More about Jade Gross

Rioja isn’t an easy place to be a newcomer. Jade Gross didn’t inherit vineyards from her family, she didn’t learn how to make wine at her parents’ side, and she certainly didn’t grow up among the vines.

She grew up in Hong Kong, the daughter of an American father and a Chinese mother. She studied in New York before getting a master’s degree in London, and as if that weren’t enough, she received a scholarship through the James Beard Foundation to attend culinary school. The rest, as we so often say, is history. Working at some of the world’s finest restaurants, like Mugaritz and El Celler de Can Roca, supercharged a love of wine.

In 2019, she found herself in the small village of San Vicente de la Sonsierra, in the Rioja Alta subregion, and immediately launched her ambitious, eponymous project. She purchased grapes from a friend and made her first wine, mostly Tempranillo with a bit of Garnacha and Viura. In the intervening years, she’s quietly ramped up production. Small purchases of vineyards around the region have given her new fruit to work with, like Garnacha Blanca and Malvasia.

It’s her status as an outsider that makes these wines so fascinating — where a 10th-generation winemaker feels obliged to keep tradition alive, Jade is able to make Rioja exactly as she sees fit. Her high-altitude, clay-limestone vineyards are in some of the region’s most esteemed villages, and she’s able to capture these sites in extraordinarily pure wines unmarred by excessive oak or large, impersonal production.