Paul Morrison is the owner and winemaker at JL Wood Wine in Monterey County, CA. Since learning how versatile and tasty Chardonnay can be in the right hands, he’s all-in with it. Along with his wife Carol, whose father is JL Wood, the couple began taking over the family ranch in 1993. and took it over fully by 2015. Carol’s father planted Clones 4 and 17 Chardonnay on the ranch. The Morrisons then embarked on a series of changes that have improved the quality of the grapes by implementing sustainable farming practices such as permanent cover cropping, pruning designed for premium grape production, and changes to irrigation and pest management. The vineyards of the JL Wood Ranch are certified as sustainable by the CSWA.
Media Inquiries: Alan Goldfarb wineflak@gmail.com | https://jlwoodwine.com/
What’s the ONE THING most unique, authentic, & memorable about your brand?
JL Wood put us in the wine business. He thought the climate around our ranch had been changing over his lifetime. Temperatures were up, there was less water coming down the river, and it was becoming too expensive to support continued growing of vegetables or other animal feeds on our soils. He decided wine grapes were a good answer, especially after he saw how his neighbor Wente was very happy with them.
We have a singular focus on Chardonnay, no other varietals. We grow it and we make it into wine, controlling every step. Our wine brand is about communicating the best expressions of Chardonnay that reflect the special terroir that we have on our Coastal Central California ranch.
We want to be known as a trusted source for affordable quality Chardonnay. It sounds simple: just make one kind of wine that people like. But the devil is in the details and being able to focus on that without distraction. So, we decided that being able to control every process was key. And, in this environment, where wine consumption has decreased, developing differentiated styles is critical to being chosen by the customer. Our Chardonnays are designed to be fruit forward and fresh tasting. That means we pick our fruit in the early part of the maturation cycle at lower brix so we can capture fresh fruit flavors and acidity. We look for continuity in the taste profile. And you can only get that naturally. That focus allows us to minimize manipulations in the winery that can detract from wine quality. And the results speak for us: Chardonnays that not only taste great when young but age with grace.
Describe how and what you’d do with your winemaking career or winery business if you were not constrained.
Without constraint, I’d work on raising awareness of both our Chardonnay and all-American-produced wine with consumers. To do that, it will take more dollars allocated to marketing.
We know that consumers love to select wine and are looking for tips on what to buy. Foreign-produced wine, especially for smaller producers, gets lots of attention. However, when it comes to American wine, we think too much attention is spent on mega winery brands that can access what is a very limited distribution system for American wine, especially from smaller producers like us.
Smaller American wine producers need to allocate more capital toward creating a more visible market for their wines, where their brands and stories could be better highlighted. That takes missionary work and an increased presence in the media as well as dedicated marketplaces on the internet.
What is the One Wine most emblematic of your brand and/or winemaking style? Tell us its story.
Premier was designed to showcase our Arroyo Seco AVA Chardonnay and be a very sophisticated style that would have great versatility. We start with the best fruit, picked on the young side of the maturation curve, and then focus on our wine profile: strong fruit presence, fresh acidity throughout with a long finish, fullness in the mouth, and hints of oak and its spice notes to provide depth and weight. It spends part of its time in steel and just enough time on French oak to give it that depth we target.
Premier reflects our focus on achieving a specific wine style, not just making another Chardonnay. This one was easy for us to define, focusing on our own personal preferences of what we wanted in a great Chardonnay. We did it in the negative: no baked fruit flavors, no malolactic, no adjustments to acidity, no off flavors, not drowned in oak and nothing flat or sallow in the mouth.
To get what we wanted, we made changes to our growing and winemaking processes. This meant a laser focus on flavor and acidity. This style requires constant monitoring of fruit maturity during the final days of the growing season backed up with laboratory analyses. We agonize over the condition of the fruit and irrigation needed during the last 3 weeks before picking. In the winery, we focus on getting the juice ready for fermentation and later, carefully managing the time on oak. Read why the “Premier” Chardonnay is one of my personal favs in recent Chard tastings.
Bonus Question: What are your wholehearted convictions related to the wine business?
The wine business is at crossroads. This is particularly true for smaller producers. And it’s not clear what will be the next successful business model.
Will wine just be another beverage dominated by a few big brands? Will we just be focused on the varietal character and let cost be our yardstick for measuring long term success?
The goal is simple: an industry with growth at least at the level that it is, at the minimum, equal to or large than the rate of population growth of legal aged drinkers and produces commercially viable returns that will allow businesses to sustain over the long term.
The patient is currently ill, and the symptoms are visible to all now. Wine consumption is down. Distribution has consolidated and distributors have reduced brand portfolios. Retailers are reducing shelf inventories. And American wine growers are losing ground to the perceived quality of premium foreign wines and cheaper imported bulk wine is taking a larger percentage of the volume produced by mega wineries. Lots of production assets, vineyards, and wineries, are now for sale. Critically, jobs are being lost.
You wonder if the wine business will be like manufactured products in the US, that is, increasingly manufactured offshore where it is either cheaper or subsidized by governments.
True innovation will be critical. Everything is in play: farming techniques, the formulation of products, reaching the customer, broadening consumption by the younger population, etc. This will take a willingness to try new things and do things differently. If there was any time that the conventional approaches are being challenged, it is now.