Jack Bittner

President

Jack Bittner felt the lure of Cliff Lede Vineyards long before he became the winery’s vice president and general manager.

Jack says, “I used to drive by the property every day. I saw the buildings going up and got a sense of the possibilities.” So what finally hooked him?

“Two things,” he says. “First there was Cliff. I could see his passion, his commitment to producing fine wine and his willingness to make tough decisions and do what it takes to reach that goal – like keeping yields low and using only the best clusters. Then there were the wines themselves. The first offerings from this project are excellent.”

Jack hasn’t always found himself in quite such lofty realms of the wine world. He got his start sipping considerably rougher stuff: apple wine he made in the garage with his father while growing up in a small town in Massachusetts. Jack has fond memories of purchasing farm apples, watching the basket press and hauling the juice into a musty cellar at home. But the most powerful memory, “the one thing I took away from it,” he says, cringing, “was that our wine was terrible. It was awful. And from that I have an appreciation of all that can go wrong.”

Which made it that much better when he discovered how profoundly things can go right. He was in college and working part-time at a wine shop. The owner invited him to try a 1983 Cos d’Estournel. “We were standing in the back of the store,” he recalls, “with the bottle on another carton of wine, and we were drinking it out of jam jars. It was a shocking moment. I was suddenly aware of a level of quality I didn’t know existed. If apple wine had been my baptism, that Cos d’Estournel was my confirmation.”

Upon graduating from Boston College in 1992, he packed up his new passion and headed for the Napa Valley. He’s been there ever since. He first worked at a pair of fine Napa Valley boutique vintners, Clos Pegase and St. Supéry Vineyards & Winery. From St. Supéry, he moved to Silverado Vineyards, where he played a key role in the winery’s marketing and sales efforts.

Jack brings to Cliff Lede Vineyards strong relationships throughout the industry, the vision and experience to develop Cliff Lede into a world-class brand and the management skills that have enabled him to engage his staff in reaching shared goals.

He recently earned his MBA from UC Davis, which has added more depth and breadth to his already keen understanding of business acquired during fifteen years in the wine trade. “It helped me see how non-wine businesses do things,” he says. “It gave me a better understanding of the macro-economics of agriculture, of how the hospitality industry works, even of how my own distributors operate and why some are more successful than others.”

An avid cyclist, Jack says his favorite ride in the valley is the climb up Howell Mountain. It’s no surprise—there are grapevines there.