John Scharffenberger, The Tastemaker
John Scharffenberger is a crucial part of the gourmeting of America. He got his start making fine chocolate and now he plans to create an American version of Iberian ham.
Robyn Twomey
FROM LITTLE ACORNS DO MIGHTY PIGS GROW John Scharffenberger with the part-feral animals at the heart of his latest passion
Courtesy Subject
Before I traveled to rural Mendocino County in Northern California to see John Scharffenberger's wild pigs,I thought I understood the overall concept that inspired his business start-ups. Scharffenberger first made his name in the 1980s, producing a California sparkling wine. It wasn't a risk-free idea, because most Americans call any bottle of effervescent alcoholic grape juice "champagne," regardless of its origin -- and, far worse in an American winemaker's eyes, denigrate any bubbly not from the eponymous Champagne province in northeastern France. Despite such prejudices, Scharffenberger Cellars found a sustainable niche. For his next big venture, in the 1990s, Scharffenberger released a California chocolate that was uncompromisingly dark in color and high in price, at a time when almost all American chocolate was milky and mass-market. Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker also found its sweet spot. Having profitably sold both of those companies, Scharffenberger today has a new scheme -- to fabricate a homegrown version of the world's most highly regarded and expensive ham, which is made only in Spain from acorn-fed pigs and is called jamón ibérico, or Iberian ham. Sparkling wine, dark chocolate, acorn-fed ham: Like three points in space, the projects together seemed to add up to a plane truth. Scharffenberger sought out categories in which the premium brands were European imports and then proceeded to develop American versions, cloaking his products with a comparable mystique so that consumers took the bait. In short, his was a marketing success story.
But when I listened to Scharffenberger explain his business strategy, I changed my mind. We were sitting in the comfortable living room of his rammed-earth house, in the Anderson Valley hamlet of Philo, California, awaiting the arrival of his friends and pig-raising partners, Mac and Kate Magruder, for an informal tasting of the hams that he was aging. He assured me that he never aimed to place his foods on a pedestal; on the contrary, he aspired to tear down the barriers of connoisseurship that were preventing more people from enjoying these delicacies. He had established that approach during his earliest days in the wine business. "The wine industry was spending all its time being exclusive," he told me. "Excluding people was beginning to kill the whole concept." What unified his projects, he said, was a much simpler idea -- personal enjoyment. By which he meant, primarily, his own personal enjoyment. "What I'm interested in is stuff that tastes great," he said. "I try to get things that I like, figure out how they're made, and make them."
The mission wasn't to replicate the taste of Champagne wine, French chocolate, or Iberian ham, even though those products had been his goalposts when he was heading down the field. He knew very well that a true duplication was impossible, if only because he was using different ingredients. Nor was he aiming to reproduce the aura of the foreign brands. For the foreseeable future, French champagne would command a price differential over its American counterpart, and so would Iberian ham. He simply thought that if he devised a way of manufacturing a tasty reinvention of a food product that he loved, he would be able to find people who would buy it.
When the Magruders arrived, Scharffenberger took out of his refrigerator the three hams that we would be comparing. One was a supermarket-bought Spanish serrano, purchased as a stand-in for its more august cousin, because ibérico is just beginning, on a very limited basis, to be available in this country. (Classic ibérico is made from a variety of pig that dates back to Roman times and has grazed in pastures on acorns. Serrano is cured in a similar fashion to ibérico, but with meat from a less distinguished breed of pig that has been fed a conventional diet of grain.) The other two hams on the roster were trial versions by Scharffenberger. He and Mac Magruder had trapped wild pigs in the area and then bred them, selecting for long snouts, long legs, and high bodies. That is the look of the classic black Iberian pig, and, indeed, Scharffenberger argues that the forebears of these wild pigs were brought to California by the early Spanish settlers. After breeding two wild sows that conformed to the desired Iberian profile, he had fed acorns to their offspring for four months before the slaughter.
We tried some of the small remaining sample of his second batch, from pigs that had eaten a diet of roughly half acorns and the rest grain, fruit, and whey. "It tastes a little cheesy," Scharffenberger said. But we all liked it. Then we turned to his third batch, the most recent. Although it had not had time to age enough and the texture was a little tough, the flavor was rich and earthy, in the manner of a true ibérico. Both trial hams were far tastier than the supermarket serrano.
"I want to make something evocative of those flavors, but it won't be ibérico," Scharffenberger said. "It will be -- I don't know what we'll call it. Maybe mendino." But he wasn't hurrying to bring his ham to market. He was in what he called the incubator phase, and he argued that at least in the food industry, undue haste could be calamitous. "It isn't like you're rushing to do the next amazing Internet stuff, because someone will beat you to it," he told me. He said that in the wine and the chocolate businesses, he had learned that it was essential to move "very slowly and deliberately" through a "process of the digestion of information" before placing the ball into play. Because once the game starts, you can no longer call a time-out.
One of six children of a corporate pioneer who in the 1960s built the company City Investing into an industrial conglomerate, Scharffenberger, who is 57, traces his interest in agriculture and food to a childhood in which he saw farmland disappear rapidly in Southern California. At the University of California, Berkeley, he devised a personalized major that he called agricultural geography -- "soil science and plant pathology and geology and some zoology and climatology," as he describes it. But most of his activities were extracurricular. Canvassing against the Vietnam War in the early '70s, he went up to southern Mendocino County and fell in love with the landscape. Some time later, at a dinner party hosted by friends of his father's, he met a wealthy, iconoclastic old doctor, Russell Lee, who owned some 40,000 acres of property in northern Sonoma and southern Mendocino counties. Lee hired the young Scharffenberger -- who, one gathers, was just as outgoing, personable, and articulate as the middle-aged iteration -- to inspect the different parcels and suggest uses for them. "After I graduated, I moved up to one of Russell's properties," Scharffenberger recalled. "We camped under an oak tree and by October moved into a cabin with no electricity and no running water, next to a lake. Within 10 days of my moving into the cabin, Russell had a stroke." The deal was off.
