A Chat with the Powerhouse Behind Jax Vineyards

We caught up with Jax Vineyards general manager and partner Dan Parrott by phone – he wears a stack of hats at the winery and is on the road a lot. His background is an intriguing departure from the standard enology degree or MBA route. He’s a former documentary photographer, Windows on the World educator, and also worked for a few prestigious European wine importers – and is now the engine behind a hip, well-distributed, restaurant-friendly brand that also makes acclaimed limited-production bottlings. And he somehow operates with the lean staff of a small family winery. 

He does it alongside renowned consulting winemaker Kirk Venge, a second-generation Napa legend. Having Kirk’s name on a reasonably priced bottle of wine is, as Dan puts it, "pretty nice."

The winery was founded in the bucolic northern end of Napa Valley in 1996 by the Jackson family (different Jacksons than you might be thinking – hence the playful, modern name Jax). Siblings Trent and Kimberly Jackson turned their father’s seven-acre retirement vineyard in Calistoga into a winery with momentum. Dan has since grown the project dramatically for them with a rare combination of laser-like business acumen and earnest hands-on involvement in the dusty, juice-spattered craft of producing wine. 

We talk about how they keep these beautifully made wines affordable, Jax’s knack for speaking to the current palate, and why their tasting room was destined to be in San Francisco rather than Napa. 

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We’ll dig into some Jax history in a moment, but first I want to ask, for anyone who’s familiar with Kirk Venge’s work and hasn’t tried Jax yet: Does Kirk tailor his winemaking style for Jax?

Kirk’s known for bigger and bolder wines, whereas I like to bring in my fruit a little bit earlier – around 26 brix on the Cab, so I can kind of control the alcohol, and not have problems with stuck fermentations. The Y3 wines are stylistically focused on what I learned working with winemakers in France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal – and also real-life consumer preferences I noticed working in restaurants. I wouldn't say they are completely atypical from modern day Napa and Sonoma, but generally a little leaner in style and slightly lower in alcohol. 

The Jax estate brand is a little more typical of the area and region. That said, I’ve been asking him to pull it back a little for 15 years. A few months ago, I was tasting his own barrels next to his Jax barrels, and went “wait a minute…” – he's now adapting with his own wines. [laughs] 

People's profiles change. And younger customers are starting to look at the bottles, notice the alcohol level, and they want to know a little bit more about the winemaking. I think 20 years ago it was: “Just put it in a glass and let's see what it tastes like… this isn't big enough, I want bigger.” Nowadays, people are pulling back a little, for moderation but also because it’s their style preference. 

The Jackson siblings who own the winery with you – Trent and Kimberly – did they grow up in Napa? 

No, they grew up in Hillsborough, just south of San Francisco. Their parents bought the vineyard in the early ‘90s. They had a lot of friends in wine country. When Dave Jackson, their father, decided to retire, he wanted to keep busy. He had a printing company, and he kind of retired into grape growing. The plan was just to sell the fruit, but pretty soon Trent said, “Hey, why don't we make a little bit of wine for friends and family?” Trent was living in San Francisco at the time, and this was before the internet, so he went to the library and got a book on how to make wine. Well, actually, how to make beer. And so he literally made a barrel of wine in his garage in San Francisco. 

With beer-making instructions?

He was just learning fermentation on his own, and it turned out to be vinegar. So the next year, he thought: Let’s get a little more serious about this and actually enlist a winemaker. So they found someone, and made a couple barrels of Cabernet from the estate vineyard. ‘96 was our first vintage. 

Kimberly went to Vanderbilt in Tennessee for a master's degree in business, and decided that she wanted to start a club for wine enthusiasts while she was there, and it became the most popular club at the university. 

The family had a cattle ranch in Australia through the grandparents, and so Trent's major job was – and has been over the last 30 years – to run the cattle ranch and subdivide the property for residential real estate development. So he said to Kimberly back then, “We’re making a couple barrels of this wine. If this is something you really want to do, why don't you come back?” So then Kimberly started selling the wine locally to restaurants, just one bottle at a time, in San Francisco. She had her dog, and was driving around growing the business. 

