The Fizz #35: Jenny and Jim of Fossil and Fawn are not clear-cutting to plant new vineyards.
Instead, these winemakers are committed to working with growers of old vines and converting parcels to organic farming, while carrying on the tradition of Oregon Pinot Noir.
For this issue of The Fizz, I spoke to Jenny Mosbacher and Jim Fischer, winemakers at Oregon’s Fossil and Fawn. We spoke months ago, but because of audio issues, and now thanks to my investment in Descript software, I’m able to share this interview with you today. Jenny and Jim have been making wine for ten years, but are still a small hands-on operation. They’re in a push and pull between traditional and new methods of winemaking, being in the heart of the Willamette Valley, where Pinot Noir is king.
They’re environmentally conscious winemakers dedicated to working with old vines instead of clearing land for new vineyards. In this interview, they’re vulnerable and honest about their journey, and I’m so excited to see what lies ahead.
Below, we speak about the costs associated with winemaking, their inspiration and curiosity, and how they kick off their fermentation process. If you like this issue, please subscribe below for $5/month—it helps me bring these issues to you by paying for Zoom and Descript software, traveling to get new stories, and paying many of my interviewees for their time.
Margot: Do you come from a family of winemakers?
Jim: I wish!
Jenny: “Family of winemakers” would sound way more prestigious.
Jim: My dad was a government employee and my mom worked at Nordstrom, so she was a retail worker for all her life. Nothing so cool as a family of winemakers, but my family owned a farm that was left to my aunts and uncle in the late 1970s. They were very interested in the notion of farming, living off the land, building a house. It's kind of interesting to see how things happen in cycles. The things that now sound appealing to me—moving somewhere, having a big garden and building a house, the same things were appealing to my parents. They moved to this space, and it was a former prune orchard. Across the street from my house where I grew up there used to be a prune dryer. My high school mascot was “The Prune Pickers”.
In the sixties, there was a gigantic storm, essentially a hurricane that landed in Oregon on [Indigenous People’s Day] and leveled many of the older orchards that existed here—plums, hazelnuts, walnuts. People just abandoned their orchards, so a lot of the early founders of Oregon grape growing, in many cases bought spaces that used to be orchards. My family had one of those spaces.
We had little things that you would do on the farm, but we never had a major crop. My dad was really into roses—he went from one rose bush to having one hundred in a year. As he got closer to retirement age, one of the things that really interested him was realizing the dream that he had when he moved to the space 25 years prior. Our family set about planting a vineyard, my cousins, aunts, uncles, everyone, and we did so by collecting wood from nearby vineyards and we started our own nursery.
And so we potted thousands of plants and moved them up from cuttings. In the fall and winter, we laid out our first vineyard block and planted. We had no idea what we were doing, and it shows.
Jenny: The vines don't know that they're crooked.
Jim: It’s not a showcase vineyard in that way—it's beautiful for sure, but it's not the geometric precision of going to the vineyard and all the vines are perfectly 90 degrees from each other. What was this kind of labor of love realized with this vision that has formed 25 years prior to moving to this place and having a farm was now really a work in progress.
Once my dad retired, he spent a lot of time growing grapes and farming them. I would describe him as being a very sweet but shy individual. Some of the people that he was selling grapes to, you know, I think they were doing their best, but they weren't necessarily making wine that we felt proud of and reflected the work that's been put into growing grapes. How Jenny and I got started was with this idea to help my dad realize all of this work that he put into the vineyard—a continuation of his vision. We were hoping to also get better customers for his grapes, so the grapes went into wine we could be proud of.
Jenny: In retrospect, it was just hubris, where we thought hey, we can do this with absolutely no background whatsoever. I mean, both Jim and I had wine industry experience, but very minimal production experience. I had worked harvests, which is just such a narrow piece of the puzzle. Jim had worked in distribution. I had worked in sales and hospitality. We knew a lot about the wine industry. We knew a lot of people in the wine business, we knew a lot of winemakers and wineries that we have worked for, but we had never actually made wine start to finish on our own.
We hatched this plan—we're going to take a little bit of fruit and we're going to make a wine. Then we're going to make that a business card wine, and we will use this as a proof of concept to then show other wineries or winemakers that these are good grapes that they should buy for their own production. Anything that we do is going to be better than what had come before, we thought.
