Judd Wallenbrock: The Ramble

A conversation with one of the U.S. wine industries most accomplished, successful and interesting executives

I first met Judd Wallenbrock when he was serving as COO of DeLoach Vineyards in Sonoma County and I was asked to work on the winery’s PR. What was unusual about him (I’d worked with numerous other CEOs and Presidents) was that Judd was a man with a plan, a philosophy, and a willingness to adapt and turn on a dime all in the service of branding, marketing and sales. It is no surprise to me that over the years he has become a sought-after winery executive and administrator. Over the course of his career in wine, Judd has held successful tenures with Robert Mondavi Winery, De Loach Vineyards, Michel-Schlumberger, Jessup Cellars, Signorello Estate, Napa’s Charles Krug, as well as founding then selling his own Humanitas brand. It is fair to say that Wallenbrock is one of the “Wise Men” of the American wine industry. I wanted to get his thoughts on the state of the industry, the challenges faced by the industry and Napa, and any advice he might have for those looking to break into his industry. I’m very happy he agreed to offer his insights in this Ramble.

This interview approach, “The Ramble”, begins with one question emailed to the subject. They respond in any way they choose, which in turn prompts my next question, and so on. It is a less formal way of conducting an interview, results in something a bit messier and rambling, but also produce something more interesting and authentic.

FERMENTATION: You really made your first mark in the wine industry working for Robert Mondavi. From there you chose to go on to a variety of ventures, including your own, and then back with the Mondavis, but with the other side of the family at Charles Krug. There is a lot of history, family and otherwise, in between those two great Napa companies and a lot of stories and tales along with that history. What do you make of your connection to the two sides of this great Napa dynasty?

JUDD: I started in the biz formally in 1980 though I had been associated with it though my college career in the late ‘70’s.  I waited tables to put myself through school, and you learn pretty quickly that if you sell a bottle of wine, your tips increase pretty substantially.  In that environment, as well as my post-college years in retail and restaurant management and buying positions, Robert Mondavi was clearly the inspiration.  He seemed to have almost single-handedly changed the culture of America with his ‘wine is a part of the good life’ evangelism.  Everyone from the pauper to the prince could experience a little taste of the good life through wine, food and the arts.

So when I had the opportunity to move to Napa Valley in 1992 and actually work for this legend…this visionary, I jumped.  Robert was absolutely driven by a passion for excellence and he instilled that in all of us.  As did his boys, Michael and Tim.  And not just excellence in wine quality…excellence in wine business quality.  Not just a culture of wine, but a culture of succeeding in the wine business.  That was huge.

Fast forward a few decades to my past role with C. Mondavi & Family, the Peter Mondavi Sr. side of the family, and the story is very much the same, but expressed much less visibly and boisterously.  That is, passion.  Passion for family, passion for fine wine, and maybe most importantly, passion for the wine business.  Of course, we all love wine and are passionate about it.  But love of the wine business, I think, is the secret to success and is certainly the common DNA of both sides of the Mondavi family.

FERMENTATION: You just inspired me to do a Google search on “Passion AND Wine”. It returned 172,000,000 results. Million! This led me to look up “passion” in the thesaurus. Interestingly, both “anger” and “joy” are listed as synonyms for “passion”. From what I’ve seen over the years, you derive genuine joy from seeing a marketing plan succeed. In fact, I get the impression the joy you derive from seeing well-laid marketing plans for significantly increasing the direct sales from a winery or from successfully refocusing a wine brand on a narrower product line or from accomplishing a complicated wine brand renovation is a kind of joy that Judd Wallenbrock would derive if his well-laid marketing plans succeeded in increasing sales of a perfume brand or an apple brand or a brand of baseball bats.

