Jenny Mosbacher didn’t set out for a career in wine. After graduating college with an art degree, she landed a job in the tasting room at Ponzi Vineyards, one of the Willamette Valley’s pioneering family wineries. As Jenny tells it, there was no single “a ha” moment, but rather a slow accumulation of enthusiasm that eventually led her to take wine more seriously. Initially, she studied up on wine so as to be a better tasting room salesperson. That unlocked the realization that terroir–the place and manner in which the grapes are grown–had a real impact on what wound up in the bottle. Afterall, she was walking through the vineyards every day, smelling them, observing the weather patterns, and noticing growth trajectories. In the tasting room, she was selling a 2004 Pinot Noir, and it clicked for Jenny that the culmination of that year’s growing conditions (hot summer, poor fruit set) had created a vintage of delicious, well-balanced wines. She started helping out during harvest, learning to sort fruit, load bins, and deeping both her understanding and interest in winemaking.

“I got a crash course in real wine working there, and I realized that there were a lot of parallels to what I loved about studying and making art and the wine world. Both are connected to culture, nature and history and encompass technical skill, socio-cultural dynamics and the experiential nature of tasting. That just really appealed to the way my brain works, and it was really non-stop from there.”

In 2010, she met her now-partner, Jim, whose father was growing impeccable fruit on a vineyard he owned in Rickreall. Jim’s dad, rather than make wine, sold the grapes to other wineries, where they were primarily used in blends. In 2011, trying to find ways to convince winemakers that their grapes could stand on their own and “armed with just enough information to be dangerous,” Jenny and Jim decided to make a small lot of single-vineyard Pinot Noir as a proof of concept to show buyers. Afterall, “(Jim) and I both had harvest experience, some wine education credentials, and that was enough for us to go for it.”

They started small, naming their new label after the ancient marine sediment soils and frequent deer sightings at their family vineyard. Uninterested in “bold manifestos or style declarations,” Jenny and Jim began by making the kind of wine they like to drink, and have held fast to that ethos for nearly 15 years, even as their label has grown to produce over 5000 cases of wine annually. We’re happy to say that our tastes often align with Jenny and Jim’s, and Fossil & Fawn wines are in frequent rotation at Wellspent HQ. Working without commercial yeasts, additives, or enzymes and aging exclusively in neutral oak and stainless steel, they are content to let the vineyard do the talking. The resulting wines are well-balanced, bright, and playful, unbound by strict adherence to tradition but firmly rooted in Oregon’s winemaking heritage. Fossil & Fawn’s official motto is “Get Weird, Suck Less,” which Jenny explains “is about not taking ourselves too seriously, thinking creatively about the practice of winemaking, and getting better by learning and unlearning every time we do it.” Which, come to think of it, sounds a bit like an artist’s approach to us.