Two Visits To Calera, 38 Years Apart

January 31, 2025 – It was a chilly winter day in 1987 when I first drove through the faded tan Hollister hills to meet Calera Wine Company founder Josh Jensen at his humble home in the Cienega Valley. 

He greeted me somewhat gruffly and with suspicion: what did this marketing person from a Silicon Valley optical character recognition company want from him? A compliment on his beautiful blue Vermont castings wood stove earned me a cup of hot tea and a crack in the ice. 

I explained that my company, started by a gung-ho group of engineers with a fascination for Tolkien, was in need of a new name. Thinking themselves ingeniously clever, they had named the company Palantir, after the seeing stones called palantiri in The Hobbit. 

Cleverness is not unique, but forethought is far less common. Another group of equally ingenious engineers in Texas had also named their company Palantir, but they had the smarts to trademark it. 

After many thousands of dollars paid to naming consultants, we had failed to come up with a name acceptable to the engineers, who insisted in retaining the original, despite the pending lawsuit.  

Frustrated, our VC firm liaison called me to his office and said, “Look, Ben (Rosen) wants a name that starts with a C and has two syllables.” He had already struck it rich with Cypress Semiconductor and Citrix, and thought C to be good luck. 

That man, Steve Dow, was a big wine lover, so I asked him to go into his cellar and write down all the names that started with C. There was a quite a list, including Caymus and Chalk Hill, but my eye went to Calera. 

On my way home, I stopped at BevMo and found a couple of bottles of 1970s Calera Zinfandel, along with a 1981 Calera Pinot Noir from Santa Barbara, in the discount bin. The front bore a strikingly simple etching of a masonry structure, which turned out to be a lime kiln, or calera, in Spanish. Jensen knew he’d hit the jackpot when he discovered white limestone soil and a quarry. The limekiln dated back to the 19^th century and was used to burn limestone to create quicklime for ag and construction use. 

Dow asked me to go sell Jensen on the idea of sharing the name. Jensen immediately objected, citing the recent kerfuffle between Apple Computer and Apple records, which was absolutely understandable. 

“Look,” I said. “Here’s the deal. If you promise to never make optical character recognition equipment, we promise to never make wine.” The faintest trace of a smile spidered out around the corners of his distinctly patrician mouth. He said, “Have your people call my lawyer,” handing me a piece of paper.  

It turned out his attorney was a classmate of Steve Dow. The deal was quickly done, and we bought a lot of Calera wine as part of our incentive program for our dealer network. I personally introduced the wine to people all over the country, and wine shops from Chicago to Boston were very grateful.

As much as I appreciated the wine, I loved the man far more. He would step out of his old Porsche 911 in an auburn corduroy blazer with bright a red elbow patch on one sleeve and a green one on the other, sporting a bright blue shirt and fantastically colored socks. Josh was the sartorial eccentric long before John Charles Boisset took the wine fashion world by storm. At his funeral, I brought that bottle of 1981 Pinot Noir and it was absolutely fantastic. 

Visiting Calera always gives me a thrill, even though Jensen is now there only in spirit. 

On a recent sojourn with the Wild Wine Women, winemaker Mike Waller, who has been at Calera since 2007, poured us some beauties, including the sensational 2022 Mt. Harlan Chardonnay. It strikes a perfect balance between lively and lush, sporting aromas of lemongrass, citrus blossom, and apple, then delivering ripe orchard fruit, lemon curd, lime and brioche on the palate. There’s not much of this, so make haste. People who profess not to like Chardonnay were seen lining up to buy this one. 

Sadly, it’s too late on the Aligote, as they are no longer making it. Waller told us that although the wine was excellent, there just wasn’t enough of it to justify a separate SKU. He started making Chenin Blanc instead, as an alternative white, but was running into supply issues, due to its popularity among young winemakers. Once the darling of California white wines, it’s being rediscovered again. 

The first Calera red we tried was the 2021 Chalone Vineyard Pinot Noir, a vivid red-fruited beauty made from the Pommard clone, one of Waller’s favorites. You can tell it hails from a desert climate with sandy soils: there is a purity of cranberry and pomegranate and a vibrancy that makes the palate shine like a mirage. 

The Chalone Vineyard Pinot is from the Vista block planted in 1996, which is the first part of the vineyard you see on your right as you go up the Chalone driveway. Waller says that Chalone is “near and dear” to him as that is where he got his first job, being a Hollister boy. Josh, too, had started in the California wine business working there and buying Zin from Chalone for the 1974 and 1975 vintages. 