Where does the Y3 line come in?

In total, we have about 14 wines. Jax, our estate vineyard-designate label, was first. The whole production for Jax is just under 2,500 cases – so not a lot. Y3 we started in 2003. “Y3” was the cattle brand sign on their grandparents’ ranch, and we source the fruit from small growers like ourselves. Everything is hand harvested, family owned, and earth friendly – organic or biodynamic. We have to be doing what's best for the soil. Y3 is much bigger, about 25,000 cases. 

Wow!

That keeps the lights on. Those are meant to be everyday wines that retail between $20 and $30, and you may see them on restaurant lists by the glass. And then Jax is a little more serious, more collector’s wines, to the point that we even put the number of barrels produced right on the front of the label. For instance, the Dutton Ranch Chardonnay this year will say “five barrels.”

Trent got the winery off the ground, Kimberly carried it forward, and now you’re in the driver’s seat most of the time?

Yes, they were up to about 5,000 cases 14 years ago when I came in. I’ve grown it to five times that, and now I do the day-to-day – including sales. I'm on the road doing trade shows and events. Kimberly is more involved in design and direct-to-consumer sales. Trent and I share an office, so he's always around, and still very involved in the final phase of developing the cattle ranch. I make the wines with Kirk Venge. He came on board to finish the 2002 vintage.

It’s pretty great that Kirk guided the replanting of the estate vineyard – selecting clones and rootstocks – and he's still your winemaker. How involved is he with Y3?

Kirk was just doing the Jax estate wines for a long time, and took over the Y3 reds in 2013 and the whites in 2014. I had been a war photographer, worked for restaurants, worked at Windows On the World at the World Trade Center. I’d worked with a French importer and then an Italian importer. I came into the business and said to him, “Let’s do this.” And now he makes the Y3 wines as well.

It seems like a coup, because you not only have his skills, but also the cachet of his name on the label of some very affordable wines. 

Absolutely. To have Kirk Venge making these wines, and have his name on a $20 bottle of wine, is pretty nice.

Where did you grow up? 

I grew up in Michigan. Then I went to school in Arizona, and I worked in restaurants to put myself through school. I always liked wine, didn't think I'd ever do anything with it. I have a master's degree in photography, and I was a photographer up until about 2006. 

I read that you worked for Getty Images in places like Gaza and Sudan?

Yes, and then when I was 30 years old, I didn't want to do it any longer. It wasn't too safe, and I didn't want to live on the road 300 days a year. I’d helped Kevin Zraly at the Windows On the World program; I knew how to teach wine. 

Zraly was wine director of the restaurant’s renowned wine program from the day it opened in 1976 until its destruction on September 11, 2001. He continued the wine school until retiring in 2016.

So I went to work in wine imports for several years, and then the company got sold. And so – right place, right time – Kimberly was looking for someone to be a general manager. I said, “If it's a partnership, I'd be interested.” 

Wine is a small world. She’d heard you were good at working with small producers and building an audience?

Right.

It’s interesting that documentary photography and winemaking both have a core goal of capturing a place and time. And they both require a mix of sensitivity and assertiveness. You went from one to the other. 

Hmm… I never thought about that.

I have the impression you’re very involved on the production side, too, even though you’re the business guy?

Yeah, I'm always around for harvest, bottling, and blending. I don't have a chemistry background, so I'm like, “Kirk, how do we do this, this, and this?” He says, “Alright, this is what we're gonna do…” I'm on the bottling line any time we’re bottling, and he largely leaves that to me once we’re set in the morning. We've been working together for 14 years now. I can tell what he's going to do or say next. It's a good partnership. 

Who on your team is walking the vineyards to check out how things are going? 

