Saying Goodbye to Josh Jensen

June 17, 2022 – Anyone who seriously loves Pinot Noir knows the name Calera. This world-renowned California house of Pinot Noir founded by Josh Jensen is synonymous with supreme dedication to making a dream come true, and a quest for personal excellence.   

I’ve met many people whose wine careers were indelibly impacted by this man and his outsized love for the precious piece of land that he searched long and hard to find. I am one of them.

My story is a little different from most. It was 1989 and I was working for a high tech company in Silicon Valley that had been founded by a bunch of brilliant engineers. Its mission was Optical Character Recognition, or OCR. These guys were as dedicated in their quest to convert reams of printed documents, especially forms, the bane of existence, to a digital format that could be more easily cataloged and searched. They were as ahead of their time as was Josh Jensen—who passed away peacefully in his sleep last weekend at age 78. 

The world was no more ready for Burgundian style Pinot Noir from some unheard of part of California (which happened to be San Benito County), than the corporate world and government were ready to convert documents from the tried and true analog world of pencil and paper to the mysterious realm of digital.

I loved working with those brilliant engineers: it was one of the most exhilarating episodes of my high tech career. One small problem, though. They had chosen the name Palantir for the company from Lord of the Rings: remember the palantiri? The seeing stones inspired them. And several others, apparently. A company in Texas had also found the name inspirational and had bothered to register it. Oops, my guys had not. So after an unsuccessful attempt at appeasement with the Texas company, it was time to choose another name. 

At first it was a fun challenge: the creativity was overflowing and went from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again. But nobody could agree on anything. After a while, the brainstorming began to cause a river of discontent throughout the company. Finally, Steve Dow, who represented Sevin-Rosen Funds, one of our investors, came to me and said, “OK, Ben (as in Rosen) says that you need to come up with a name. No more committees. It needs to start with a C, and it has to be two syllables.” This new directive was puzzling until he explained that two of Sevin-Rosen’s darling investments were Cypress Semiconductor and Citrix. Looking for a new source of inspiration, and knowing how much Dow loved wine, I asked him to go to his wine cellar and bring me all the C wines. There was Caymus and Chalk Hill, which didn’t seem to fit (chalk being so analog) and then I saw Calera. The label was wonderful. I loved the typeface and even more, the symbol of the limestone kiln. I asked, “How is the wine?” Dow assured me it was awesome. 

So, I headed south to Calera to meet with Josh Jensen. Would you mind terribly if we used your name for our company? Thinking about it today, I can surely understand his instant reaction. He was not amused. His hackles went up, worrying about the possibility of conflict, like Apple Records and Apple Computer had encountered. He wasn’t sure whether to kick me out or have me arrested. We sat in his kitchen and he made me tea on his Vermont Castings stove, and we began to find common ground. After a while, I said, “Ok, how about if you agree never to make optical character recognition equipment and we agree never to make wine?” 

He cracked what I thought was a small crinkle of a smile, probably still wanting to throw me out but he said, “Ok. Have your people call my lawyer.” He wrote down his lawyer’s name, and I called Dow on the long drive back from my car phone that was the size of a brick. What a great stroke of luck: Jensen’s lawyer was a classmate of Steve Dow’s in college.  

Calera Recognition Systems never made too much of a dent in the world, although we developed desktop OCR that actually worked pretty well and was bundled with pretty much every scanner you could buy in the 1980s and early 90s. However, we did spread the name Calera far and wide. Everyone in the company grew to recognize that Pinot Noir was an awesome varietal. All wine lovers at Calera Recognition Systems could easily tell you their favorite vineyard designate: Jensen, Selleck or Reed? There were only three back then. Mine was the latter. It smelled and tasted like autumn. 

Jensen and Calera Wine Company benefited greatly in that we bought rather a lot of wine from him to use as dealer and salesperson incentives all across the country. Over the years, Josh and I kept in touch. He was easy to spot at wine events, with his colorful blazers and wild shoes that matched his Porsche. He enjoyed showing all the naysayers who thought he would go bankrupt, that they were oh, so very, very wrong. 

I love that man with all my heart. I discovered that his Pinot Noirs were a thing of intense and visceral beauty, and that he cared for that property and brand and mission as if it were one of his children. His love was deep and unshakeable. The last time we spoke, in late 2020, he proclaimed his life was truly blessed. He felt good that Calera was in good hands with Duckhorn. He loved living in San Francisco, because his daughter Silvie was close by with his granddaughter, and he loved his drop dead gorgeous view of the San Francisco Bay, from the Golden Gate to the Bay Bridge. He told me he never thought he would want any other view than the stunning one he had at Calera. Yet, he discovered that he loved this view of water, water everywhere. It was such a vivid contrast to the bleached and dessicated limestonescape of San Benito he had loved for decades. I also discovered that leaving wine in the trunk of a car in the middle of winter in Madison, Wisconsin, is a seriously bad idea. I never told Josh about that.