When Jenny first wrote to me from UC Davis, she was a brand-new grad student with no winery experience and a dangerous Philly mouth.

“My former wine certification student, now out in California,” I told people, “just insulted a Mondavi to his face and lived to tell the tale.”

Back then, she was slipping me dispatches from her first harvests. One of my favorites came after a weekend at Folio, one of Michael Mondavi’s projects in Napa. She and another first-year headed over to get their hands in some grapes, because they were the only two in the program who hadn’t worked a harvest before.

“I bulked up my biceps doing punchdowns,” she wrote. And then the kicker:

She’d been there a few weeks earlier when we were visiting Napa. In classic Philadelphia fashion, she managed to say—straight to Robert Mondavi Jr., without realizing who he was—that “the Mondavis like to throw their name around to get anything they want.”

“Leave it to me to put my foot in my mouth,” she wrote. “Some punk-ass Philadelphia kid coming out to Napa and saying that to a Mondavi.”

They laughed about it for a week at her expense. I laughed about it for much longer. Because that’s Jenny: smart, blunt, and absolutely unafraid.

From Philly wine class to UC Davis tanks

Jenny didn’t grow up in a wine-drinking family in New Jersey. She studied chemistry at Villanova, planning on a sensible career in pharmaceuticals. Then someone handed her a wine class in Philly—one of those casual “wine appreciation” nights that are supposed to be harmless.

It wasn’t harmless.

She realized two things at once: that wine could be as geeky as any lab course, and that there was real science behind what was in the glass. Structure, fermentation, chemistry—just a lot more interesting than pill coatings.

Instead of being content with drinking the stuff, she went looking for a way to make it. She researched every wine program in the U.S., then headed west to UC Davis for a graduate degree in viticulture and enology. The program at the time had plenty of theory and lab work but no full production winery, so the winery side felt abstract at first. She fixed that the way good winemakers always do: by chasing harvests.

After finishing at Davis in 2009, she zig-zagged the globe: New Zealand, South Africa (twice), and then back to California when the money and the travel finally reached a natural limit. By then she’d seen enough cellars and vineyards to know where she wanted to plant herself.

Enter Scott, and the birth of Jolie-Laide

While Jenny was taking the laboratory route into wine, Scott Schultz was coming in through the dining room door.

He worked every job a restaurant could throw at him, front and back of house, until he landed with Thomas Keller’s group and was moved from Chicago to Las Vegas to Yountville. In Chicago he could only read about wine. In Napa Valley, the winemakers were literally sitting at his bar.

Names like Christian Moueix and the Schafers weren’t labels on a list anymore; they were people dropping into Bouchon. Scott did what restaurant lifers do when they want to learn something new: he staged. First in kitchens, then in wineries. He started helping with harvests whenever he could escape the floor, eventually staying on as a cellar hand and then cellar master. Napa Cabernet paid the bills but didn’t light him up, so in 2010 he headed toward people whose tastes ran more like his own—Pax Mahle and the crew around Wind Gap—leaner styles, stranger grapes, less polish, more character.

Jolie-Laide started as his side project in that world: small lots, unusual varieties, little intervention. The name is French slang for “pretty-ugly,” a term of affection for something that’s unconventional but compelling. That’s the entire thesis of the winery: beauty in the misfits.

Jenny and Scott met at a winery in Sebastopol. He was working there; she came in for a tasting. Eventually, she joined him not just in life but in the cellar. Today Jolie-Laide is essentially the two of them, working out of a shared facility in western Sonoma County alongside like-minded producers. It’s a place of long harvest days, loud music, shared lunches, and more than a few beers keeping the crew vertical.

How they make wine

Their approach is wonderfully simple on paper and relentlessly physical in practice:

• Whole-cluster fruit whenever it makes sense
• Foot-treading in bins and tanks
• Indigenous yeasts, no inoculations
• Fermentations without temperature-control toys
• Aging in neutral oak, concrete, or stainless
• Low sulfur, used sparingly

This is winemaking stripped down to intent and elbow grease. The science isn’t missing—Jenny has that in her back pocket when something goes sideways—but it’s not the driving aesthetic. Scott talks about it the way a seasoned cook does: you may not explain every molecular step, but you know what to do with your hands and when to do it.

The grapes themselves rarely play the celebrity roles. Instead of Cabernet and oaky Chardonnay, you’re more likely to see:

• Mélon de Bourgogne from Rodnick Farm in Chalone, planted in the mid-’80s. The wine smells like citrus, papaya, and fresh bread, tastes like Asian pear over crushed shells, and lands with a quiet, salty finish that would make any Loire fanatic pay attention.
• Old-vine Valdiguié rosé from a spiritual little site in Ukiah, all bitter orange peel, grapefruit, strawberries, fennel, and a faintly Campari-like bite.
• Gamay from decomposed-granite soils in the Sierra Foothills, made with whole clusters and a carbonic lift that will scratch the itch of anyone who loves serious Cru Beaujolais.
• Grenache blends from Shake Ridge and Syrah from high-elevation sites like Halcón, where altitude, poor soils, and coastal winds keep the wines taut, perfumed, and nervy rather than thick and jammy.

These are wines built around freshness and acidity, with alcohol kept in check. They’re light on their feet but not slight—more about precision and energy than weight.

Labels, boots, and the rest of it

The “pretty-ugly” philosophy shows up on the labels too. The artwork changes every year. Tattoo artists, photographers, friends—each vintage gets its own skin. It’s the opposite of big-brand consistency, and that’s the point: different years, different fruit, different moods.

If you ever visit them during harvest, you’ll notice two other constants: loud music and Blundstone boots. They live in those things on the crush pad, slipping them on and off all day as they climb tanks, stomp fruit, and drag hoses. Feet first is not a metaphor in that cellar; it’s standard operating procedure.

From “punk-ass Philadelphia kid” to California natural-wine force

When I read that first email from Jenny at Davis, I saw a smart, restless kid who refused to be intimidated by famous names on a label. Years later, watching her co-run Jolie-Laide with Scott, the arc makes perfect sense.

She took a chemistry degree, a few Philly wine classes, and that Mondavi incident, and turned them into a life spent making some of the most distinctive and quietly influential wines in California.

So yes, Jenny—keep ’em coming. The emails, the stories, and especially the bottles.