County's wineries hang on, seeking major-player status in the industry

County's wineries hang on, seeking major-player status in the industry
By Richard Bammer
Posted: 09/09/2009 07:56:58 AM PDT

When Jess Jones casts a cold eye on the Northern California wine industry, he not only smiles but he also signals a frown.

The smile is for his own successful small winery, Jess Jones Vineyard, on 3.5 acres off Midway Road in Dixon. There, he and his wife, Mary Ellen, grow the grapes, press and bottle six different varietals, some blushes and port for $5 to $14 per bottle, and sell them out of a modest tasting room that opened in May.

The frown is for the pending grape harvest, a likely bumper crop statewide, he said, based on his own heavily fruited vines a stone's throw from the tasting room. It's a situation that may portend, according to some analysts, a glut and depressed prices for the 2009 harvest.

But Jones, a genial 67-year-old with short-cropped gray hair, believes he will weather the possible slump, as he has in other lean years, because he bottles what he grows, serving what he calls "the low end of the market." Lacking a contract, he is not trying to sell grapes to a broker or to megawineries.

"The value-priced wines -- the ones selling for $12 or less -- they'll do OK," he said Thursday, seated in the tasting room, a homey affair made of wood and sheet metal and furnished with sturdy wooden kitchen tables. "But the wines selling for $30 or $40 and up -- they're suffering."

Solano County is not known for pricey varietals, commanding $50 or more, as some wines from Napa and Sonoma counties are. Many tasting room visitors, looking for bargains when they visit during shaky economic times, are more likely to plunk down $10 to $12 for a bottle of pinot noir, cabernet, sangiovese or chardonnay, said Ron Lanza, vice president of Wooden Valley Winery in Suisun Valley.

Jones agreed.

A Dixon native and former U.S. Army captain who served during the Vietnam era, he planted his first vines in 1997, believing the east county's fertile soils and cool Delta climate were a recipe for profitable vineyard operations. Today, while still growing other crops on some 160 acres alongside his vines, he owns one of two Dixon-based wineries and has taken his place among the winery business in Solano County.

Last year, Solano County produced 14,000 tons of wine grapes on some 4,000 acres, with revenues of $11 million -- numbers that show a slight decrease from previous years. However, wine grapes still rank among the top 10 crops in the county.

Prospects for Solano's still-budding wine industry, Jones said, are generally good, as more wineries open, as the Suisun Valley appellation becomes more widely known and as bus tour managers include the county on their itineraries.

Likewise, Sandy Person, vice president of the Solano Economic Development Corporation, said Solano has slowly "pushed its way into the picture as a growing wine industry entity."

"Solano has kind of come full circle in the game," she said. "We grow the grapes, we bottle it, we cork it, label it, distribute it and we drink it."

True, but Lanza, who addressed an Aug. 20 EDC breakfast meeting on the economic impact of wine grapes in Solano, said the county could reap even greater benefits if more wineries opened and sold locally produced wines.

"One of our biggest issues is, that we estimate that we only consume 4 or 5 percent of the grapes we grow here, that are sold here," he said. "Ninety-five percent of the grapes leave the county and go to other wineries."

The resulting "lost opportunities" of tasting-room jobs and considerable tax revenues should not be ignored, said Lanza. He noted that, by contrast, El Dorado County, with 3,000 acres in vines, a figure similar to Suisun Valley acreage, "uses 80 percent of what they grow" at its 20 wineries.

"We're low-percentage end-users," he said. "We're (the Suisun Valley Grape Growers Association) trying to change that. There are two to seven tasting rooms in the Suisun Valley. That really helps out. The goal is to be more of an end-user. That will definitely help the county."

Referring to the county's General Plan, a document which guides planners into the future, Lanza noted it contained a specific section on Suisun Valley, with county leaders making it 'easier and more user-friendly to open up a winery."

"We want to create more wineries and market Suisun Valley as a destination," he said.

James Herwatt, CEO of Cork Supply in Benicia, which sells corks and screw caps to wineries nationwide, is bullish on the wine industry's future in Solano County.

He recently invested more than $3 million to expand his business into a new but related line: the making of French oak barrels. His is the only county firm to operate a cooperage, or barrel-making facility.

"Our goal is to produce the finest French oak barrels -- with attention to details," said Herwatt, who oversees 45 employees and last year posted revenues of $55 million.

He agreed that the 2009 wine grape crop may incur "a softening" of prices, but, he added, growers, rather than sell cheaply or leave their clusters on the vine to rot, should make their own wine, bottle it and sell it, as Jones does.

"They should say, 'If I can't sell my own grapes, then I'm going to make my own wine, that we're willing to crush grapes and enter the marketplace,' " said Herwatt, who also spoke at the Aug. 20 EDC meeting. "There are wineries and capitalists out there who are going to benefit from this."

Saying he was "cautiously optimistic" about the wine industry, he noted that it grew by 2 percent last year, meaning "more people are drinking wine." While high-end wines are showing the least amount of growth, the "$10-to-$14-a-bottle market is growing somewhere between 2 and 5 percent," he added.

Such figures are good news for Jones, who last year produced 2,000 gallons of wine on his 3.5 acres and corked 10,000 bottles, or 833 cases of 12 bottles each.

"This is my retirement project," said Jones, smiling. "We don't want to quit. We want to stay."

To that end, he slightly expanded his winery's offerings earlier this year. A few steps from the tasting room, Jones built an unenclosed "event center," a concrete slab covered by a white tent, and hosted his first event on June 28, featuring the Narrow Gauge Bluegrass Band. The event center, which also has hosted a class reunion and a wedding, had its grand opening Aug. 29.

Like Lanza and Herwatt, he remains upbeat about the wine industry in Solano.

"There are a lot of impressive wineries out there," Jones said.

Jess Jones VineyardAddress: 6496 Jones Lane, Dixon

Owners:Jess and Mary Ellen (Mel) Jones

Products: Six varietals, some blush wines and port

Tasting room hours: 1 to 5:30 p.m. Fridays to Sundays and by appointment. "But we're here nearly all the time during the summer months, so we're basically open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., except Sunday," said Jess.

Telephone: (530) 304-3806

Web site: www.jessjonesvineyard.com