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Fighter Pilot Takes Patient Approach to Elegant Pinot Noirs
November 19, 2007

At the Air Force Academy Brice Cutrer Jones learned about "duty, honor, and country"; as a fighter pilot in Vietnam he learned about leadership; at Harvard Business School he learned to "question every assumption"; and when he founded Sonoma-Cutrer vineyards in 1973 in the Russian River Valley as a tax shelter he found out "that I was going to be broke for a very long time."

Seventeen years, to be exact, and that was just to break even. "When I went back to visit Harvard," says Jones, 67, "they gave me the `Long Suffering Award,' and the guy who gave it to me was Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman of Blackstone."

When success did come, Sonoma-Cutrer had earned respect as one of the finest chardonnays produced in California. His first vintage was 1981. In April 1999 Jones sold the company to Brown-Forman, which also owns Fetzer Vineyards, Korbel, Jack Daniels, and Southern Comfort. They asked Jones to stay on as president. It was a marriage, he says, made "in purgatory."

"Going public was ruinous," Brice told me over lunch in New York at Tocqueville restaurant. "Brown-Forman wanted more quarterly profits and more wines, and I wanted to make less. They wanted to grow from 150,000 to 500,000 cases. We locked horns on lots of issues, and they finally got fed up and fired me."
By then, however, Jones (left) had bought 105 acres of apple orchard north of Sebastopol, which he'd even offered to Brown-Forman, which declined, so he and six other Sonoma-Cutrer management people invested in the land and started planting pinot noir, not chardonnay, even though Brown-Forman had waived Jones's non-compete agreement. Eventually 30 employees of Sonoma-Cutrer left to join Jones.

"Fifteen years ago I said western Sonoma Coast was going to be the Côte d'Or of California, and we're out to prove it," says Jones adamantly. "Should we try to taste like Burgundy? No, but we should emulate their charm, elegance, balance." Then, sounding quite the California gentleman farmer, "I want my pinot noirs to be a holistic, seductive experience."

The result is Emeritus Vineyards, which produces just 5,500 cases. With winemaker Don Blackburn, who previously worked at David Bruce Winery, Elliston, Bernardus and Byington wineries, Emeritus makes two pinots from two estates, the Russian River Valley ($32), sold in nine states, and the William Wesley ($50), available only through the winery's website: www.emeritusvineyards.com. The 2005 vintage, which I tasted with Jones, is currently available.

Blackburn utilizes clonal selection and dry farming to help the grapes achieve full ripeness without excessive sugars and extracted flavors. Grapes are hand picked at night (right), so they are cool when they arrive at the winery. He too can sound quite Left Coast when he describes his pinots as having "aromas that work harmoniously toward creating a complete, well-focused impression that gives the taster an ineffable sense of well-being."

Not that he's wrong. After drinking both the wines with Chef Marco Moreira's fine lunch of chilled corn soup with a green tomato marmalade and lemon-scented chicken with a confit of sweet onions, pancetta ham, and fava bean puree, I certainly felt lulled into a sense of well being.

The wines are indeed elegant, very velvety, big but not cloyingly extracted. The alcohol is not nearly as high as some Sonoma pinots-14.3 percent for both wines-but the wines do indeed express what is best about the Russian River Valley terroir for pinot noir, which isn't really very much like the soil of wind-blown Burgundy. The California sun boosts the sugars but Blackburn is careful to keep the acids in tandem, producing pinots that are clearly full of California boldness.

Jones, meanwhile, is working as hard as ever, using the slow post-harvest season to travel and drum up business. Ninety, he thinks, is probably a good age to consider retirement. So if you call him and get his answering machine, he may greet you with a weather report from Sonoma Coast, fill you in on the current vintage—"light but the best in memory"—and say that he's "on the road, burning shoe leather, with my hat in my hand, doing what I did 25 years ago."

—John Mariani