Econ alum finds contentment tending Napa vines

The California brewmaster idea didn’t pan out, but the excitement of grape harvest channeled passion for beer into one for wine

By Clint Talbott

Vineyard owner Jody Harris did not begin his studies at the University of Colorado Boulder knowing what he would do with his career. He took a wide variety of courses and settled on economics as a major.

Along the way, one of his roommates started brewing beer. The 1997 alumnus “got really intrigued with that” and later took a summer-school class to become a certified brewmaster.



While brewing beer in Colorado, Harris noted that some wineries in California were branching into brewing, pulling out grape vines and planting hops. He had inherited some land in the Napa Valley but had no specific plans for it.

“So my light bulbs went off, and I thought, ‘Gee, I would love to build a brewery in the Napa Valley.’”

After gradation, the brewing idea lost its fizz. Having returned to the Napa Valley, Harris partnered with another college roommate who had just purchased a winery.

“Harvest was coming, and all this excitement, and my interests turned quickly from beer into wine.” In the late ‘90s, Harris developed a small, 10-acre vineyard on his property. The parcel had an olive orchard, which he expanded.

In 2000, he had six acres of olives. The next year, he planted 10 acres of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and petit verdot grapes. The first harvest was in 2004.

“We started putting shovels in the ground in the late ‘90s, and you shoot forward to today, and you finally have the successes of what we did back then,” Harris says.

From the first harvest through 2008, Harris sold the fruit while working in commercial real estate. In the fall of 2008, he left the commercial-real-estate world and pursued a career in wine.

He had wine in barrels and was preparing to launch his business. Over lunch, a friend asked how Harris planned to market his wine. Plan A was to sell wine to all his friends.That year, he had wine in barrels and was preparing to launch his business. Over lunch, a friend asked how Harris planned to market his wine. Plan A was to sell wine to all his friends, Harris joked.

The estate wine was not going to be ready for several years, so Harris had time to think about how to brand and market the wine.

Harris frequented the Cavallo Point Restaurant on the San Francisco Bay. The restaurant’s wine director sold Harris on the idea of producing reasonably priced by-the-glass wine for restaurants.

“Before this, I didn’t know what a by-the-glass wine was,” Harris recalls. Once again, his “light bulb went off.”

This was 2010, when the wine market was faltering. Harris decided to produce two brands of wine: an estate wine, which would be “high end, low production,” and a large-production, by-the-glass brand, which was later branded Cultivar.

The team produced its first vintage of Cultivar in 2011. The Caspar Estate wine, which still needed time to age, is a “big, Rutherford, super-big, super-chewy, super-bold wine, but Cultivar is much more of the everyday, by the glass, pop-a-cork-every-night kind of thing.”

About 95 percent of Cultivar wines are sold in restaurants, and the balance in retail outlets. Harris said that seems appropriate. “The wine was created in the cellar of a restaurant, so we knew we wanted to be a restaurant, food-friendly wine.”

By contrast, “Caspar Estate, you won’t find that anywhere. The only place you can find that is if you come to visit us, you can taste with us. If you visited us and heard the story, we’ll sell you our wine, and we’ll also make you an offer to join our mailing list.”

“We’ve got a niché market for that wine, and we have a lot of followers,” he said.

“The groundwork we laid over those few years has really started pay off now.”

It was a challenge to start two wine labels at once, Harris said. “We didn’t start in the garage, but we were living on our credit cards and using whatever means we could to get by.”

In the early years, Harris sold many or most of the grapes he grew. The wine and its market had to age and grow. Now, the winery is retaining the fruit from eight of his 10 acres.

Now, with both the Cultivar and Caspar Estate labels selling well, Harris said he benefited from perseverance, networking and “a lot of luck.”

“When you’re starting anything new, you have everything stacked against you. You don’t have any tricks of the trade, because you’re trying to learn them. You’ve got growing pains with, say production, learning how to get things done. Everything costs twice as much as expected on top of that. Every card in the deck is stacked against you in the beginning.”

Harris said his economics coursework at CU-Boulder has “tremendously” helped his career.

His advice for students at CU-Boulder: “Have fun. Who knows if I would have ever gotten into the wine business if I hadn’t gotten into brewing beer and those kinds of things that led me here? Find your interests. Find your passions, and immerse yourselves in those.”

“At the end of the day, we’re not going to spend much time doing things we don’t want to do.”
Clint Talbott is director of communications and external relations manager for the College of Arts and Sciences and editor of the College of Arts and Sciences Magazine.

Feb. 27, 2015