Jackson Hole Winery

PHOTOGRAPHY & EDIT: Rebecca Goodpasture

JACKSON HOLE WINERY

with winemaker Anthony Schroth

Jackson, Wyoming, USA

EDITOR'S NOTE

An hour into our interview Anthony and I realized we grew up a five-minute walk from one another. Our families have the same patriotic devotion to local restaurants (Point Loma Seafood), youth sports teams and the local high school, and yet here we were, 1,001 miles away, meeting and connecting for the first time.

I am perhaps most thankful for connecting with Maggie, the sommelier and cellar door host at Jackson Hole Winery. We met during my first visit to the winery, and 30 minutes in I was polishing glasses, waiting for her shift to end so we could go on a tour of the local distillery and later the local brewery. We spent the summer paddle boarding and drinking wine, and for this friendship and connection I am eternally thankful.

I interviewed Anthony in July 2018, just before moving to Washington for the fall vintage. As I write this, I'm packing for my second vintage, and I can look back at this conversation as the first lesson in the combined technical beauty and resilience of harvest.

I think sports teach you some discipline. Practice, practice, practice and you start to see improvements.

With baseball, you hit a ball three out of ten times, you hit 300, you go to the Hall of Fame. I mean in any other sport you’re a loser.

There’s a lot of frustration in making a mistake or not getting that hit, and having to move past it. And with winemaking, and I think with business, you have to keep pushing forward. You’re gonna make mistakes, you have to learn how to learn from those mistakes and keep improving. And baseball certainly helped me do that.

BASEBALL TO WINE:

I think I transferred 5 or 6 times. Went to 7 different colleges trying to play baseball.

I got recruited by Sonoma State. So, I went to Sonoma State thinking “baseball.” Was not thinking wine, vineyards, grapes. Driving into the valley you quickly realize you’re in wine country, because the vines are on every hill, valley, nook and cranny.

I was taking Wine 101 and I picked up an internship in Napa Valley at O’Brian Family Vineyards. Going through harvest and crush, they were long days. We were getting up at 4:30 in the morning and not getting out of there until 8, 9 p.m., and waking up and doing it all over the next morning. It was the first job I ever was just excited to run out the door, no coffee needed, let’s go make wine.

ON THE START:

In 2009 we got a little bit of fruit, and it was an experimental lot. We brought the fruit up and crushed it, fermented it, and kept waiting for that other shoe to drop. The “Oh no, this just won’t work.” And it never came.

And it actually turned out to be a benefit, tracking these fermentations. I was going “My god, this is exactly what you want.” And we weren’t doing anything. We weren’t trying to control the temperatures, we were just letting it naturally happen, and at the end of it we had a great wine. And then it was like, “Wow, we can do this.”

How are we going to do this? How are we going to scale it up? And we just kept chipping away.

You look back, and we started with four barrels and now we have 200.

TASTING ROOM: extending from the original homestead onto a patio, often loaded with pups and featuring a relaxing, serene view of green hills and a soft stream.

It’s pretty cool to see, to see essentially the same pinot noir fruit ferment in California versus Jackson. We pick it the same day, so we’ll start the fermentation in California (under Anthony's California label, Premonition), start the fermentation in Jackson, and Jackson goes a week longer. That was what jumped out to me, the very first time we did it. That there’s something definitely different in Jackson.

ON ELEVATION & OXIDATION:

We barrel age our reds for about 18 to 20 months, especially with our pinots. A lot of people like to barrel age their pinots for 10-12, 14 months, in that window. We get a few extra months, allow that oak to integrate in, allow the acids and tannins to soften and round out.

One of the benefits of crushing and fermenting at elevation is we’re 30 degrees cooler here. When you get below 50 degrees, one benefit is oxidation, the second is microbal activity, so yeast is not viable.

With every 1000 feet in elevation you loose 3% less oxygen. So, with an elevation of over 6000 feet, we’re fermenting at 18% less oxygen.

Yeast needs a lot of oxygen to ferment. And so we’ve noticed that we don’t get these hot, fast fermentations, we get a nice, steady progression of temperatures rising, yeast activity increasing, but we might top out at 85, 87 degrees, and then things just cool back down and you’re on the tail end of the fermentation.

And we are fermenting anywhere between three and four weeks with our wines. In California they’re between two and three weeks, and they might use a lot of dry ice or tanks with glycol jackets to control the temperatures to slow things down, we don’t have to do that. We just let it naturally go.

ON THE VINEYARDS:

What we’re doing in nothing new. There’s people that are buying fruit from California and are shipping it all the way to Atlanta, Georgia, all the way to Connecticut. But they’re buying the fruit and having it shipped out, and they’re trusting the guy at the other end of the phone.

I go out to California and actually farm, manage seven different vineyards and walk the vineyards that we buy fruit from.

And I make the decision on when we’re going to pick it, and I help pick.

We drive it out.

I am much more hands on. I’ve talked to some folks that get fruit from Sonoma, Napa, and ship it down to San Diego. They think I’m nuts for going out there and going back and forth so much instead of just sitting and waiting for the fruit to arrive. It’s a lot of work during harvest crush but I know what I want and I want to make those decisions, so that’s why I go out there and do it. You have to be on the site to taste the flavors, the tannins, the maturity.

We start picking at 3 o’clock in the morning in California with our headlights and the vineyard, it’s a pretty cool sight. You see all these lights flashing around and the vines shaking and then the guys yelling and the fruit comes flying in. And then we layer some dry ice and we hit the road.

