How Au Bon Climat’s second generation filled a giant's shoes while dancing to their own tune

Knox Alexander and Isabelle Clendenen inherited more than a family winery. Au Bon Climat, founded by their father, the late Jim Clendenen, helped establish Santa Barbara County as a serious source of cool-climate Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, building a reputation far beyond California.

Now, the siblings are carrying that legacy forward while finding distinctly different places within it.

International markets have long been central to Au Bon Climat, known to fans simply as ABC.

Today, around 45% of sales are exports, with Japan its largest international market, followed by the UK. For Knox and Isabelle, that international identity was part of childhood.

‘Dad could be away travelling for as many as 200 days a year,’ Isabelle remembers. ‘He’d always bring back stories and souvenirs from the places where he was introducing Au Bon Climat to the world.’

One destination in particular captured Isabelle’s imagination.

Learning Japanese

Her fascination with Japan began with little figurines her father brought home from his travels.

Eventually, she convinced him to take her along. There, she found herself surrounded by people eager to interact with her, but with whom she could barely communicate.

She returned to California determined to learn Japanese.

Jim released the first vintage of Isabelle, his barrel-selection Pinot Noir named for his daughter, in 1995, when Burgundy remained the benchmark for Pinot Noir and the influence of Parker-era criticism reinforced the prestige of French fine wine.

By the time Isabelle began travelling to Japan around 2007, Japanese wine lovers were beginning to look beyond Burgundy for more affordable expressions of cool-climate Pinot Noir. Au Bon Climat offered precisely that kind of alternative.

That connection shaped what came next. Isabelle majored in Japanese, and spent a semester in Japan working with one of ABC’s distributors.

She realised then that a life in wine did not necessarily mean following her father into the cellar; it could be built around language, relationships and creating shared experiences. Isabelle joined Au Bon Climat full time in 2018.

‘I wouldn’t speak Japanese without wine, and I wouldn’t be in the wine industry without Japanese,’ she says.

The call to action

Today, Isabelle is one of ABC’s principal faces in Japan, strengthening distributor relationships and hosting wine dinners and events.

She says Japan’s share of the winery’s sales has roughly doubled, from 7% to 15%.

While Isabelle found her place at ABC by following the winery outward, Knox arrived at his role from almost the opposite direction.

Growing up in Santa Barbara wine country, where seemingly everyone was a winemaker or connected to the industry, Knox became ‘numb to the concept’ and initially wanted something different.

He journeyed through an odd sequence of experiences before finding his way back to wine: working security at a concert venue and, while studying journalism at Temple University’s campus in Japan, picking up voice-acting gigs for commercials and a video game.

Jim’s death in 2021, during Knox’s junior year, brought things to a crossroads.

‘That was a call to action for me’, he says, ‘a realisation that I had the opportunity to take part in something that was beyond just me, a continuation of a legacy.’

The succession question

After graduating, Knox returned for his first harvest in 2022 and has since worked alongside winemakers Marc Piro and Sarah Atwood in production.

Knox resists the expectation that a new generation must remake a family winery in its own image.

‘I think about this business as a passing of the torch,’ he says. ‘It’s the same flame and all.’

While Isabelle describes herself as a ‘crystallised version of Dad’, venturing outward to build within, Knox expresses succession differently – at home and in the cellar.

Asked where he hopes ABC will be in 10 or 20 years, he answers: ‘Hopefully the same, just with a few more grey hairs.’

Au Bon Climat remains committed to freshness and acidity in its wines, barrel fermentation for its whites, French oak for the barrels and the food-friendly style on which Jim built its reputation.

But preservation does not mean keeping everything in amber. Isabelle’s less romantic example of generational change?

‘The first thing I did was finally update our company website,’ she laughs.

A reassuring presence

Abroad, the evolution is more substantial. ABC has produced private labels for distributors in China, Japan, Denmark and the UK, while food, language and personal relationships increasingly shape how the wines are presented.

The siblings grew up with wine and food intertwined, particularly through the famously diverse daily winery crew lunch their father established.

Today, Isabelle carries that tradition into wine dinners around the world, pairing her namesake Pinot Noir with crispy duck bao (steamed buns) in China; Hildegard with matsutake gohan (seasoned rice with wild mushrooms and dashi) in Japan; and Los Alamos Chardonnay with tom kha gai (coconut milk chicken soup) in Thailand.

For the Clendenens, taking Au Bon Climat forward is less about reinventing their father’s wines than finding new places for them.

‘We aren’t rushing to mechanise our production. We aren’t straying away from our utilisation of French oak,’ Knox says.

‘We’ve realised these are the wines that we love, just like Dad did. In a world that is constantly changing, I think it’s somewhat reassuring to have something that stays the same.’

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