JUDD: Rather than ramble, I’m going to amble a little!  Do you remember the John Prine song “Angel From Montgomery”?  The line I love is ‘how the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening and have nothing to say’.  I just can’t see living that way so I dive into everything in life with passion.  I had an epiphany in my late 20’s, early 30’s when I was feeling a little down about some things that happened to my family, especially my father, that left him pretty much broke. And it destroyed him.  I made the realization that everything in life is a choice and only you can make those choices.  You can’t play the victim. You can choose to complain…or to contribute.  You can choose to engage…or to disengage.  You can choose to love…or to hate.  You can choose to be happy…or not. Obviously people don’t ‘choose’ to have cancer, or to break a bone, or go bald…but you do have a choice as to how you react to things that happen to you.  I choose to make a difference and try to make people’s lives a little bit better. 

FERMENTATION: And you identify one of the great things about working in wine—a chance to work in an industry that produces something that, when used correctly, tends to deliver happiness. Folks working in the concrete industry probably don’t get to say that.

But this leads me to another issue. You have been managing folks in the wine industry for many years now. This also means you have worked closely with the different demographic cohorts we all talk about (Greatest Generation, Boomers, GenXers, Millennials and likely now Gen Z). Are there any observations you can share about the different generations and what it takes as a manager of people to help make these different cohorts’ lives a little bit better?

JUDD: Having children helps a lot!  I have two Millennials a Gen Z’er in my household and they’ve taught me so much.  Ultimately, I think none of us really ‘manage’ people…we ‘coach’ them.  The key is to hire people that are ‘coachable’.  I played baseball in college and played with some of the finest talent on the planet, but they didn’t make it past single A ball.  Why?  Because they simply weren’t coachable – wouldn’t take suggestions and learn from them.  So, much of creating a great team is truly in the HR process.  The old adage ‘garbage in, garbage out’ is true. Me?  I was a sponge.

Now that you’ve got your team, let them do their job.  Don’t micromanage – coach.  And to me, this is all about communication.  Maslov’s hierarchy of needs holds true for every generation – we all want to feel loved and needed.  We may express it differently depending on our generation, so the vehicle of communication becomes the difference.  No matter where I’ve been working, I’ve always sat down with every new hire in the company and walk them through a very fun presentation outlining our vision, our strategies to achieve the vision, and where we are in the process.  I don’t leave this up to a few pages in the employee manual…I do this personally.  And at the end of the meeting, I do an exercise called ‘What’s Your Terroir?’.  I tell them that I was born in 1957, the height of the baby boom.  All that means is that there is a lot of ‘me’ out there.  But at the end of the day, we’re all genetically one click away from being identical.  Doesn’t matter if you are male or female, black, brown, white…whatever.  We’re all essentially the same.   But what gave me my terroir…my ‘flavor’ was how I was raised.  I grew up surfing and playing baseball in So Cal.  It shaped the way I talked, I dressed, I ate, I approached life…everything.  Yet an African American woman born on the same day and the same year in the Bronx talks differently than I do.  Acts differently, thinks differently.  Her ‘terroir’ shaped her flavor.  And I end the meeting asking ‘What’s your terroir?’.  This is where I really get to know the human being and start a connection that ultimately bonds us at a significantly different level than just management and employee.

FERMENTATION: So, let’s talk about the terroir of youngsters. There is an undeniable concern running through the industry now that wine is not attracting the attention of Millennials and Gen Z; that they are more and more likely to reach for spirits and other options than they are wine. First, do you agree with this assessment? Second, if you do agree, to what elements of these generations’ “terroir” do you attribute this apparent retreat from wine and is there something that the wine industry can do to turn them on to wine?

JUDD: The issue of generational change was the big issue prior to the Pandemic, right?  Pre-pandemic we were concerned that the Boomers were aging out and that Millennials weren’t drinking wine.  And the numbers support this – wine consumption is flat to slightly declining.  That said, let’s remember that Boomers didn’t drink wine when they were young either.  Nor did Gen X’ers, but they are now.  In fact, when I became of age, I believe per capita consumption in the US was something like 1.9 gallons.  Now it is close to 3.0 gallons. Percentage-wise, that is a big jump, but the reality is, culturally, we pale compared to those countries where wine is culturally accepted and simply a part of life.  France, Italy, Spain, and Germany all are 3 times that amount and Portugal is off the charts.  So the upside is quite huge.  And when you consider that we import close to 30% of our consumption and only export maybe 5%, the math pretty clearly indicates that we don’t produce enough wine to actually satisfy our own current consumption.  

