Jack Sporer
Fres.co Wine and Magnolia Wine Services
Jack Sporer is the owner of Fres.co Wine and Magnolia Wine Services.
This interview is a great episode for a beginning winemaker thinking of starting their own brand and considering how to make that dream a reality. Because Jack is the owner of a custom crush winery facility. Unless you are independently wealthy or inherited a vineyard, you are likely going to start your winery in some sort of a co-op or shared winery space, and since that’s how I make our wine for my brand Centralas (whose wines, btw, are available for sale at CentralasWine.com the purchase of which supports this wonderful podcast) and since Jack owns one of these facilities, we dig into the pros and cons, the whys and the hows, and the hard questions you need to ask before choosing a facility. No, you don’t want to start making a wine at the nearest crush pad, unless it also stands up to some thorough evaluation.
Jack’s custom crush facility in Sonoma is also the home of his winery Fres.co, which he named Fresh Wine Company in an attempt to cause us to think about wine the way we think about produce, as a product that is grown.
Jack is deeply involved in regenerative agriculture, through both Fres.com and Magnolia, and he makes an incredibly important point about it. Basically, true regenerative agriculture implies working with degraded or poorly managed land, NOT pristine organically farmed vineyards. And that means that regenerative agriculture is about building bridges between farmers & winemakers with different and even opposing philosophies.
I love that Jake embodies true regenerative agriculture with both Fres.co and Magnolia, and I think he does that with very smart, empathetic, and trust-building interactions that set an amazing example that we can all learn from.
Sponsor: