My day at the races with a secretive queenpin of wine

The most significant woman in wine is woefully under-publicised. I mentioned the name Barbara Banke to the well-connected head of one of her UK importers and it meant nothing. Banke is the widow of the feisty California lawyer Jess Jackson who founded a business empire on the hugely successful Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay brand. Its touch of sweetness, rumoured to have been accidental initially, offered American wine drinkers just what they were looking for in the 1980s. Since then, Banke has transformed Jackson Family Wines into a leader of sustainability in wine that now has about 50 brands, premium operations in eight countries and a workforce that adores her.

Last month, when she came to England for Royal Ascot, I was finally able to interview her. We spent a day at the races, where it became clear she knows and cares as much about racing as our late Queen (with whom she discussed equine matters at a polo match not that long ago). Her interest in breeding racehorses began in 2003. “Jess was driving me crazy with his micromanaging, deciding which assistants were assigned which cubicle in which wine company, [so] I told him to go get a hobby,” she recalls. He took up racehorse breeding and she followed suit. Two years ago, she became the first woman elected chair of the prestigious Breeders’ Cup in the US, thanks to the extraordinary achievements of the thoroughbreds reared on her Stonestreet Farms in Kentucky.

An Angeleno, Banke’s weekend entertainment when qualifying as a lawyer at Hastings College in San Francisco was forays into wine country. She met Jackson in the courtroom in 1978. Six years later, they married and had three children, all of whom are now involved with Jackson Family Wines — as are Jackson’s two daughters from his first marriage and their progeny, bringing the total number of family members with a role in the company to 13.

Jackson was the frontman but Banke was already so effectively involved in the wine company that, when he died in 2011, her transition to chair and proprietor was, according to chief executive Rick Tigner, “seamless”.

Her interest in breeding racehorses began in 2003. ‘Jess was driving me crazy with his micromanaging . . . [so] I told him to go get a hobby,’ she recalls

Her husband left a legacy of highly regarded wine estates in Napa Valley and, especially, in Sonoma where the company is based. But Banke’s empire is still expanding, to the tune of more than $150mn spent on its development during the past five years alone. Banke and her older daughter Julia have acquired two wineries on Vancouver Island, not well known as a wine region but cannily chosen because it’s more temperate than British Columbia’s established wine country. In another move designed to challenge global warming, they have taken a major punt on cooler, wetter Oregon to add to their properties in Monterey, Mendocino and Santa Barbara counties. Projects too recent to have made it on to the company’s website include a venture in Washington state’s Walla Walla and a Sancerre and Loire Chenin Blanc called Passerelle which will be launched next year.

Jackson Family Wines also recently announced a foray into English wine production. Banke and her family, especially her son Chris and his wife Ariel, love England and have long been keen to move into vine-growing here.

One signature of the group is the extraordinary level of autonomy given to each estate, so that the big-company ethos, so evident and often crippling in other large wine enterprises, seems entirely absent. This despite the fact that Tigner estimates it produces more than a thousand distinct products in any given year, and owns about 14,000 acres of prime vineyard.

JFW recently added a third Australian winery, Giant Steps, which joins the McLaren Vale organic pioneer Yangarra and historic Hickinbotham. Banke recruited Melanie Chester, chief judge of the Melbourne wine show, as new winemaker at Giant Steps, a Yarra Valley winery that already enjoyed a fine reputation, by asking her whether she sincerely wanted to continue to improve the wines. “She loves great properties,” Chester said of Banke, who admits that her legal training (she has no formal wine training) is awfully useful in her continual quest to expand the empire.

When she told me, “I love Burgundy”, I realised she was referring not to the wine but to her dream of acquiring land there. “We should have some, but it’s so expensive. Never mind, we’ll work around it. Between the UK, Oregon, Canada and Giant Steps, we’ll make a similar style of wine.”

So where next? In my pre-Ascot hour with her in the elegant drawing room of Farleigh House outside Basingstoke, which she now rents each June, Piedmont, Germany and Tasmania were all mentioned. “I’m not a big fan of jammy, over-extracted, Mega Purple sorts of wine,” she said, referring to the notorious grape concentrate colouring additive, “but my palate has evolved over the years.”

It was in the early years of this century that Jackson Family Wines began its leadership in sustainability, initially auditing and then limiting the chemical inputs on each estate. It is now engaged in a wide range of schemes including regenerative viticulture, light weighting its bottles, recycling wastewater, eliminating non-native species and introducing (manure-producing, cover-crop-chomping) livestock on its estates.

In 2019, JFW co-founded International Wineries for Climate Action, a growing band of wine producers committed to reducing their carbon emissions. Many initiatives have been inspired by the devastating Sonoma fires of 2017 which left many Jackson employees, and some family members, homeless, prompting Banke to acquire a nearly finished apartment block that was ready for her workers to move into within two weeks. “People before profit,” Tigner summarised on the journey back to London from Ascot.

Ariel Jackson has been leading a scheme to clear brushwood and eliminate flammable materials to fireproof its properties. Katie Jackson has been responsible for the company’s sustainability credentials, and for government relations. Her husband Shaun Kajiwara is the company’s vineyard director and has started a farm labour contractor that brings in legally documented workers from Mexico. “It’s been very good for us,” says Banke, who is all too aware of the problems associated with agricultural labour.

So do I have a criticism of this marvel who claims to have become such a top performer by simply hiring the right people? Only, I suppose, the extent to which she depends on her private plane, which seems at odds with such a commitment to sustainability.

Banke will turn 70 in August and is planning three parties: one with the family in Sonoma, one in Kentucky “with horsey people” and perhaps one in New York. Her longstanding international adviser Nick Bevan added, “And maybe a celebration in London, because she loves a pub crawl.”

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. Some international stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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