Aperture is Jesse Katz’s winery, and Katz is the rare first-generation vintner who arrived without a family estate or a bloodline in the trade. He grew up in Boulder, Colorado, traveling the world’s wine regions with his father, the photographer Andy Katz, then trained at Fresno State and through harvests at Pétrus, Screaming Eagle, and Viña Cobos before becoming the youngest head winemaker in the country at Lancaster Estate. He founded Aperture in 2009 to make Bordeaux-variety wines from cool-climate Sonoma sites others had overlooked. His Cabernet became the first from Alexander Valley ever to earn a perfect hundred-point score.
Cabernet Sauvignon: the signature wine, and the first Cabernet from Alexander Valley to earn a perfect hundred points.
Red Bordeaux Blend: the estate’s core expression of its Bordeaux varieties.
Barrel-Fermented Sauvignon Blanc: a textured white in the Bordeaux mold.
Old-Vine Chenin Blanc: a delicate, increasingly rare bottling.
Sister label Devil Proof makes dry-farmed, single-vineyard Malbec, the highest-rated California Malbec among the major critics.
In 2016 he bought the historic Ponzo Ranch just outside Healdsburg, forty-two acres first planted in 1912, and built the estate around it: a 24,000-square-foot winery and a hospitality space shaped, like the name, after a camera’s aperture, with lens-like forms pulling light inside. Every Aperture label carries one of Andy Katz’s photographs. Tastings are seated and by appointment, from a full-range Soil Series to single-vineyard flights, in a glass room over the Russian River Valley. Most of the wine never reaches a store.