2011 was a very fortuitous vintage to start out with in Oregon. It was one of the wettest and coldest years on record. Ultimately, it made a wine that we really really liked. Against all odds, it turned out pretty good, and it succeeded in its initial goal, which was that we were able to use it as a way to leverage connections with other winemakers to buy Jim's dad's fruit. By the 2012 vintage, we already had a couple of other buyers, and that was very exciting. We had this wine that we made in 2011, though, and in 2012, we said, alright I guess we're going to make wine again. Then we realized, hmm, I guess we better sell this stuff!
We eventually released the 2011 and 2013. So there was a little bit of a lapse in the time from the initial project start. It sounds very unromantic when you lay it out.
Margot: It sounds extremely romantic! You fell into something that became your passion, which is really amazing. Where did the wine equipment come into play? How did you actually start making wine?
Jenny: For the 2011 vintage, we found a winery that was willing to effectively barter with us. We gave them some of the fruit from the vineyard to then give us both the space and mentorship to then make the wine. By 2012, we moved into a custom crush arrangement with another winery that was in Portland, which was really convenient for us. It's very inconvenient to get grapes from the Willamette Valley—it's all U-haul trucks and white knuckle driving.
Jim: We tried to the best of our ability to pick first thing in the morning. In late September, early October, the morning temperatures are usually in the low forties. So if the fruit is picked immediately, it really has not changed. Thankfully we can avoid the need for refrigerated containers. We basically love making wine and hate driving big trucks of fruit. We try to find places that are close to where we process.
The question that you had about equipment, I think is a really important one because we made our first vintage of wine for probably about three or four thousand dollars, it was only 53 cases, but that was still a lot of money for us. Using shared spaces was a way that was mutually beneficial—we helped spread the cost for fruit for people who had already purchased it or were purchasing it, and it allowed us to get our foot in the door.
Even as it stands now, after doing this for ten years, we still don't own much really. The wine press, for example, costs several thousand dollars. It's really daunting to try to figure out how to afford that, because as it is now, we don't own anything. I mean, we don't own a house. I don't have a car. We have zero collateral.
Jenny: We are really the shittiest people to lend to, because they can't repossess anything. It has actually been a huge obstacle for us. We were very lucky that in the first couple of years, Jim's dad effectively gifted us the fruit. There is certainly a lot of privilege that comes with that, but in terms of finances of getting wine made and then to market has been entirely a function of the business making wine for a small amount of money, being able to sell it, and then hopefully making that back. Everything that we make from the business goes back into the business. I's very much a shoestring operation even ten years later.
Margot: Do you currently have your own winery space?
Jenny: In mid-2020, we went in on a joint venture between ourselves and Ross and Bee Maloof. They're incredible. We're really blessed to have a really wonderful relationship with them as friends and colleagues. We had made wine together a couple years ago and wanted to do that again. We ended up making wine in different spaces after that, that first year of intersection. We wanted to get the band back together. We had this really amazing opportunity to lease an operation.
It was not a lease where you just get an empty building. We had wine making equipment there. It has been a really amazing experience because it's the closest thing we really had to our own space, where we make a lot of the decisions. It’s a partnership.
We have a really good ability to communicate with each other and make it work so that we have this collaborative space. It feels that in some ways we haven't come a super long way on paper, but then in other ways, in upgrades to quality of life, it has been pretty monumental.
Margot: That’s great. You currently farm your own vineyard and then buy grapes from other growers, is that right? How do you choose what is growing on your home farm?
Jim: In some cases, it was already chosen before us by my father. The vineyard itself just has two grapes—Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris. That's what I love, and I don't really want to mess with that right now. That then opens up the opportunity, if there are other things that I'm interested in, those would be grapes that we are seeking out to try to buy from other growers. If I could plant more, I might choose other things to plant, for my curiosity.
Jenny: Pinot Noir is in a weird spot. In Oregon, it's by far the most planted grape by acreage, and a part of the kind of the Oregon brand. We have certainly reached and probably exceeded at this point, peak Pinot in terms of what the state produces. As a result, it has become uncool. It's taken on a kind of norm-core edge to it where people say “oh, you make Pinot, but what else do you have?”
It's interesting because we're still very artistically and emotionally committed to Pinot Noir as a grape. Until climate change comes for us all, the Willamette Valley is still a great place to grow it, and particularly the expression of the fruit that comes from Jim's parents vineyard is special. It makes me want to continue that line of inquiry of making it and seeing what we can get out of it as winemakers.
