Jerry Lohr Interview

Growing grapes is not rocket science. Making good wine from them is. As a former research scientist for NASA, Jerry Lohr, owner of California’s J Lohr Vineyards and Wines, may be the only vintner in the world who can claim to possess the necessary qualifications. Yet it is Lohr’s status as a pioneer in the central California coastal appellations of Monterey and Paso Robles that most define his career and his contributions to the American wine industry.

‘In this industry there were certainly other people before me who scouted things out,’ says Lohr. ‘People had been in the wine industry dating back to the early 1800s, but the pioneer is the one who settles.

‘Scouts go and camp and stay for a while, maybe even marry a local, but the pioneers are the ones who build a community. And I don’t mean to be immodest but I think that’s what I’ve done.’

Lohr hails from hardy Scandinavians who settled in South Dakota in the 1800s.

Settling for Lohr has meant buying and planting some 1,200ha (hectares) since the 1970s in Monterey, Paso Robles, Napa and other areas, and tending those vineyards. ‘There’s not an acre of land, of our vineyards around the state, that I have not run a tractor over,’ says Lohr. It also meant banding together with other vintners in the early days to help pull the inchoate industry together – a effort that continues today.

Lohr is relatively soft-spoken for a man of his 1.9m stature and many ccomplishments: he is a former Rhodes scholar, holds a graduate degree from Stanford University, and ran a successful construction business developed at the same time as his winery. As a captain in the Air Force in the early 1960s, he was assigned to the NASA Ames Research Center for four years.

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