Season: A Year of Wine-Country Food, Farming, Family & Friends
That subtitle perfectly describes the time I spent working on one of my all-time favorite projects. They had me at the first meeting at the Kendall-Jackson Wine Estate. No conference room. No Powerpoint. It was a warm Sonoma spring afternoon, and I was seated at a table for six, set with white linens and a promising array of wineglasses in the dappled shade of a walnut tree in the center of the Kendall-Jackson Wine Estate’s culinary garden.
As chefs Justin Wangler, Tracy Shepos Cenami, Robert “Buttercup” Nieto, and Culinary Gardener Tucker Taylor told me about their dream of a book showcasing their food and farming philosophy, a series of platters appeared that did most of the talking for them. Roasted leg of lamb from a nearby ranch with green garlic salsa verde, a purple potato salad with olive and nasturtium tapenade, Tucker’s signature “Farmer T’s” lettuce mix with soft herbs and flowers. A fluffy cherry clafoutis flavored with tarragon. Each course was perfectly matched to a complementary Jackson Family wine. And the vegetables! Sure, they looked lovely. But each time you took a bite, your face would change because these vegetables have more intense flavor and snap than you ever imagined possible.
This turned out to be one of my favorite books to work on and to give to friends. It’s a collection of unusually good, remarkably simple recipes showcasing four seasons of fresh produce, created by chefs whose job is to start with a wine and then create a dish that makes that wine sing. Over the course of a year and a half, I got to spend time with this delicious group of people, hanging out, eating, cooking, tasting, interviewing, kibitzing at photo shoots and design reviews, truffle hunting, helping cater a banquet for a hundred sommeliers at a vineyard in Oregon, and most of all, learning. My own cooking changed forever, and I’m forever grateful.
Role: Writer
Publisher: Cameron + Company
Authors: Justin Wangler, Tracey Shepos Cenami
Producer and Executive Editor: Kim Laidlaw
Design: Iain R. Morriss & Suzi Hutsell
Photography: Alan Campbell
Food Styling: Kim Kissling, Elisabet der Nederlanden
IACP Cookbook of the Year
IACP Best Chef & Restaurant Cookbook
“This is more than a cookbook…It’s a carefully crafted reflection of today’s wine country farming, cooking, and entertaining—a guide to celebrating seasonal bounty with wimple, sophisticated recipes, paired with wonderful wines.”
— Thomas Keller, Chef-proprietor of The French Laundry and Per Se
“Why can't everyone write cookbooks like the folks at Jackson Family Wines do? This gorgeous volume is cleverly organized by season, making it easy to use for meal planning.”
— San Jose Mercury News
“An appealing advertisement for not just wines and food, but for the California wine country lifestyle.”
— Publishers Weekly
Writing Sample
Truffles: A Dream Comes True
When it came to farming, Jess Jackson loved a high-stakes gamble. And in 2009, he and Barbara decided it was time to take on one of the greatest farming challenges of all: truffles.
Can truffles actually be grown? Well, yes and no. They are a naturally occurring fungus that forms on the roots of trees, and the tradition of cultivating them by planting tree seedlings in a known truffle site and then transplanting them elsewhere goes back around three centuries. But the process has always been a combination of agricultural smarts and luck. You don’t grow truffles. They have to want to grow themselves.
The modern practice of larger-scale trufficulture is still in its infancy, especially in the United States. Jess and Barbara had a hunch that the soil and climate of Sonoma County would be a great place to cultivate black truffles, and they chose Brian Malone—one of our vineyard managers who has a background in viticulture and landscaping, a serious green thumb, and a happy-go-lucky sense of optimism—to spearhead the project.
Brian started by looking for the perfect location. He found ten acres on Taylor Mountain in Sonoma County’s Bennett Valley—the site of an old horse farm near vineyards of Pinot Noir, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, and Cabernet Franc. The virgin grassland and rolling hills had never been planted, and there were no trees. That’s important, because if
you start with native trees, they might have existing root fungi that would compete with truffles.
From 2010 to 2011, Brian and his crew cleared and prepped the land and planted more than thirty-four hundred oak and hazelnut seedlings that had been inoculated with Tuber melanosporum (Périgord truffle) spores. And then, they waited.
“It’s anything but an exact science,” Brian says. “The way I see it, you’re not growing truffles. You’re creating a forest from scratch, and then doing careful forest management to give the truffles the best chance. The rest is in nature’s hands, and there are no guarantees or silver bullets. All you can do is watch and wait.”
It takes truffles five to eight years to mature. In 2017, it was time to find out whether Jess and Barbara’s vision and Brian’s patient cultivation had borne fruit. On a crisp February morning, a highly trained Belgian Malinois truffle dog was brought in from Oregon. She scampered through the trees and quickly came to a halt. Brian raced to the spot and put his nose to the ground. The smell was unmistakable. Slowly excavating with his bare hands, he felt something firm, the size of a rock, but with a yielding texture. His heart pounding, he slowly freed it from the soil. And there in his hand was the first truffle ever harvested in Sonoma County.
That year, the crop ranged in size from golf ball– to tennis ball–sized truffles. The following year proved even more productive, with one of the truffles, the size of a softball, weighing in at thirteen ounces. And with the price of truffles ranging from six hundred to one thousand dollars a pound, it’s looking like Jess’s gamble is well on its way toward paying off.
But for Brian, our culinary team, and the Jackson family, this is more than a business venture. There’s a feeling of making culinary history and a sense of pride in sharing with the world the bounty of the terroir we love. “Since these are the only truffles ever grown in our corner of the world,” says Brian, “I’d say they’re priceless.”
© 2018 Jackson Family Wines