It has helped us grow because in our first couple of years of production, we were working effectively just with the one vineyard until 2017. For our first several years, we were making wine exclusively from Jim's parents vineyard. Because of that iterative process where we were given this artistic constraint of just this one grape to work with, it really forces you to learn everything you can about it to get good at it. It has enabled us to really hone and improve our style and our understanding of the craft of winemaking through this one variety. I think that if I had started out and I was given a broader palette to work with, I don't know if we would be in the same place.
Jim: It's tough because I want it to be cool.
Margot: There’s a lot of new kinds of wine out there right now, but there’s something beautiful to be said for the traditional Oregon Pinot Noir.
Jenny: I'm glad that there are people that are willing to give it a chance. There certainly has been a saturation point. There does become a problem where there's certainly a prestige style that emerged where they really all kind of do taste the same.
Jim: Well, they created a formula, specifically to legitimize Oregon Pinot Noir, which at that time revolved around wine scores. I don't begrudge people who were starting at that time for doing that. I do think that in my own estimation, as a person who has tried a lot of Oregon wine, that the best examples of wine from Oregon that I've had are Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris. That isn’t to say that down the line that someone won’t plant some Chenin or Trousseau and it becomes the most beautiful wine I’ve ever had from Oregon.
We didn't get to select the grapes that my dad planted. He chose those when I was in high school and I couldn't have cared less then. For now though, we have more opportunities to try everything because I think to be a person who makes something, you have to be a curious individual—but you also can’t end up with 23 different wines that aren’t sellable.
The new space that we lease with the Maloofs, is a winery that was built in the late seventies, on a property that was planted to grapes in the mid seventies. The grapes that are there are really old. They’re some of the oldest in the area. The person who planted it, planted predominantly Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. It's really awesome for us as people who love Chardonnay, where now we have those amazing, really old grapes.
We have two different sites that we get to work with that have two very different expressions of those grapes. I think one of the hardest things to express, but one of the most enjoyable things to feel, is getting to know a terroir. Chasing different parts of it through the process from fermentation through bottling and aging. It's really cool to learn different areas—you're starting an in-depth relationship with a place. We’re still in the honeymoon stage with this new vineyard.
Jenny: It is cool having that perspective because we have had this very deep experience with Jim’s dad’s vineyard. As we have matured as winemakers and started to work with fruit from other places, we’re able to compare and understand differences between Pinot Noirs. It’s a journey, and we’re always learning.
Margot: That's awesome. I want to touch on your winemaking style a little bit and the history of that home vineyard. When your dad planted those grapes originally, was there a conversation about organic, not organic, spraying, any of that?
Jim: That was a very lengthy and ongoing debate that took years. One of the elements of making wine that is important to Jenny and myself is trying to work with organically farmed fruit. My dad, being a man who grew up post World War II, is in many ways a man of that generation who experienced life as it was sold to him, which is better living through chemistry. It was a real challenge early on to get my dad to understand what Jenny and I were looking for.
Not just us, but other people too, because we were trying to sell his fruit. It was a battle—we had screaming matches with each other. It took years of wearing him down and it was stressful for our relationship. A lot of vineyard owners are oftentimes white men of the same age, and it’s difficult to try to convince them about the merits and logic of organic farming. It forced us to create a more economic incentive—if you are willing to do this, I would pay you more money.
For me as a person who can be very suspicious about capitalism as a construct, it feels really gross to say hey I’ll dangle money in front of you to do these things, but it has been effective.
Jenny: Yeah, saying that it’ll be better for the environment or for biodiversity, they don’t give a shit about that. You have to kind of speak their language and find a way to bridge the gap. That became a successful model for working with vineyards that we wanted to get into an organic model. In addition to wanting to work with organically farmed fruit, we also strive to work with fruit from vines that are as old as we can possibly get access to. I think that vines that are more mature produce fruit that we have found to be more expressive and more interesting when it's vinified. I sometimes balk at people who say “I am really interested in organic farming, so I'm going to buy this plot of land and I am going to clear cut it, plow it under, and plant my new vineyard, but it's going to be organic, so it’s okay”.
If we're working with these vineyard sites have been planted for forty years, at least we're not continuing more harm and more destruction of old growth timber forest.