Boomers represent about 70 million people.  X’ers are around 65 million, while Millennials are about 72 million.  Gen Z behind them dips back down to around 67 million.  My guess is that as generations age, they ease into wine.  Both the Boomers and the X’ers did…I see future generations doing the same.  Which means, because of the smaller population of Gen X, the industry is in for a lull until the Millennials age into wine.  Then we are in for some good times again.  And if the per capita increases, it could be an incredibly prosperous industry again in 5 or 10 years. 

So why did the Boomers and X’ers start drinking wine?  My guess is that it is because the world became smaller.  Travel to Europe opened the eyes of the post-war generations to wine as a part of culture.  And that will continue, especially as the Pandemic frees the younger generations to travel again. And not just for leisure, but for business.  That exposure to cultures that celebrate wine and food every day, and who have centuries of generations that embrace it will eventually modify our younger generation’s actions.  

What’s the net of all of this?  Patience.  As Baron Philippe de Rothschild said (paraphrased), the wine business is really quite simple.  It’s just the first 200 years that are difficult.  We can’t force a generation to drink wine.  But we can let them discover it on their own by exposing them to culture. 

FERMENTATION: I think your take is astute. However, I also think that the Millennials are just biding their time waiting for people like you and me to retire…but especially you. 

Your point about wine as a cultural artifact that one is more likely to embrace upon finding themselves surrounded by it due to travel or other experiences is a good one. Still, there are those that believe the wine industry simply hasn’t met younger generations where they are, that the wine industry hans’t properly reflected the values of Millennials and GenZ or utilize the communication tools that those generations use. Silicon Valley Bank has sounded the alarms in their State of the Industry reports. And there is a move afoot to fund a generic advertising and marketing campaign to help stave off what appears to be a retreat from wine. Should the American wine industry get behind a generic, industry-funded marketing campaign?

JUDD: So, are you saying it is time for me to move on, Tom?  Old & in the way?  Hah!  I can remember when I got in this business over 42 years ago it was dominated by old gray-haired white men…now I’m one of them!  Fortunately, I don’t think or act like those guys.  But I actively search for younger diverse people with a spark and hope to inspire them a bit to pick up the torch and run with it.

This isn’t the first time Silicon Valley Bank has sounded alarms – and I appreciate their concerns but I’m way more positive than they are.  It is all about communication and how people receive, process and act upon those messages.  Technology has helped so much in this regard with our phone being the center of all forms of communications…the least of which is actually talking on that phone.  I’ve been approached by the people looking to do this campaign to promote wine.  Remember the Wine Market Institute in the ‘90’s wanting to do the same thing?  What ‘Got Milk’ did for the milk industry, they wanted to do for the wine industry.  Everything comes full circle.  Your question, should the industry get behind this is a good one.  The answer is, yeah, probably.  But nothing traditional, in my opinion.  Everything has to be both digital AND experiential, which is tall order.  The most important thing we can do is simply get people to put a taste of wine in their mouths and to tell the story behind that wine.   Ultimately, the message needs to be that ‘wine is cool’ because we aren’t trying to build a brand, we are trying to build a culture.  And cultural change is something that happens over time, not overnight. 

Remember the ‘wine raves’ of the ‘90’s?  Those were great for the industry I think because it spoke to a new generation in the places that the generation thought were cool.  It was completely experiential.  I’d love to see something like those come back, but with the messaging and in the locations this next generation can relate. 

FERMENTATION: Going back to working with younger generations and seeking out and finding young folks with a spark, what can you tell us about hiring conditions in Napa and the wine industry in general? It strikes me that we are still looking at some of the best conditions ever for someone with sales and hospitality talent to get into the wine industry and the Napa Valley wine industry in particular. This seems particularly so if they want to start on the hospitality side. Unemployment is lower than it has been in ages. Wages are growing. And it still seems like there are a number of positions opening up regularly in Napa. What are the primary challenges wineries are facing right now concerning hiring?

