Do you have the coolest job on earth?
I think I might. I am here at the winery right now with the vineyards in the background and it’s a special place and an incredible job.
Reading the story behind the Booker brothers, did they marry or have children?
Never married, never had children and when they passed they owned 1300 acres of land here in the westside of Paso Robles where Bookers is located and when they passed they donated all of the land back to the city. They were very philanthropic and when our founder Eric heard the story of the Booker brothers and where the estate sits, we have 100 acres that was their land, how they thought of the community and just being good neighbours to everybody, they wanted to dedicate it as a tribute to them. People often think that our founder was Booker it is Jensen, but they wanted to name it as a tribute to the Booker brothers.
The Booker brothers were farmers but not wine people?
They had a lot of cattle, a lot of ranching. Farming overall not really any vineyards. When the land was purchased. In 2001 there were some vineyards planted, but not by the Booker brothers.
I’m interested in what your background was and your work experience to bring you to where you are.
I’m young in the industry, I was born and raised here, not in Paso Robles, but about 30 minutes south of here in San Luis Obispo County. El Paso de Robles is in San Luis Obispo County, we are in the northern tip of the county, a big agriculture based county, big agriculture community. My elementary school was located in the middle of vineyards which was pretty cool.
Eric Jensen, our founder, was my basketball coach when I was a young kid, when I was 12 years old I was able to meet him, meet his two sons, Jake and Max, so I actually grew up with them. We went to high school together and since have remained very close but I was able to be around the vineyard when I was a very young kid and I immediately fell in love with it. I started drinking Booker wine before I was 21. We have a bottle called Vertigo which Eric basically had us try with dinner with him when we were about 17 years old and I didn’t really appreciate it at the time but I learned to and Eric was essentially saying “hey you’re going to learn to enjoy nice wine because once you try nice quality wine it is going to be tough to go back” and when I finished school here I had an agricultural business major. I started working at Booker about four years ago and started in the Tasting room as a busser just kind of learning the tips and tricks of hospitality, learning winemaking, farming, everything that goes into the whole production of wine making and fell in love with it.
With your interest in food and wine did you pursue further education in addition to your experiences?
No, actually I had a more hands on experience during Covid and during 2020, I lived here in Paso Robles in he Jensen’s house for a little bit and got a pretty hands on from Eric himself, just being out in the vineyard. Obviously everything is so quiet here and I really had a hands on experience and one thing I learned is learning by doing is, for me, much more beneficial than learning by a textbook and I got to really experience it firsthand see the magic that comes with farming grapes and the whole production from vineyard all the way to bottle.
I’m guessing one of the top five questions you get is climate change? Are you experiencing disadvantages to climate change?
I don’t perceive advantages based on climate change. If you were south of us, about 180 miles south of us in L.A. fires are a prime example of that. We have had a very, very dry winter. We had some rain this past week and I believe L.A. got some rain this weekend as well but as far as winters go this is one of the driest and warmest years we’ve had, especially throughout January and if that keeps up I don’t see that being an advantage in any way. Especially compared to the last two years, we had heavy, heavy rainfall. In our area we had about, we had record rainfall in 2022 and 2023 leading into 2024, whereas this year it has been pretty dry.
With such a dry area how do you irrigate the vineyard?
As far as irrigation goes we are all on drip lines throughout and we have two wells on the estate. We are very conscientious about our irrigation, we don’t get much rainfall here in Paso Robles, it’s typically pretty dry and drought stricken. We are very conscious with our irrigation the drip helps us mitigate and make sure we are irrigating efficiently. We also have something called soil moisture probe, something we put down into the soil to measure, it could be 6 inches, 8 inches, 12 inches deep, to see how much moisture is actually settling in the ground to make sure we aren’t overwatering and making sure the vines are getting enough water. We are trying to irrigate to the absolute perfect amount.
Tell me about the winemaking?
Specifically for Booker, we have three brands under the Booker umbrella. We have Booker, My Favorite Neighbor and Harvey and Harriett. At Booker we are predominately estate grown so behind me we have our vineyards here on Bookers estate, we have a 100 acre estate, 60 acres planted, we predominately grow Rhone varietals so about half of our vineyard is Syrah and we do a lot of Grenache, some Viognier, Marsanne, a little Temperino and a little Chenin Blanc as well.
We really want to carefully craft nice, big, bold, high alcohol wines. We are trying, it’s been our mission as of the last couple of years, to get the ABV down a little bit, right around the 14, 14.5%. But beautiful wines, smooth tannin structure, palatable when they’re bottled as well as will hold up for age.
My Favorite Neighbor and Harvey and Harriet are more of a collaboration effort. So at Booker we are really highlighting our terroir. You can kind of see that the hills and deep slopes behind me so with my Favorite Neighbor we are going to highlight our Favorite Neighbor throughout Paso Robles our Favourite vineyards is where we source Cabernet from and the same with Harvey and Harriett where the really highlight the Paso as a region.
Our main focus is are we farming the right way? Booker is certified organic and well as regenerative organic certified. There is a lot of emphasis in the vineyards we believe that it’s performing the right way it makes winemaking much easier for us.
We are growing high quality fruit and it translates into high quality wines.
How big is your winery team?
I would say about twenty people full time and we bring in interns from the local university as well during harvest. At any given time about twenty people and then if you mix in hospitality it comes to about forty.
There is not much turnover here, our employees are very loyal to Booker brands. We love working here, we have a great working culture but it is really nice having young kids from the local university come up and learn. We get young, youthful energy in here and see where the scope of wine is going to lead in the next few years.
