Jeff Jaeger

Managing Member
JaegerVineyards, LLC, Napa

Managing Partner
Barrel Associates, International Fresno and Napa

Interview by Diana H. Stockton

Jeff and his wife, Kristen, live on the Jaeger family property on Big Ranch Road in Napa, formerly the Hartley Ranch (where the still widelyplanted Hartley walnut variety was developed). Jeff’s parents, Bill and Lila, began to spend summers in NapaValley from the Bay Area when Jeff was eight. In 1963, after a trip to Mexico, Bill came down with a walloping case of hepatitis and was advised to switch from whiskey to wine upon recovery. He did, and Jeff says wine was always on the table after that.The Jaegers bought a place on Inglewood Avenue in St. Helena in 1965 and the family spent 5 or 6 hours every Saturday putting the property in shape. When Bill and Lila acquired additional acreage in Napa, all the family worked staking and planting vineyard there, too. In 1980 Doug Hill became the vineyard manager.

When Bill became a partner in Freemark Abbey in 1967, the group persuaded Brad Webb, the former winemaker at Hanzell, to get involved. Brad insisted that cooperage be part of the equation. According to Jeff, “Staves are to wine as fruit is to vine. Grapes are from the land as the stave mill relies on trees.” Bill and Lila set out to find the best cooper in France.Their search led to Philippe Demptos, a sixth generation at Demptos in SaintCapraisdeBordeaux, and to declare Demptos the best cooperage. Jeff says, “You are what your staves are.”When Philippe started coming to the United States in the 1970’s to sell barrels, the Jaegers invited him to stay at their house rather than a hotel. Jeff says Philippe was fascinating—just back from Morocco or Spain selling barrels. From Napa Philippe sold six or seven thousand barrels in one month each year. At the end of 1980 Philippe invited Bill Jaeger to be a partner in a new company, Demptos Napa. Jeff joined this company in 1982, after college. Christian Radoux had been involved in its startup (Jeff calls him a compagnon of the wood business), as well as master cooperWill Jamieson, and two coopers from Portugal.

Christian set the flow of the new cooperage. Since Demptos didn’t want to pay to ship waste, preliminary work was and is done in France on raw staves coming from the mill. Handsplit stave wood is stacked outside for 182426 months to leach and bleach its tannins and vanillins, then planed and jointed and edges beveled. Staves are bundled into sets and 200 to 250 sets each put into shipping containers.The same is true for the sawn stave wood of American white oak that comes to Demptos from McGinnis in Cuba, Missouri.

Jeff left Demptos in 1992 to involve himself in a number of woodand barrel related projects. He built a stave mill in Salem, Indiana which he later sold to Independent Stave Company, a familyowned cooperage that makes thousands of barrels a day for wine and whiskey, the latter for bourbons such as Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark. [BrownForman Cooperage (formerly Blue Grass Cooperage) also has several stave mills and makes two thousand barrels a day, most of which it ships to Lynchburg,Tennessee for the aging of Jack Daniels,Woodford Reserve and other BrownForman spirits.]Today, Jeff is a managing member of JaegerVineyards and a managing partner of Barrel Associates, International (BAI), a cooperage known for its unique “DeepToast” barrel with staves of waterbent American oak. BAI makes 100 barrels a day in Fresno.These are offered through Dargaud et Jaeglé, a Burgundian cooperage with offices in Napa. Jeff also has a small log link business an hour north of Louisville, Kentucky and deals in white oak, although sassafras, white and red oak, and walnut are also represented. Jeff says wood for veneer gives the greatest dollar benefit.The first six to eight percent of sawn timber goes to veneer mills,THEN to barrels. The rest goes for furniture, flooring, railroad ties, and even wood chips.

Jeff sees a higher emphasis on quality from every producer of wine today. A winemaker’s involvement reaches across agricultural and productive lines. The winemaker is in the vineyard more. Barrel suppliers, in turn, have become knowledgeable about the trees that create staves, the firing process, bending and barrel finishing. Because a winemaker’s style takes a while to develop and the wood formula for a new wine determined, suppliers work with winemakers throughout the life of the wine to help achieve a particular style.Their consultations keep winemakers informed as winemakers perform barrel trials and hold tastings among their peers and a discerning public. Jeff calls the matrix of shared knowledge substantial and counsels, “Ordinary doesn’t sell; extraordinary does.