Waller then poured us the 2021 DeVilliers Pinot Noir, a complete and perfect contrast. Dark and stormy, with aromas of black plum and earthy cellar, the wine explodes with dark, rich buttery fig bars with a tinge of molasses. 

There are 7 vineyards on Mt. Harlan, Waller told us, and each is named for someone significant in Jensen’s life. The first three were planted by Josh in 1975: the 5-acre Selleck Vineyard, named for Dr. George Selleck, a friend and mentor; the Reed Vineyard, also 5 acres, named for Bill Reed, a longtime friend and the initial investor, and the 14-acre Jensen Vineyard, named for Josh’s father. It would be 3 years before these vines produced their first miniscule crop. Josh subsequently purchased the 100-acre parcel where the winery and tasting room now sit in 1977, and in 1982, purchased another 300 acres of limestone land on Mt. Harlan, where he planted Viognier. He was all in at this point. 

“Every one of my friends and critics bet I would lose my shirt,” Jensen told me in a 2017 interview, after the sale of Calera to Duckhorn. He most assuredly did not. 

The DeVilliers Vineyard was planted on the eastern flank of Mt. Harlan in 1997. At nearly 16 acres, it’s the largest, and lies between the two original plantings, Jensen and Mills. DeVilliers was named for Marq DeVilliers, a South Africa born writer who chronicled the Calera story in The Heartbreak Grape.

Looking at the vineyard map explains a lot about each: their aspect ratio, their steepness and how they soak up the sun, and what little water mother nature squeezes out of the sky as it heads over this steep limestone terrain. 

We learned that Selleck Vineyard, one the original vineyards, was just ripped out. It was always one of my favorites, but will be replanted with what is now the Calera clone: descendants of those original cuttings brought by Jensen from the famed Burgundian vineyards in which he apprenticed while in France. 

Waller explained that each of the wines we were tasting was made exactly the same way: whole cluster, a two-week native yeast ferment, 30% new French for 18 months, then bottled with no racking in between. “What you are tasting here is the vineyard,” Waller reminded us. “I am the laziest winemaker on earth. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay make themselves.” He might be slightly exaggerating there. But the gravity feed winery and the gorgeous underground caves for barrel aging, are indeed the ideal setup for producing wine that springs from the earth, is blessed by sun, wind and rain, and is left to ruminate into something magical. 

Next up was the 2021 Ryan Pinot Noir, a vineyard at 2500 feet, planted in 1998, and named for longtime Calera vineyard manager Jim Ryan, who helped Jensen build the dream of great American Pinot Noir, one vine at a time. This is a truly brilliant wine: smooth as satin, with bright spicy cherry flavors that just won’t quit. The depth, energy and staying power of this wine is utterly striking. Waller says it is one of the highest vineyards and is on the westernmost side of Mt. Harlan, where it captures the most sun. Waller says they held a ceremony in 2022 to dedicate the vineyard in Jim’s name, and that the wine we were tasting, the 2021, was named the 29^th best wine in Wine Spectator’s Top 100 list for 2024. 

We then tasted the 2021 Reed Vineyard Pinot Noir, planted on the north side of Mt. Harlan, where it always struggles to ripen, and is now 50 years old. Waller says he picks this late October into November, and it’s always the last one in. Bill Reed, one of the few people willing to bet on Jensen’s potential success, must have been very proud to have his name on this vineyard. This wine oozes black licorice, silky black raspberry jam, dark roasted meat and a hint of mint. There is nothing quite like it. This beast will age beautifully. 

The final wine of the tasting was the 2021 Jensen Vineyard Pinot Noir, always grounded in earth, with a distinct hint of iron filings in the nose. The vineyard faces east, and is planted in four blocks that create an amphitheater. Fruit is picked over a two-to six-week period, depending on the vintage.  Super complex and almost mystifying, the wine is an encapsulation of autumn, with spiced apple, fig, cinnamon stuck and a hint of menthol. As it develops in the glass, it reveals red raspberry and mulberry, melded with a smooth chocolate finish. This is the kind of wine that invites contemplation.

In fact, Waller admitted, when he simply wants to relax he enjoys drinking things like sparkling and Grüner Veltliner, which appear in the Duckhorn portfolio and are also available for tasting and purchase in the Calera tasting room. “Pinot Noir makes me think too much.” 

We’re sure he does his share of thinking, especially during harvest. 

Waller told us that this year marks the 50^th anniversary of the founding of Calera. Hard to believe. Like many of the classic Napa and Sonoma labels, Calera is still true to the original. Why mess with something so iconic?