What kind of yields do you expect?
Last year we were down about 15%, we had some late frost come in April which was very, very unusual, which hurt yields, but compared to the local industry standards we were pretty much on par even if not better. This year is a little too early to say, very dormant but on a given year Booker would expect around 7500 or 8500 cases.
Which of your wines are you bringing to the Vancouver International Wine Festival in February?
Good question, off the top of my head I believe we have Harvey and Harriet Red Blend, Harvey and Harriett White Blend, My Favorite Neighbor Cabernet Sauvignon, our My Favorite Neighbor Chardonnay, Booker Pearls, I believe five.
We will showcase our 100% Syrah called our Fracture at a seminar. I believe we are showcasing five of our wines. It should be fun, it’s about California wine making and the California Agriculture Department.
Has there been anything that you have found surprising or unexpected working in the industry?
I would say unexpected, the places where wine has taken me and taken our brands. When I first started in the Tasting room I really looked at wine as a pretty narrow scope and now I’m seeing that’s taking me across the country, it’s taking me across the world. I was lucky enough to go to the Cayman Islands for a couple of weeks for Booker, got to showcase our wines there. I get to come up to Vancouver later this month and just the experiences that have come with, and the people that I’ve met, really just been a pleasant surprise for me.
What are your long range goals for Booker?
Just beyond this hill our neighbour had another 100 acres, and we just acquired that about a year ago, so we expanded our operation and we now have our 100 acre estate plus their 100 acres estate so I guess about another 30 planted so now up to about 90 acres planted.
It was something that was very exciting for us and a great expansion and something that had been in the works for quite awhile and kind of came to fruition about a year ago.
Tell me something about the winery that not everybody knows?
I would say that something that is unique that people don’t specifically ask is why we have wine caves down below. Basically right below where I am sitting we have about 12,000 square feet of wine caves and that’s where we do all of our bottling and all our barrel aging. We have a fermentation room as well as an aging room. People love it, they love the aesthetic of it. They don’t specifically ask why we do it and that’s simply because we were spending a good amount of money to store all of our wine at off site warehouses and just between taking trucks over and back and forth, back and forth. It kind of limited us in a way, so in 2021 we completed the construction of this current Tasting room that we have, and the wine caves down below us, and having it there with all of our barrels in it for storage it’s just been immaculate. We do a lot of the My Favorite Neighbor wine making production and Harvey and Harriett so it allowed us to really consolidate everything and have it all on one site.
For the power source for our wine caves, we mainly use solar as well as electric. We have it air conditioned if necessary and when we do our lactic fermentation we are able to warm the room up to about 70, 80 degrees. So it is temperature controlled. We have not had any temperature issues with it getting too warm or too cold.
Where do you see the winery and the vineyards in a year from now?
I see us continuing, what we’ve done here on our estate is something that’s special and unique. As far as farming organically and regeneratively organically, when I say regenerative what we’re doing is we are actually restoring the soil health, something as small as planting cover crops and no till farming and we would love to see that kind of spread throughout Paso. That is Eric’s, and our vineyard manager, Hilary’s, big goal right now is to get other vineyards farming the right way. Capturing carbon as opposed to emitting carbon into the atmosphere. If we keep farming the right way, and keep those pillars of regenerative organic, that will spread throughout Paso, and that’s kind of the future of it.
What else would you like us to know about the winery?
I think I would love people to know that when Booker was founded it was founded upon Eric Jensen’s dream. He wasn’t an expert winemaker, he didn’t have a winemaking background per se he and his wife, Lisa, they are from Southern California and they fell in love with Paso Robles and Eric has always loved the idea of keeping it very tight knit, very family oriented. For example, Chris Jensen, Eric’s oldest brother, also works here at Booker, lives on our estate. Eric’s father, Harvey, Harvey and Harriet’s name sake, also lives on the estate here, he is 93 years old. Uncle Chris, I call him Uncle Chris, lives with Harvey and also Aunt Kathy, Eric’s older sister lives here as well. We have a big family presence.
It’s a very tight knit team here and if you were able to ever visit us you would notice that special vibe and culture we have built here at Booker where we truly all get along and we all love each other and we’re all one big happy family.
For Harvey and Harriet we really want to increase production and distribution throughout Canada.
Eric’s father, Harvey, who lives on our estate. Eric’s mother, Harriet passed away about ten years ago and that’s when we launched Harvey and Harriet, about 2017 that we first did it. It was a passion project for Eric, he wanted to dedicate something for his parents. On the back of the label a little note saying “to my mom and dad, everyone’s favorite neighbors, or not, from Eric Jensen”, because Eric grew up in a small home in Southern California. Eric is one of seven children in a 1500 square foot home in Southern California. A lot of chaos, a lot of debauchery, but his parents loved the idea of having wine at the dinner table but they were not able to afford nice wine per se. So Eric says we grew up drinking Two Buck Chuck, that’s what my parents could afford however they loved the idea of having their meal with wine. Eric really wanted to launch this wine at an affordable price point to make high quality wine that people across the country, across the world, could enjoy with their friends and family and make memories over wine.
Carson O’Connor
Brand Ambassador
Booker Vineyard
Paso Robles, California, United States
Sales and Business Development
Booker Vineyard
Paso Robles, California, United States
Luxury Brand Ambassador
Constellation Brands
Wine Sales Representative
Booker Vineyard
Paso Robles, California, United States
Source: LinkedIn