18, 20 hours later we’re back here in Jackson and we’re crushing and fermenting at elevation.

PINOT NOIR: a sunset picnic at Jackson Hole Lodge, with the Tetons in the background

A PEEK AT THE WINES

PINOT NOIR:

We ferment it on the skins for three to four weeks. We get incredible color extraction, we get tannin extraction from the skins and the seeds, and then after that we press it and it goes into French oak barrels for 18 months. And it’ll pick up a lot of flavor from the oak, the toasty vanilla, caramel, some spice notes, and also being barrel aged allows it to soften the tannins, soften the acidity (see Ritual Chocolate’s barrel aged bar).

VINEYARD SOURCE

I chose Russian River Valley for pinot noir and chardonnay. It’s a really unique micro climate and my favorite pinots and chardonnays come from that area, so I wanted to work with that fruit.

ANTHONY EXPLAINS:

Russian River Valley microclimate

In the Russian River Valley they get a really thick fog bank that rolls in, you can actually see it roll in late in the evening. It’ll just roll over the hills and then the next morning it sits in the valley. No sun comes through, you don’t think the sun’s gonna come out at all, but then around 12:30, 1 o’clock the fog burns off, you have bluebird skies and it’s 85 degrees.

The cool foggy mornings help to retain natural acidity in the fruit, it doesn't allow the transpirations (the process of water movement through a plant) and evaporation of acids and then in the afternoon you get the photosynthesis.

So you get this nice balance of having the sugars, the acids, and you get a nice long hang time which develops really beautiful fruit flavors and stunning wines.

ROSÉ:

Rosé is normally a bi-product leftover, or maybe a vineyard source that isn’t looking that good so lets make some rosé.

This year we dedicated a full ton of the pinot noir straight to the rosé. We took one of our best vineyards and we were like, “we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna do it right.” We crushed it and pressed it on the skins, and the pressure and the rolling in the press allowed us to pick up a lot more color in the pinot noir. It’s still a light rosé, but darker than the other years previous.

And it came out fantastic, gold medal in the New York International wine competition, and sold out in two months.

We’ll do the same thing again this year, I really love it. We’re all about quality and not necessarily quantity.

TIMING

Difference with rosé (versus pinot noir) is you’re bleeding it off, pressing it off the skins, and then you ferment it and it’s actually ready in three to four weeks. We do not go through a malolactic fermentation. It was stainless steel and we bottled it in February, which was about six months later.

ANTHONY EXPLAINS:

saignée

Years past we would saignée the pinot noir juice for the rose.

We would crush our pinot noir into our fermentation bins and then each one of the bins we would siphon, bleed off, saignée off 10-15% of that juice.

We would do it immediately, so we would get this nice, pale pink color, and great aromatics in both wines.

Editor's note: Anthony refers to "both wines" because the saignée method of rosé production impacts the original red wine as well. By bleeding off 10-15% of the juice for rosé, the remaining Pinot Noir in the fermentation bin has a higher juice to skin contact, which leads to a more concentrated red wine.

VIOGNIER:

The viognier – it’s one of my favorite white wines. Done right, its got these amazing apricot, melon, perfumey aromatics with great mouthfeel and nice acidity and screams summertime and it’s really unique.

VINEYARD SOURCE

We have a great vineyard source in Sonoma.

We were the last ones to pick it, and I kept waiting for those flavors to develop. And that last day I went out there, we tasted the fruit and you could taste the apricot in the fruit and it was like, here we go. Let’s get this off the vine and we’ll get it fermenting. And sure enough our wine shows this beautiful apricot and melon, citrus, and I love it.

CATCH AND RELEASE:

We’ve done 100% Zinfandel on our Catch and Release, but we can’t call it zinfandel, we cant put the vintage, and we can't say it even comes from California. Which is just wild.

VINEYARD SOURCE

We buy Lil Zellers; he’s an old school, an old timer, he’s a country boy. He’s one of the biggest characters you’ll ever meet. He has about an acre, an acre and a half of a zinfandel vineyard. And we purchased the whole thing.

We like working with smaller vineyards and trying to buy all the fruit. One, that allows us to have more control over the farming of it and two, guarantees us to get fruit.

ANTHONY EXPLAINS:

what's in a name

A number of our wines are labeled “American red wine.”

We source our fruit in California and the TTB or federal law states that if you’re sourcing fruit and bringing it to another non-adjoining state for fermenting, the only appellation you’re able to put on that label is “American.” Then, if the only appellation you can label your wine is “American,” you can’t put a vintage or a varietal.

So we have American red wine, and we have our fanciful names, Catch and Release, Rendezvous Red, The Outlaw, Alpine Glow. And we have lot numbers, which are actually those years. So “Lot 15” would be our 2015 vintage. We’ve spent a number of years educating people on exactly what’s going on with the label. But, that’s the only thing we can do.

WINE WITH A VIEW: the soothing view from the tasting room patio

I would say the most common thing that we get out here after the third wine is someone apologizing, and they tell us they wrote us off before they even got here. And they taste through three of them and they go “this is the real deal. This is great stuff.” We educate them on what we’re doing and next thing you know they’re signing up for the wine club and the rest is history.

Fred Dame came out two weeks ago and said the same thing. He said, “I thought my buddy was dragging me here and I was going to have to smile or something.” And he goes, “Wow you guys are really doing a great job.” And that was huge for us.

Every single day it’s what we hear. Three times yesterday, and I’m sure we’ll hear it again today. We encourage people to give us a shot.

Many thanks to Anthony and his family, and to Maggie.