JUDD: There seems to be a real shortage of talent these days and I’m not quite sure why.  What I do know is that when you create a great culture, the best and the brightest want to work for you, which makes things much easier.  If your culture is poor, you have to go out and seek talent and convince them.  That can be a tough sell.  In the old days, people just wanted the ‘lifestyle’ of wine and would work for peanuts.  Those days are over with the exception of maybe retirees or folks in businesses that afford them more flexible hours to complement their other job.  Nowadays people don’t just want a job or a lifestyle, they want a career. It is super expensive to live in Napa and wineries need to adjust.  Controlling the flow of traffic to your tasting room through the use of appointments helps to regulate that traffic, and perhaps provide a better guest experience as a result.  But also, it means fewer staff members focusing more on quality than quantity.

FERMENTATION: I think you identify one of the key issues confronting the industry looking to attract and hire talent: cost of living in Napa. Relative to other wine regions, the cost of living and particularly the cost of housing can be accurately described as “insane”. I recently looked at homes for sale in Napa. The least expensive option was a 900 square foot, 1 bed-1bath townhouse situated next to Highway 29 that had all the charm of a pair of muddy shoes. Meanwhile, in the Willamette Valley, Walla Walla and other regions you can get two and three times the home for the same price. I don't’ see how you attract talent without significantly increasing wages.

But on to another subject I wanted to bring up with you. You are not just a baseball fan. You were a very talented college ball player and your brother is one of baseball’s top hitting gurus. Not long ago VinePair published an editorial in which Zach Geballe speculated that baseball and wine have similar problems to overcome; primarily the need to attract younger folks to their product. Zach noted that both baseball and wine have the kind of obsession with history and the past that diminishes their appeal. I think Zach identified the problem as "tragically obsessed with their pasts.” He cited the wine industry's adoration of older vintage and aged wines and the general impossibility of younger, less affluent consumers’ ability to afford them as harming wine’s appeal. It’s an interesting perspective and his article is provocative. But Is he right?

JUDD: Hmmm – a couple of interesting topics here, Tom.  Let’s separate them.  First is the cost of living in Napa…or should we say California in general?  I was just having this conversation over the weekend about how skiing has become a rich person’s sport more than ever before.  Undoubtedly there are still some values, but if you want to ski…or play golf…at an elite location, you are going to pay dearly for it.  I suppose that is what the ‘premiumization’ of Napa has accomplished.  It has separated the wheat from the chaff and as my daughter likes to say (stolen from Austin Powers) ‘that train has sailed’.  The good news for consumers is that there are endless wine and wine country destination choices.  It’s a little like restaurants – one can dine at the French Laundry for an arm and a leg, or they can re-fuel at In ‘N Out…both are great but it depends on the individual.  Napa has clearly positioned itself as the elite destination for Cabernet Sauvignon in the New World and is running with it. 

That does also attract a different kind of employee than the one from 20-30 years ago.  I see an older crew, many of whom might be retired or firmly established in another industry working part-time.  Or, it may attract those that have invested in their passion, receiving Level 1, 2, or 3 WSET degrees (and beyond) intent on working their way up in the industry they love.  This changes the dynamic considerably and requires the industry to adjust not only to whom we are attracting for visitation, but to whom we are recruiting to serve these lovers of fine wine and fine wine experiences.  And that requires an investment in staff.  No doubt there is change occurring and it will be interesting to see if Napa remains as protected from economic ups and downs in the future, or if it will need to adjust.  My sense is that it will remain elite, and position itself for quality over quantity not only in wine, but in all levels of hospitality. 

On to the more interesting subject of baseball (!).  I fundamentally disagree that baseball is a dying sport.  I do think the demographic is changing for sure though.  The question is whether or not the baseball ‘heroes’ of today can do what the NBA heroes have done.  That is, impact a new generation and a new demographic culturally.  Going to an NBA game is not unlike skiing – out of control expensive.  Yet TV and social media has really made these stars role models.  And frankly, for wine, this is a good thing.  Look at the number of NBA stars who by example are endorsing fine wine and think about the ripple effect that is having on the youth.  Just like wanting to ‘Be Like Mike’ and wear hellaciously expensive shoes, today’s kids are seeing the greats drink fine wine.  I can’t help but think that will trickle down to a new generation of a diverse group that will expand the wine universe. 

