GO WITH THE FLOW


Bees find a permanent home for honey making at Jordan Estate


By Deborah Parker Wong the almond bloom season. J 30


The hives, which are ultimately mobile homes for bees, are placed in a meadow surrounded by woods at the edge of Jordan’s petit verdot vineyards. The nearby Russian River provides the bees with a reliable water source, and both wild and cover crop plants—from yarrow, Toyon shrub and California buckeye to red clover and mustard—offer food. This diet provides essential nutrition for pollen and creates a healthier hive. It’s a win-win because the bees also pass pollen among vineyard cover crops before packing up and moving back to the northern Sacramento Valley near Chico, California, to help cross- pollinate the almond tree flowers.


As a thank you, the beekeeper brings a half-dozen mason jars of honey to the winery chef at the end of each year.


Impressed by the flavor and quality of the honey harvested from the visiting hives, Jordan Executive Chef Todd Knoll, who had been sourcing honey from Northern California apiaries and top honey producers from around the globe, saw beekeeping as a natural addition to the winery’s expanding farm-to-table efforts. “I’d already been using raw honeys in my cooking because refined cane and beet sugars are flat and stripped of character,” Knoll says. “Our honey is another color in Jordan’s culinary palette, a component specific to this place and time.”


ordan has become a destination for culinary travelers, and even honey bees are not immune to its charms. Beehives first arrived at Jordan in 1996 when professional beekeepers from the Sacramento Valley began bringing their colonies to the idyllic 1,200-acre estate for winter foraging before


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