What do you make of a label with the first paragraph of Homer's Odyssey beneath a reference to the woodland habitat of Winnie-The-Pooh?
We're not exactly sure, but juxtaposition is a recurring theme in the story of Hundred Acre—one of the most gossip-ripe wine brands in Napa, Ca.
Founded in 1998 by darkhorse Jayson Woodbridge, Hundred Acre didn't waste any time raising the bar in St. Helena. Their second vintage made the Wine Spectator 100. And from 2002 - 2015, their wines earned 22 100-point scores from Robert Parker's Wine Advocate.
Jayson Woodbridge's image in the press sounds more like an A-list celebrity than a Napa Valley Winemaker:
"Describing Jayson Woodbridge requires a thesaurus. Passionate is a good word, along with driven, charismatic and hedonistic. You could add exacting, arrogant and volatile."—Tim Fish, Wine Spectator
"That his unconventional ideas and ways of doing things clearly get the results only compounds the prevailing notions of a kind of mysterious, unseen, dark matter element that accounts for his success." —Lisa Perrotti-Brown, Wine Advocate
A veteran of the Canadian Infantry turned investment banker, Jayson "retired" at 36 and bought a prime vineyard site in Napa. Controversy soon followed: including a lawsuit for making wine without a license, civil suits for noncompliance, and complaints from angry neighbors.
Quite the rap sheet for a man who named his winery after a children's book.
But for wine nerds, Jayson's attention to detail describes his character best. Vines are thinned to a single cluster. Specially-trained workers select individual berries worthy of ripeness standards. Air filters stand guard against vine disease. And super-fine misters—emitting just enough moisture to evaporate before coming in contact with the vine—function as an air-conditioning system.
All Hundred Acre fruit comes from small vineyard plots. And each expression—parsed by soil type, rootstock, and time of harvest—ferments separately. Then Jayson performs a feat of improvisational blending. Perhaps learned by osmosis from Phillipe Melka, who honed his trade at famed Bordeaux houses, Haut Brion and Chateau Petrus and Dominus in California.
Hundred Acre Wines can sell anywhere from $500 to $10,000 or more depending on the source and vintage. These elegant monsters can cellar for 30 - 50 years—a period sure to transform your investment from Winnie-The-Pooh into The Odyssey.