Jim Clendenen

One of the beautiful mysteries of wine is its relationship with time. With each growing season and production of the finished product, and the subsequent deposit of bottles into a cold cellar, people and their imaginations occupy space in the past, present and future, all at once. When I opened a bottle of 1948 Vouvray to celebrate my parents’ birthday a few years ago, a friend opined about two guys standing in a vineyard seventy years ago, and imagining that the juice from the grapes they were picking would be poured and savored in the US seventy years later. What is in the glass in the moment is so very much of the present, and yet there is an ineffable timelessness to wine and its people, that many of us would perhaps rather not understand entirely.

We lost Jim Clendenen over the weekend, and I can only attribute the profound shock and grief I feel to the realization, strange as it seems, that I thought of him as timeless. I received word late last night that he had passed, and I cried through a sleepless night as I thought about the volume of my experiences with him over the course of the last twenty years. He and I were in very different places when we met, he was twenty or thirty years my senior, and I was just getting started in my career. He was by then, already, the substantially famous, fast-talking, mildly eccentric, living incarnation of Au Bon Climat, the Santa Barbara County domain he guided for four decades.

The first time I visited the winery that had been founded and outfitted in the early 1980’s by Jim and his longtime winemaking partner, Bob Lindquist of Qupé, I was amazed by the level of respect with which I was treated. Though I was completely green, Jim took time with me as we moved through the massive barrel room, and he filled my tasting glass with one pipette after another of selections from recent vintages. When we migrated to the giant lunch table at the end of the tasting, I was shown to a seat at the center, right next to Bob and Jim, and eye level with a dozen bottles from Qupé, Au Bon Climat, and myriad other domains, domestic and imported. It might have been my first real lesson in the magic of tasting great wines in context with each other, as Jim poured splashes of a white Burgundy he loved, and one of his monumental chardonnays, one after the other.

Jim’s love of great wines from all over the world, which was inversely proportional to the destestation he seemed to feel when he encountered an example of fraudulence (inside the world of wine or outside), turned him into a man more bursting with ebullience than perhaps anyone else I have ever known. Christopher Hitchens comes to mind. When Jim slipped into second or third gear, often fifteen minutes or so after he put the finishing touches on the five or six massive platters of sausage and potatoes, roasted vegetables, heaping bowls of beautiful salads (he was an amazingly prodigious, and prodigiously talented cook), he spoke quickly, and packed so much consideration into each utterance that you felt like you should buckle your seatbelt in order to keep up.

Of course he was happy to furnish an abundance of details about a given wine, or a vintage, or his voluminous insights about the way an obscure Italian grape variety was likely to perform if planted in a given Central Coast vineyard. His voice filled with the same sense of urgency if the topic turned to labor practices, or national politics, and it didn’t matter whether he had introduced the subject or not. Something about Jim that I am remembering now, but that never actively occurred to me in all of our conversations, is that he was an exquisitely attuned listener. In the midst of the occasional fireworks and the beneficent bombast, when he asked you how you were, what was going on at the restaurant, he stopped, and he listened. He genuinely wanted to know.

Jim was maybe at his most indefatigable when it came to bushwhacking all of the pretense he perceived in wine culture. He was a man who learned, much earlier than most, about the ways that modest, inexpensive, well-made little table wines can often resemble the greatest wines in the world. He did not suffer wines of middling quality, and was still more dismissive when they masqueraded under veils of high prices and undeserved reputations. In his own winemaking, there was no cuvée not worth exploring, no planting of Teroldego or Furmint too unlikely. And did he ever back it up. He made great wines from Aligoté and Mondeuse, Nebbiolo and Arneis. There were entire labels dedicated to the different projects that bubbled up and out of his imagination. Bricco Buon Natale was for Barbera and Tocai Friulano, and I think Sagrantino, among others. A project with his friend, always referred to by Jim as “The Great Mel Knox,” called Ici/La-Bas, was dedicated to the production of exceedingly delicious Pinot Noir from Mendocino and Oregon. Under the label Clendenen Family Vineyards, Jim bottled an astonishingly fine and inexpensive Viognier, Mondeuse and Aligoté, and a classic Jim homage: a special Syrah-Viognier blend, aged three years in barrel, which was initially conceived as a California counterpoint to the famous single-vineyard Guigal ‘La-La’ Côte-Rôtie’s. People lucky enough to own some of that wine will be able to happily ponder that comparison for several decades to come.

Not every single time, but with the rough success rate of a Gold Glove fielding percentage, the wines were uncannily good. The breadth of the work and the concurrent depth and quality was almost too much to imagine. The way he handled all of those different grapes so deftly — and most especially his king and queen, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir — was rare, to say the least. Most winemakers dream of wrapping their hands and minds fully around just one or two grape varieties, and gaining some mastery over them over the course of a career. Jim made brilliant wine out of nearly everything he touched — one eye-opening example after another. In the last twenty years, as a lot of the world’s most famous Nebbiolo-based wines, from areas like Barolo and Barbaresco, have grown richer and more alcoholic, Jim supplied us with a consistently superb expression of the grape, ripe and with bright acidity and plenty of structure, at 13.5%, from the Santa Maria Valley.

He may or may not have been the greatest maker of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in the world over the last four decades. I am trying to think of other practitioners of both of those grapes who have made wines as good and as consistent as Jim’s. Any vigneron in the running, especially from Burgundy, likely sells wine that is five to about a hundred times more expensive. I’m not saying that Jim’s greatest Chardonnays would seem superior if tasted next to Romanée-Conti Montrachet, which costs thousands of dollars per bottle, but neither would they seem clearly outclassed. In any case, he wouldn’t have been concerned with how anything stacked up against anything else. He was in it to make the very best wines that he could from the hillsides in his adopted Santa Barbara County. He surely loved great Burgundy, and also he loved that he made wines that could be mentioned in the same sentences with other masterpieces.

Jim was a mentor and a very great friend to me. He was invested in my development, I think, at least partly because he had the sense that he and I chased up similar pursuits. Even though we came from different backgrounds, and of course were focused on different aspects, we shared a deep devotion to the serious, critical work of providing pleasure. The cultivation of good taste and personal integrity are necessary and valuable practices. They can be refined and improved with a little thoughtfulness, and they are essential to a happy life as a human being. Jim was a lifelong student of the connections between wine and culture, he was particularly interested in Americans and their predilections, and I owe a good bit of anything I know about those things to him. I am so sorry for Isabelle and Knox, and Bob and Louisa, his longtime partner in oenological mischief Jim Adelman, Marissa, the entire CLV family. I am devastated by the scope of losing this man, and will be touched forever by his example.