This is the style of Chardonnay that Jackson stamped into the American palate three decades ago.Mr. Humes appears never to have tried the stuff and sees Kendall-Jackson as the Apple of the wine industry—and says so more than once. He glorifies Jackson as the man who “set out to teach America to love good American wine.” One buttery sip tells a completely different story. It’s the tale of how a millionaire became a billionaire by the mass-marketing of banality as “premium wine.”

A Man and His Mountain

By Edward Humes
PublicAffairs, 324 pages, $26.99

The author has saddled himself with a challenging narrative. For starters, the Jess Jackson story is all too recognizable. The bookstores are crammed with biographies of bootstrapping if emotionally repressed alpha males who emerged from the Depression with unsinkable dreams. The brutish father, the maniacal work ethic, the adoring college sweetheart he marries (and, in his successful years, dumps). Born in 1930, Jackson was a cop, then a prosecutor, then a real-estate lawyer. Only in midlife, wealth acquired, did the fantasy of becoming a farmer, and thus a winemaker, take hold. Even then, he approaches the trade in the factual manner of a numbers guy. From the Lakeport, Calif., farm he acquires in 1974 to his recruitment of maverick winemaker Jed Steele to assist with the seminal blended Chardonnay, Jackson is methodological even in risk-taking, a human-drama-free zone.

Then there’s the vocation itself. Though Mr. Humes describes winemaking as “something ancient, unique, mystical, and profound,” the work itself is quite tedious, and poetry doesn’t come easily from pruning or fermenting. What does seem a fascinating story is the slow transformation of somnolent Napa and Sonoma into a viticultural Disneyland, which seems to have begun right around the time Jackson’s wines entered the market in 1982. Strangely, Mr. Humes doesn’t bother setting the stage for us or fleshing out the region’s confederation of soon-to-be-celebrity winemakers. Denied this rich panorama, we see only what interests Jackson—which, more often than not, is limited to buying up prized parcels of land and mulling over price points.

The author apparently spent a great deal of time with Jackson, who died in 2011 at the age of 81. Access, as any journalist knows, can be a double-edged sword. Mr. Humes fell in love with his subject, which would be fine if the affection were accompanied by rigorous thinking. But we’re left with a portrait of the man as he saw himself. Jackson’s will to power is formidable; it costs him his first marriage, imperils his relationship with his daughters and alienates him from the rest of the wine industry. (Mr. Humes maintains that the “old guard” was jealous of Jackson’s success.) He snatches up coveted vineyards and winemakers (and, later, racehorses) with Steinbrenner-esque bravado. There’s a fitful monster within the maverick—and beneath that, a frail Depression child—but these dimensions go largely unexamined. At one point, Mr. Humes writes that Jackson “struggled with” shyness; later the author tells us that the wine entrepreneur harbored “not a shred of shyness about asserting himself.” Near the end of the book, Jackson glibly sums himself up as a fancified farmer, one who “loved dirt and hated debt”—an absurd reduction of a billionaire who borrowed constantly and left the tilling and picking to the hired hands.

Where the book especially falters is in explaining Jackson’s relationship to his second vocation. “My focus is on making the best wine in the world,” he claimed, but Mr. Humes unwittingly disproves this by describing the company’s strategy of “continued acquisition, growth, and vineyard expansion” and quoting Jackson in Donald Trump mode saying, “I love winning the game.”

It’s telling that in 300 pages of text, there’s not a single mention of Jackson ever having a glass of wine. (Did the billionaire have his own wine collection? Did he love any of the great wines of Bordeaux or Piedmont? Did he even drink?) For that matter, how do we reconcile Jackson’s many lectures on the virtue of terroir—the combination of climate and soil conditions that lends a particular grape grown in a particular place its distinctness—with the inescapable fact that his wines were designed to taste like they could have come from anywhere or nowhere? By 1994, Kendall-Jackson was producing 1.7 million cases per year, and along the way Jackson had changed the paradigm of what one thinks of when one thinks of Chardonnay. Quite an achievement for a real-estate lawyer, but let’s not confuse it with winemaking.

The pivotal moment in “A Man and His Mountain” takes place when Jackson’s first vintage of Chardonnay is imperiled by a “stuck fermentation” that causes some of the wine to go sugary. Undeterred, Jackson just has it blended in with the rest of the Chardonnay, and Americans go bananas for the sweeter style. The “superblend” is Jackson’s secret sauce, a triumph of indistinctness.

As it happens, in the late 1990s, Jackson also made a high-end wine known as Verité. A month after his death, the famed wine critic Robert Parker paid a visit to the winery, indulged in a vertical tasting of Verité and broke down in tears over the loss of one of the industry’s dominant figures. He awarded perfect scores to several of the wines. Mr. Humes interprets this sentimental gesture as proof that Jess Jackson’s wines actually belonged “in the same category as the finest in the world: Chapoutier, Guigal and, yes, Château Pétrus.” To which I can only say: Come on, man. Just take a sip.