Margot: What was the process like of converting that vineyard to organic?
Jim: It really was as simple as modifying the spray program, and maintaining in many cases what we were already doing in terms of no tilling. We use weed whackers and try not to break the soil. It was just the cessation of using what was already a low level of spraying—the vineyard was LIVE certified.
Jenny: His dad was already effectively farming it to the LIVE standards at that point. It wasn't necessarily taking it from conventional all the way down to organic. It was a one-step process. I would say that that is pretty typical of the other vineyards we’re working with. They were already almost there. We were just trying to push them to get to the finish line.
Jim: Getting people to understand that beauty has many different forms has been a big part of transitioning folks. We worked with a grower for a few years who had his beautiful older vineyard, right in the town where I went to high school actually. He used his site mostly as a wedding venue, but he could never find customers for the fruit. We pitched him on the same model, which is we'll pay you way more money and cover your costs associated with transitioning.
He was on the board with that, but his biggest challenge after that was learning to accept the beauty standard that of an organic vineyard—grasses are growing and plants are growing and it looks alive and it doesn’t look like a golf course.
Margot: On your website, it says that you use you cultivate yeast from your vineyard. What does that mean?
Jim: Prior to harvest, we start doing samples in the vineyard for ripeness, sugars, acids, flavors. We collect a variety of clusters from around the vineyard, let the juice soak on the skins for a brief period and set up samples in different beakers. We let fermentation take off in those juice samples. Sometimes we set up ten samples and all of them will go beautifully and start fermenting and be awesome, sometimes not.
Sometimes they’re just cold and they don't ferment. Sometimes fermentation kicks off real fast, but then it gets deducted and stinky, or really volatile. We do this process until we are able to select the strains that we like. Once we feel that we have a sample that will be a strong fermentor, we will feed it fresh juice, like a sourdough starter to basically keep building it up until we have adequate volume to essentially have something that we can add to that fruit when it arrives at the crush pad for process. This means that we can avoid adding sulfur or additional yeasts when it’s time for harvest.
Last year for 2020, we had two wines that were sulfur-less. Sulfur is a really useful tool, I’m not going to vilify it. We try and use as little as we feel we safely can to make the best wine we can make. Sulfur has turned into this horrible, evil monster that people are terrified of. It doesn't help that in America, we must have wine labels that say there is sulfur in the wine, because I think it makes it seem scary.
Jenny: The flip side to be aware of as we work with organic vineyards, is that a lot of times, sulfur gets added in the vineyard and not at the crush pad or in the cellar.
Margot: I want to touch on the Gewurztraminer you make that is macerated for 234 days. Quite a while. Why is that?
Jenny: Once you get going, then it becomes a self dare. How long can we go? That has been really fun. We knew we wanted to do skin contact, but we wanted to do something kind of different with it. We thought about what does really extended skin maceration look like? We devised this plan that we were going to destem it but leave it as whole berry as possible, and put the juice into these super durable, neutral egg shaped vessels. The brilliance of the egg design is that you can fill it up and basically not get any headspace. The lid is the little top of the egg, just like a soft boiled egg. We'd fill it up with fruit and then allow it to ferment whole berry. Over time, what would happen is that it starts to break down, and we’d top it up.
We just thought we were going to do this for a while, and we'll just keep tasting and tasting it and see what it does. It has definitely been some of the weirdest in-process ferments and has gone through its “teenage years”, but by the time it’s done, it really emerges through this metamorphosis.
Jim: Part of the 234 days is kind of arbitrary, but part of it is not arbitrary—in tasting it, the way that it feels is critical because three months or four months in, it's very tannic, very aggressive, not fun. As you go on, these smaller components that are too heavy for the solution, fall out. The wine finds itself.
Jenny: Initially, we were really surprised at the color—we thought it was going to have so much more pigment than it did, but because the pigments are going to be those longer chains, they’re the ones that are going to fall out of solution. It ended up being this really pale kind of peachy color. One of the more striking characteristics of it, is that it tastes like orange. It’s an orange wine, and it tastes like oranges too. We’re excited to see where it goes next year.
Margot: I’m excited to try it. Thanks for speaking with me, and I hope to meet you in person soon!
You can support Jenny and Jim by following Fossil and Fawn on Instagram, and buying their wines on their website. Try their Oregon Pinot Noir—nothing norm-core about it.
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