Will baseball follow the example of the NBA?  Not sure, but I feel like it is doing so.  The rules are changing, the games are speeding up, the sport is very ethnically diverse, and there are still heroes.  I think maybe the bigger issue with baseball is its endlessly long season stretching from Spring to Fall and people lose interest until the playoffs. But is it ‘tragically obsessed with their pasts’?  I think there is a minority that is – just like wine lovers obsessed with older vintages.  But that group is small, aging, and not the future of both industries.  There is authenticity in history and there is innovation in the future.  A balance of the two is in the cards for both baseball and wine. Sidebar:  as I love food, wine, and baseball, one of little weird things I like to do is watch a game and pair the food famous in each of the competing cities to pair with wine to match the food.  Dodger hot dogs and Philly cheesesteaks paired with a nice Pinot Noir, for instance. The point:  make it fun, make it accessible, and make it cultural.  

FERMENTATION: My take on baseball is that the in-person experience can be critical for young or younger fans. We see how the Oakland A’s can’t seem to attract a fan base to the park, but we also see that the Oakland Coliseum is a travesty of an experience compared to the baseball stadium across the Bay. And I think folks would likely stay away even if the A’s didn’t put a low-cost team on the field but instead paid for some superstars.

OK….let’s end this with some advice. I’m a 22-year-old just finishing up college with a degree in business/economics and a minor in French. I like wine. In fact, my peers in college always razzed me on Friday nights because I was drinking Cab and Pinot while they were guzzling cheap lagers. I want to make wine a career. So, someone recommended I go see Judd Wallenbrock and get his advice. Here’s my main question. Assuming I can spend a couple more years in school if I want to or I can jump right into a job search, which part of the wine industry or which job path in the wine industry would you direct me toward with the idea that it is likely to provide me with the best opportunity for a long, successful career?

JUDD: “For a long, successful career in the wine industry” – what a difficult question!  The path I took worked well for me but may not be relevant today.  My choice was to ‘walk a mile in the shoes’ of everyone who touched wine to gain experience at every level in order to run wineries experientially rather than hypothetically.  But that approach takes time, pays poorly initially, and requires patience and a plan.  I was learning the love of the wine ‘business’, not just the love of wine.  Additionally, it made me appreciate what each role in the industry contributed, and how important it is to think holistically.  For example, if I wanted solely to be a great winemaker, why spend time learning to sell wine?  Because it teaches you that there is more to the business than just the individual roles.  It takes a team.  It teaches empathy.

In today’s environment, that approach may not be the best one, especially for someone who knows exactly what area of the industry in which they’d like to specialize.  For instance, if you want to be the best winemaker in the world, seek out and do anything you can to be taught by the best, and fill in the other experiences to complement and round out that role as you can. 

But your question seems to be more directed to what area of the industry is in most need of talent if I read that correctly. In my opinion, that need is most significant in consumer analytics and communications.

As discussed, we have challenges…and opportunities to speak to different generations, different ethnic groups, and simply folks in different stages of their wine journey.  Traditionally, we’ve used a shotgun approach to expanding the reach of wine while other industries have used technology and new platforms of communications to be more laser-focused on identifying the potential customer and speaking to them in a way that is meaningful to them.  In an industry absolutely saturated with choices, the wineries that can break through the clutter and speak to the consumer on their terms, not the winery’s, will be light years ahead of everyone else.  Simply, consumer ‘pull’ always wins.  It always has, we just have so much more technology to help us talk with (not at) them today.   

My parting thought is this - most importantly, always be “coachable’”.  Learn from others’ mistakes…and successes.  Listen, learn and apply. That is a life-long lesson for me.    

FERMENTATION: Thank you, Judd.