Garden of delights
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Tucker Taylor pauses at a galvanized metal tub at the top of Kendall-Jackson Wine Estate’s celebrated culinary garden. It’s overflowing with greenery and Taylor, the director of culinary gardens for Jackson Family Wines, sweeps his hands over the fragrant leaves with the delight of a child petting a puppy.
“This is orange mint, my favorite mint. Feel your fingertips. You can feel the essential oils,” he says of the strong citrus fragrance unleashed from this spring- and summer-blooming herb popular in teas and other drinks.
For Taylor, who oversees nearly 5 acres of premium food crops and perennials at the estate, to declare a favorite is saying something. Some 200 varieties of edible plants are grown in K-J’s culinary garden, each grown for flavor and to please the pickiest of the Bay Area’s top chefs.
On tours of the gardens, Taylor urges visitors to touch the merchandise. It’s part of the experience he wants to create in a garden that, in its California way, comes close to rivaling the gardens at Le Petit Trianon at Versailles. It is a serious production garden serving as Taylor puts it, “30 Michelin Stars” in San Francisco alone, spread over 15 restaurants. But it’s also laid out in a way that mixes the classical aesthetic of precise rows ringed by 80-year-old English walnut trees with the exuberance of flowering perennials along its borders humming with bees and butterflies.
“I often say we’re a hybrid garden,” Taylor says. “We’re farming and landscaping at the same time because it is also a show garden.”
The garden also is a way for people, many of whom may live in cities and suburbs far removed from any farm or even a backyard garden, to experience how exquisite just-picked food tastes. And that in turn may create positive memories of Kendall-Jackson when they scan the market shelves for wine.
“It’s fun for our guests to come out and do this,” Taylor says, pointing out other mints in the collection, from strawberry to pineapple. “Most people have not smelled these different mints. I really love the educational aspect of this garden. Our goal is to help educate
Kendall Jackson’s celebrated culinary garden grows some 200 varieties of edible plants.
TUCKER TAYLOR, director of culinary gardens for Jackson Family Wines
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people to the importance of fresh food.”
Visitors at Saturday’s annual Taste of Sonoma event put on by Sonoma County Vintners may opt for a guided tour of the scenic gardens that occupy a long space between the chateau-style visitors center and vineyards.
As extensive as they are, they remain hidden, almost like a secret garden, behind a wall of Ligustrum, a privet hedge Taylor had planted when he arrived at K-J from The French Laundry nine years ago.
“I just wanted the garden to feel more enclosed, and it’s a nice backdrop to the perennials,” he says.
The tours ($10) are a chance to learn about and taste the fruits, vegetables and herbs that feed K-J’s farm-to-table program.
Taylor hopes that as with wine, the proof that fresh is best will come with that first bite into a crisp carrot or tender radish the size of a thumbnail that has just been pulled from the earth that day.
“We harvest every morning and our produce goes right into the kitchen, and most of it never goes into the walk-in (refrigerator),” says Taylor, taking refuge under the shade of one of the old English walnuts that give the garden an air of venerability. Temperatures on this day would surpass 100 degrees, but the garden crew, having started in the cool of the morning not long after sunrise, will knock off work before it gets dangerously hot.
Most of the food crops grown in the winery garden go into food and wine pairings or dishes for events at other Kendall-Jackson estates.
“Our main kitchen is producing for all the other estates as well,” Taylor says, “so it might be canapes for 100 people or it might be a buffet for 50 people or an eight-course meal for 12 people.”
But produce from the gardens that amount to a small farm at the edges of Santa Rosa are in high demand from chefs.
“It’s really fun working and collaborating with our chefs in San Francisco and the Bay Area,” he says.
“We’ve had a waiting list for seven years in the city, so we’re getting ready to get three greenhouse like the one I put up at The French Laundry, which will really help out our winter production. I’m really excited about that.”
One of the more radical moves Taylor made when he first arrived at K-J was to add masses of perennials to attract pollinators to pump up the garden.
“As you can see, they bring in a diverse array of insects which help balance things, and there are also more birds in the garden now. There is a hole in that tree over there,” he says, gesturing toward a walnut in the distance, “and there is a bluebird that makes a nest every year. ”
Taylor also declares an “all-time favorite” among his perennials: Rudbeckia Goldsturm or black/ brown-eyed Susan.
“It’s just a workhorse and once it’s established can take the drought and take the heat. And it just keeps on giving. After it goes through its first bloom, we’ll cut those off and it will burst out again,” he says.
Taylor has planted large masses of varieties that paint the borders of the neat in-ground beds with color. Among them is a swath of blue bachelor’s buttons with blossoms that are prized by some chefs.
Other edible blossoms in the garden also sold as produce range from calendulas and violas to nasturtiums and verbena.
All do triple duty, by adding beauty to the garden, nectar for pollinators and edible blossoms for the plate.
Taylor stresses it all comes down to soil.
“We consider ourselves soil farmers, since that is the foundation of everything we do,” he says. “We add a lot of compost. We rotate our crops and plant cover crops in the wintertime. As a result, we have nutrient-dense produce,” he says. In fact, 10 percent of the soil is organic matter, he adds.
Another bold move Taylor made was to remove some of the old English walnut trees. A wide path was cleared through the middle of the garden to create a magical space for farm-to-table dinners served in the middle of the garden. Long tables run down the center, lined on either side by pristine beds of vegetables.
Although Taylor grew up on a 3-acre plot outside Jacksonville, Florida, helping his dad work the garden each summer, he chose a different path in college, going for a degree in business administration from the University of Florida. While that now seems a world away from farming, his understanding of economics and finance has proven valuable in making the garden more than a showplace.
He can’t really say exactly how many beds are in the field or how many varieties are grown on the estate. But he can speak the language of sales.
“For instance, the Tokyo turnips we pull out of the ground, the fresh salad turnips, are the size of your pinkie. They’re 25 cents each. We package all of our petite crops by the 100 count, so that’s $25.
But instead of going into a restaurant with $25 cases of produce, we’re going into restaurants with 200 to 300 cases of produce.
That adds up quickly. And we grow them year-round.
In the wintertime, we’ll grow them in the greenhouse.”
Taylor perhaps unwittingly launched his career in horticulture while in college, working as a prep cook in a restaurant called Café Gardens. While there, he convinced the owners to give him a small stipend to help clean up the landscape.
His first post-college job was at a bank, but it just didn’t fit. He returned to school for a second degree — in agriculture.
His concentration was environmental horticulture, which engaged both his creative and analytical sides.
He designed and managed an organic farm in Oregon’s fertile Willamette Valley and later managed the production of specialty produce on an organic farm outside Atlanta.
Always aiming high, he applied for a job designing the gardens at Thomas Keller’s illustrious French Laundry, and with the encouragement of Keller, began doing outside consulting.
Now Taylor also networks with the Sonoma County food community, serving on the board of Farm to Pantry and raising money for the food gleaning group by hosting farm-to-table dinners at K-J in the garden.
Like many a great gardener, Taylor is always looking for new things to grow. But as a natural marketer, he’s also looking for new projects to pioneer. He just returned from a trip to England, with Jackson Family Wines’ international team. He’s now trying to grow the idea of getting some land outside London for a culinary garden — it could provide a back door to introduce K-J wines to the best restaurants there.
“They have so many chefs there supporting local farmers and highlighting local farms,” he says. “They have an appreciation for the hard work it takes. It’s sort of a pipe dream. But you’ve got to have dreams.”
