How Jesse Katz Wove Sustainable Viticulture and Photography Into Aperture Cellars
Guided by dry-farming techniques in Sonoma’s cooler pockets and a winery shaped by the mechanics of a camera lens, the acclaimed founder of Aperture Cellars unites site-driven farming with a lifelong connection to photography
At the edge of Sonoma’s rolling Alexander Valley, where coastal fog drifts inland toward the Mayacamas Mountains, morning light sweeps across Aperture Cellars and catches the crisp geometry of its winery buildings. The majestic scene mirrors how Jesse Katz learned to read the land while traveling the world alongside his father, celebrated photographer Andy Katz, long before he launched one of Sonoma’s most ambitious wine estates. That connection between architecture and cultivation guides nearly every choice at the winery, from his mastery of intricate farming techniques to the breathtaking structures where Aperture wines are made.
Katz’s childhood was itinerant, moving from one renowned growing region to another with his father. “My whole life growing up was traveling and following my artist father around the world,” recalls the Colorado native, who visited more than 80 countries by the time he graduated high school, crossing paths with legendary figures such as Robert Mondavi and Olivier Leflaive. At Leflaive’s home in Burgundy, when Katz was 12 years old, his father traced the wines in his glass back to the vineyards they had walked earlier that day, letting Katz sneak sips and instilling an early reverence for terroir and craftsmanship. “Even at that age,” he explains, “I could see how distinctly different the wines were and how place had a distinct interaction with the final product.”
That realization changed everything. After an internship at Santa Barbara vineyard, Fess Parker showed him that entering winemaking didn’t require inheritance or wealth, he left business school and transferred to California State University, Fresno’s viticulture and enology program. From there, his training carried him to Pétrus in Bordeaux, Screaming Eagle and Robert Foley in Napa Valley, and Viña Cobos and Bodega Noemia in Argentina. After completing his studies and becoming the country’s youngest head winemaker at Lancaster Estate, Katz set out to build a label that reflected his own site-driven philosophy. He founded Aperture Cellars in 2009 with a focus on identifying overlooked vineyard pockets in Sonoma County that could support Bordeaux varietals at a top level.
Specifically, the town of Healdsburg drew him in owing to its support of remarkable talent across wine, cuisine, and hospitality, with a concentration of high-level producers that matched the range he wanted to explore. Within a few blocks downtown, one can dine at three-Michelin-Star restaurant SingleThread, enjoy hyperlocal fare at Dry Creek Kitchen, or settle in at Valette, where a seasonal California menu pairs closely with a list of varietals curated by a winemaking family. The town also sits within close reach of the vineyards across the Russian River, Dry Creek, and Alexander Valleys that reinforced Katz’s confidence in the area’s potential. He soon began searching for soils nearby that signaled long-term promise.
In 2016, Aperture acquired a historic vineyard property nearby, where thriving vines planted as far back as 1912 point to the site’s depth and resilience—a strength that only grows more relevant under the cooler microclimates Katz now views as central to the estate’s long-term future. At Farrow Ranch, he uncovered a block of old-vine Malbec that would alter the standing of the varietal in California. His Devil Proof bottling from the site went on to earn a rare 100-point score, widely cited as the first California Malbec to reach that benchmark from a major critic. There, he cultivates Bordeaux varietals across varied soil types and elevations that face multiple directions. That range allows for longer-than-usual growing seasons and layered complexity.
Aperture’s wines grow from a farming program built around long-term site health, climate awareness, and dry-farmed cultivation wherever conditions allow. Katz studies each block through soil depth, slope, exposure, and seasonal behavior, then adapts his approach vine by vine. “Not every site can handle it, but where we can push the vines, we do,” he says of dry farming. “It reduces canopy size, berry size, and cluster size, which helps concentration.” The estate runs almost entirely on captured rainwater, stored in reservoirs, and Katz’s team recycles roughly 98 percent of winery process water back into irrigation, creating a closed-loop system that benefits from the land’s naturally cooler conditions.
Katz views that natural advantage as central to the future of winegrowing in Sonoma. “We’re about 10 percent cooler than Oakville and 14 percent cooler than Bordeaux over the past decade,” he says. “Napa uses around 34 percent more water on average than we do.” For Katz, sustainability rests on choosing sites that can endure change without artificial intervention. “Instilled in the French mindset is you don’t plant or make wine for this generation. It’s for the next generation and beyond.” That philosophy now underpins a portfolio that has earned multiple 100-point scores across his Aperture Cellars and Devil Proof bottlings.
The estate’s architecture carries Katz’s ideas about art and agriculture into built form through angular geometry and abundant natural light. From the start, he wanted a winery that fully reflected his father’s photographic influence. To that end, every bottle of Aperture features an original photograph by Andy Katz, drawn from a body of work shaped by decades spent traveling through the world’s most storied vineyards. The images span renowned wine regions and remote terrain alike, reflecting the same sensitivity to light and atmosphere that defines both the father’s artistic practice and the son’s exacting approach to site-driven winegrowing.
That same photographic language shapes the buildings. Signum Architecture founder Juancarlos Fernandez devised the production winery by studying the mechanics of a camera’s aperture and translating its segmented geometry into four interlocking volumes that read as distinct structures while operating as one. “Like the art of photography, architecture is an intellectual and visual exercise in perspective,” Fernandez says. He deconstructed the aperture into individual elements and reassembled them as rooflines that give the building a shifting profile as one moves along the vineyard edge. “The design process was filtered through the exploration of the camera, specifically the aperture of a lens,” he says, adding that the goal was “to give voice to the groundbreaking vision of both men through the architecture.”
That directive takes a more intimate expression in the estate’s hospitality building. Fernandez set the structure on a pad elevated 32 inches above the vines to widen the panorama and capture the ocean breezes that waft in from the west. “The smaller hospitality building is yet another manipulation of the elements of an aperture, defined by light, views, and transparent indoor and outdoor spaces,” he explains. Inside, a circular, aperture-shaped oculus pulls daylight into the center of the room, while glass-walled private rooms radiate outward with 180-degree vineyard and mountain views. Walls splay from the core to frame long sightlines from interior to exterior, shaping spaces that balance openness with enclosure. Tastings and dinners unfold against large-scale photographs by Andy Katz that line the bright interior walls.
Aperture’s momentum continues to grow at the level of craft and recognition. This year, Katz launched Collage, a limited luxury tier that draws from top vineyard lots across Sonoma County, released as a Sauvignon Blanc and a Cabernet Sauvignon shaped by extended aging in barrel, cement, and bottle. The release arrived as Wine Enthusiast named Katz its 2025 Winemaker of the Year. “As a first-generation winemaker, I don’t take the honor lightly,” he says. “There was no family winery waiting for me, only a deep passion that began in the vineyards my father photographed.” The same year also brought the debut of Prophet & Poet, a Sonoma-based label created with longtime friend Jessica Biel and supported by Jackson Family Wines. The project grew from wines Katz crafted for Biel’s wedding to Justin Timberlake.
For Katz, these moves reflect a larger ambition to be “much broader—not just an iconic brand within the wine industry, but also within luxury and lifestyle,” he says. Aperture now extends beyond the cellar through a partnership with United Airlines, which places select vintages in its Polaris business-class cabins. The wines have also landed at Rosewood Kona Village in Hawaii, where Katz leads the resort’s Āina Reserves Wine Weekend. Even with that growing presence, his focus remains on the next bottle: “I always tell my team we haven’t made our best wine yet.”
