This article originally appeared in the October issue of NCGA Golf Magazine
NorCal native Greg Anderson is reputedly the only PGA of America member who is a certified sommelier
By Martin Kaufmann
Years ago, Greg Anderson was running golf operations at Princeville Resort on Kauai’s North Shore when an elderly man wandered into the clubhouse and struck up a conversation with him.
At first blush, the bearded man seemed a bit eccentric. He drove around the North Shore in a 1971 Volkswagen Bus and, Anderson recalled, “looked almost homeless.” But that man, Jess Jackson, soon became one of the most pivotal figures in Anderson’s career and life.
As they talked that day in the clubhouse, Jackson asked Anderson, “Why don’t we have a nice golf resort in Sonoma County?” Anderson, a Sonoma native, said he often wondered the same thing.
Jackson wasn’t just making small talk.
“Within a short time, I had two first-class airline tickets on my desk,” Anderson said.
Back in Sonoma, Jackson gave Anderson, who became a PGA member in 1986, a tour of 14,000 acres he owned and told him about his hopes of building a golf resort in Sonoma and another in Santa Barbara County. After all that, Anderson recalled, “I still did not know who this guy was.”
The late Jess Stonestreet Jackson Jr. already was a wine country legend by the time he convinced Anderson to come back home to Sonoma County to run his fledgling golf business. The golf courses that Jackson envisioned got swallowed up in the black hole of California environmental regulations. Jackson never broke ground on either course, but he did become a friend and mentor to Anderson until his death in 2011 at age 81.
Anderson spent 11 years working for Jackson Family Wines, and during that time he earned a unique distinction. Anderson is reputedly the only PGA of America member who is a certified sommelier, earning the distinction in 2007.
Anderson and Jackson spent a lot of time together during those years. Sometimes they would meet at Stonestreet Estate Vineyards in northern Sonoma and make the dramatic drive from sea level up to the 2,400-foot plateau that overlooks 170 micro-vineyards planted in 26 soil types at various elevations stretching down to the valley.
“I used to spend a lot of time there with Jess talking about the world,” Anderson recalled.
Many people know highly successful entrepreneurs, but Anderson was one of the rare ones who got to spend quality time absorbing life lessons from an unassuming, self-made billionaire.
“He said there are three things that make a business – quality, quality and quality,” Anderson said. “He never did anything halfway. Everything he did was the best of the best.”
That lesson stuck with Anderson when he returned to golf operations. His stops along the way included serving as head professional at Sea Ranch Golf Links and GM at 36-hole Oakmont in Santa Rosa. He set up his own instructional studio during the pandemic and, for the past three years, has served as director of golf at Bennett Valley Golf Course, where he played junior golf as a 9-year-old in 1969, the year the course opened at the base of Bennett Peak in Santa Rosa.
“So here I am, coming full circle, running the property at the twilight of my career,” Anderson deadpanned.
Anderson has a lot more golf left in him. He said he still enjoys the daily challenges of running a busy golf course, still carves out some time to teach and puts his sommelier skills to work overseeing wine purchases for Iron & Vine, Bennett Valley’s restaurant.
One of Anderson’s entrepreneurial ventures after leaving Jackson Family Wines was to launch GolfVino, which ran golf-and-wine tours through Sonoma and Napa counties. A few years ago, he started a tour with a dinner on the mountain above Stonestreet, in part because of his history there with Jess Jackson.
“They said, ‘How do you get better than this?’ It’s one of those ‘oh wow’ things,” Anderson recalled. “Exclusivity means a lot – being able to do certain things that other people can’t do. For example, going in during September and October for the annual harvest, meeting the winemakers, those are special moments.”
Recently Anderson has partnered with Premier Golf’s Bill Hogan, a college friend from their days at the University of San Diego, to help run tours of wine country. Hogan has been a leader in the luxury golf-tourism market for more than three decades and has the staffing, expertise and clientele to organize the tours, freeing up Anderson to host groups when they arrive in Sonoma or Napa.
Their first venture together is built around Super Bowl LX in Santa Clara. The tour will start with three nights at The Lodge at Pebble Beach, with golf at Pebble, Spyglass Hill and The Links at Spanish Bay, followed by three nights in Palo Alto for Super Bowl festivities and the game. For those clients who want to extend the trip to Sonoma, Anderson said he recently secured some of the region’s swankiest five-star villas to host the group.
The food-and-wine pairings that Anderson plans for clients are on the same level as the accommodations and golf. He remains a Jackson Family Wines loyalist, peppering his pairings with 100-point offerings from Vérité and wineries of similar renown. For his well-heeled clients, those “oh wow” moments are well worth the price.
“It’s a $500 bottle of wine, but there’s a certain point where they don’t care because it has a story to tell,” Anderson said.