It's Kirk and I. He also consults for other wineries and has his own wines. What's great about Kirk is he's super hands-on. So when it comes down to harvest time, we're all in the vineyards. He's sometimes managing up to 100 vineyards, so he's got an assistant winemaker who will go out into some of the vineyards and spend a whole day picking samples. But for ours, it's he and I deciding on when to pick, how to work around rain, all of that. 

The Jax family vineyard is right down the street from Kirk's house in Calistoga, so that’s easy for him to check in on. 

We’re about to share some Jax and Y3 with our club members. Without giving too much away, can you tell us about some of the fruit sourcing?

There's a white wine coming from a small family vineyard in Pope Valley – on the backside of Howell Mountain. There’s very little of that grape left in Napa Valley, and we're one of the few people still doing it here, so it’s a highlight that it’s also a great price. There is a red from one of Napa’s more prestigious locations, which we just got a 94+ score on from Jeb Dunnuck – that’s drinking fantastic. There’s also fruit from Carneros.

How did you decide on a San Francisco tasting room, instead of Napa? 

The Jacksons’ grandfather had owned a building right next door, at 334 Brannan Street, where they’d had the printing company. I was living in San Francisco, Trent was living in San Francisco, and Kimberly was living down in Hillsborough. And so, being that we had an office in that building, we thought…why don't we do something in San Francisco? Nobody here is doing what we want to do. So we leased out the building next door, put a lot of money into it, and developed it. We brought vines down from the estate vineyard. We brought down an olive tree, a fire pit – it’s a really unique space. After three years, we executed the option to buy it out. 

We're doing a lot of music now. We teamed up with San Francisco Jazz, and do jazz on the second and fourth Friday of the month. We get really great artists from all over the world coming in to perform. And it’s free. We call it Jax Jams.

What kind of customer is drawn to Jax?

We generally have a younger demographic. Since our tasting room is in San Francisco, we get a lot of 28 to 35 year olds coming in. It's a lot of tech down there, as you know, and now it's all AI. But most importantly, we draw people who care about a really good quality-to-value ratio; almost any winery that's pulling fruit out of the same vineyard that I am is charging twice our price. 

I’m trying to figure out how you stay affordable.

For one thing, not always putting the names of the prestigious vineyards we’re working with on the bottles, so we don’t have to pay for all the rights. Also, I have only two full-time employees – one I just hired a year ago. And Kirk is a consultant. It’s a very small staff for 27,000 cases of wine.

That’s almost crazy. You had some profound early experiences with small wineries in Europe. You’ve now grown to a medium-sized winery, but are operating it with the staff of a small winery. Is that small-business style important to you?

It is. One of the companies that I used to work for was actually called Small Vineyards. We worked with about 50 wineries in Italy, 10 in Spain and Portugal, and we were finding the small family producers that we loved to drink, and then we were importing them into the U.S. We would develop these little family vineyards and help tell their story. And that's where I learned winemaking – working for all these small wineries, going in, asking “Why do you do that?” “What is this?” “Why does this taste that way?” 

It's important to me to work directly with the growers. That's why I only work with small family vineyards. The big growers have to make “big” decisions. With small growers, I get to choose specific rows in the vineyard. It's a partnership between the farmers, myself and Kirk, on what we're going to do and how we're going to do it. Whether it's the Duttons, Andy Beckstoffer, or Oscar Renteria, our contracts are set way in advance, year after year, and every single year, we develop a vineyard management plan. It's a close connection to the land as well. It’s not just, “Oh, we need 50 tons of this or 20 tons of this.”

I happened to be in northern Napa yesterday, so I drove out to the Jax vineyard. Such a gorgeous atmosphere, almost languid. The air was thick, the birds and bugs sounded happy, it’s in a pocket up against the hills. What’s the name of the mountain peak above? 

That's Mount St. Helena. The volcanic soils come down from there.

I didn’t recognize it from that angle. So beautiful. 

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To get the wheels moving on your visit to their San Francisco tasting room, start here.