Jeff Duckhorn

“Redwood Empire”

Jeff Duckhorn’s path to whiskey begins not in a distilling classroom, but in Northern California kitchens and gardens. Duckhorn was born in December of 1976, after which his family moved to Sonoma County, where he grew up. As an adult, he attended the University of California, Berkeley, where Jeff developed a keen interest in food and flavor. It was during this time that he began homebrewing beer, a practice he has now continued for more than twenty years. Working with grain, yeast, and time in a home setting gave him an early, practical understanding of fermentation long before he touched a commercial still.

For a number of years after college, Duckhorn’s professional life looked conventional from the outside. He built a career in accounting, eventually joining Purple Wine + Spirits, a company founded in 2001 by wine entrepreneur Derek Benham. His day-to-day work involved spreadsheets and financial statements, while at home he baked and brewed, activities that coworkers took note of when he occasionally brought his tasty homebrews into the office.

When Benham decided to move beyond wine and build a distillery in Sonoma County, he did not have to look far for someone to run it. Benham’s distilling operation was developed at the old Hallberg facility in Graton, California, and he invited Duckhorn, who was already overseeing the financial aspects of the project, to step out from behind the desk and become a Distiller. Duckhorn accepted, trading office life for full-time work at the still.

Though he created other spirits to keep the lights on, whiskey was already becoming Duckhorn’s focus. As the construction work on the distillery progressed, the team began laying down whiskey in barrels, pairing 100% California-grown grain with careful distillation and long aging. Early on, they supplemented their own distillate with sourced whiskey from Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, and later partners such as MGP and Bardstown Bourbon Company. Duckhorn’s job was to manage both sides of this operation: building a grain-to-glass California whiskey program while also blending sourced stocks into consistent, high-quality bottlings.

By 2015–2016, the distillery was regularly filling barrels of its own whiskey, and Duckhorn was leading production from mash to barrel. These early casks would eventually form the backbone of what was now called Redwood Empire Whiskey, a brand launched in 2019 under the Purple Brands umbrella. Named after the redwood forests of Northern California, the line moved Duckhorn firmly into the world of American whiskey, with an emphasis on bourbon and rye.

As Master Distiller, Duckhorn now oversees a portfolio that includes three core straight whiskeys: Pipe Dream Bourbon, Emerald Giant Rye, and Lost Monarch, a blend of bourbon and rye, as well as bottled-in-bond and limited releases. Pipe Dream blends bourbons aged several years from multiple distilleries; Emerald Giant is built on a rye-heavy mash bill; and Lost Monarch combines rye and bourbon in what the distillery calls a “ryebon” blend. Under Duckhorn’s direction, Redwood Empire also released its first fully in-house, bottled-in-bond whiskeys, Grizzly Beast Bourbon and Rocket Top Rye in 2021, aged five years at the Sonoma County facility.