One Woman Took the Leap to Start Her Own Winery Pt. 2

Forrest Kelly
00:00:00

Welcome. Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast with Forest Kelly.

Jenny
00:00:06

The name is. So it's two words correct. Oxley, O X L E E. Graham.

Jenny
00:00:12

Yes. Two words told. I make it sound like one, so.

Forrest Kelly
00:00:16

Right, yeah. And you say that you are women owned and family driven. Is that a good thing?

Forrest Kelly
00:00:22

The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. Yes, I think so. I am pretty much a one woman show. I, I make all the decisions.

I make the wines, I sell the wines, I deliver the wines once they're sold. So I'm pretty much carrying out every day to day operation. But then I really rely on family and friends to kind of help keep things moving.

So if I have a bigger project, I need more hands. Usually I'm calling in my parents, my sister, my sister actually designed the label. My brother in law helps me a lot with my website.

So it's a business that is owned by me, mostly run by me, but it definitely wouldn't run the same way if I didn't have all the support from my family and my friends.

Forrest Kelly
00:01:01

There's a whole organization, have you tapped into that of female owned wineries?

Jenny
00:01:06

I've seen that organization. I haven't. I've reached out to them a couple times. I haven't heard back from them. Just was curious too where the name came from.

I named the winery after my grandmother's. So Oxlee and Graham are their maiden names.

Being a woman owned winery, I wanted to really lean on the strong women that came before me and kind of the lessons that my grandmother specifically taught me, you know, things that I see in myself, that I saw in them and they really bestowed on me, you know, strength and honesty and hard work and perfectionism and all these things that they kind of shared. And they were both such different women but successful in their own ways. And so I really wanted to kind of honor that and pay it forward.

When I decided to start the winery, my granny Oxley had recently passed away and so it was kind of that moment of paying homage to them and, and my love for them and they were such a big part of my life. So I wanted to kind of honor that with their names.

Plus I just love the name Oxley and I think together it's just a beautiful kind of representation of what we're doing.

Jenny
00:02:07

So Oxley now that's your, that's a nickname for your grandma.

Forrest Kelly
00:02:12

That is her maiden name.

Jenny
00:02:13

Her name.

Forrest Kelly
00:02:13

So.

Jenny
00:02:14

Oh gosh.

Forrest Kelly
00:02:14

Yeah, so it's also my dog's name. So I got a puppy right after she passed and named him Oxley and then decided to Start a winery and thought, I'm going to still use Oxley.

But now everyone thinks, oh, you've named it after your dog. That's cute. But it's not named after him.

Jenny
00:02:31

And your dog is Scottish. He's a Scottish.

Forrest Kelly
00:02:33

He's a Scottish terrier.

Jenny
00:02:34

Yeah. Okay, I see that on the. On the website. Yeah, yeah.

I've started a couple of businesses and I made them in with my mother, who's still with me, but she named him after my mom and dedicated him to my mom. So that's why I was asking. Woman owned and woman operated. That's a good thing.

Forrest Kelly
00:02:50

Yes, it's a great thing.

Jenny
00:02:52

I know you said you interned and you went through that transition trying to find a job and getting it, but then when did it actually turn over to, I'm going to do it myself?

Forrest Kelly
00:03:02

So I worked at Paul Hobbs for about 12 and a half years, and throughout that time, I kind of grew within the company. I started in the lab as the enologist and then grew to the assistant winemaker. Winemaker and then director of winemaking fairly quickly.

But I just really absorbed every lesson I could while I was there. So, you know, whether that was winemaking and how we worked with clones or how I fermented things, I got to really play and experiment.

Paul was very gracious in letting me kind of be creative and drive the style a little bit. So I kind of absorbed every detail, every lesson. I cared very much about what barrels we put on the wine and what corks we closed the bottles with.

So all of that. But then also as the director, I got to learn a lot of the business end of things.

I was writing all the month tax reports, and I was, you know, working on budgets.

And so there was kind of this drive for me to continue learning and continue just developing business skills on top of production skills and wanting to continue to learn about different varietals and areas where the grapes are grown. And so I kind of thought, you know what, I just want to start my own project. And I was still at Paul Hobbs when I did that.

And I wanted to kind of delve into other areas, Santa Cruz Mountains and Mendocino, other varietals that I hadn't had the opportunity to bottle on its own, like Petite Perdot. I decided I was just going to kind of jump off and make a few cases for myself, and then learned the business side.

And so then that kind of quickly just grew into, you know what, I'm just going to do that solely as a business. And I kind of left Paul Hobbs.

I stayed on for a little bit as a consulting winemaker for him and then broke off and just completely am doing Oxley Graham now.

But it was something I just really felt like as a winemaker it's such a creative job that I wanted that freedom to continue to create and learn new things. So I lovingly call this project Pinot and My Weirdos. I mostly make Pinot, but then some off the beaten path varietals as well.

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