The Essentials With Joey Wölffer: Horses, Sag Harbor Haunts and Carrying on the Family Business
Growing up on her family’s farm in the Hamptons, Joey Wölffer was more interested in riding horses and playing with the potato bugs that inhabited the potato-field-turned-vineyard than she was in winemaking. “My dad would see things that people thought were a little nuts,” Wölffer tells Observer from her Hamptons office. “Owning a vineyard five minutes from the beach in the Hamptons—no one was doing that,” she recalls. “But it was his dream, he loved it, and as a daughter, it complicated our relationship when I was younger.”
Determined to follow her own dreams, Wölffer went off to college at Vanderbilt, started a career in fashion and had worked her way up to the role of trend director at The Jones Group when her father unexpectedly passed away in 2008. While her half-brother, Marc, immediately knew that he wanted to continue his father’s work with the growing vineyard, Joey Wölffer wasn’t convinced. “It took a while to settle the estate, and in that time, I made the decision that if I could stay in, I’d like to for my family’s legacy,” she says of officially joining her brother at Wölffer Estate in 2013. The pieces quickly fell into place from there, with Wölffer using her fashion background to handle marketing and branding; Marc taking over strategy and business; Wölffer’s husband, Max Rohn, as CEO; and Roman Roth, the vineyard’s first winemaker, becoming a partner. Less than a year later, Wölffer Estate introduced its signature Summer in a Bottle rosé.
“We all have our different roles, and that’s really been the secret to the success of it,” says Wölffer. “Not having any experience in wine was really good in some ways, because I just came in and said I think we should look at this as a lifestyle; people are connected even if they don’t drink wine,” she explains of her approach, which led to the estate eventually introducing ciders and non-alcoholic wines. From its start as a 14-acre hobby vineyard in the 1980s, Wölffer Estate has expanded into a 175-acre property complete with a horse farm, as well as additional vineyards in Argentina and Spain. But family is still at the heart of every decision Wölffer Estate makes, including its commitments to sustainability and community. “Often when you grow, people get ego, and—my brother and I—that is just not who we are,” Wölffer says. “The people who work for us are our family, and we need to think about legacy and think about the next generation and what we’re doing for the land.”
More than just a business ethos, that care for others carries over to Wölffer’s life outside of the estate, where she is involved with nonprofit organizations like the Feed Foundation, Robin Hood and the Bridgehampton Center. “We live in a community where people think that everyone is rich. But in order for these people to have their beautiful lawns, they need landscapers and workers, and there’s no affordable living out here, so people end up living well below the poverty line and sometimes homeless,” says Wölffer, who is chair of the advisory board of the Bridgehampton Center. “The Bridgehampton Center provides daycare and after-school care for kids, and health opportunities like breast cancer screenings that the underprivileged community doesn’t have access to.”
In addition to a collaboration with Swedish candy company BonBon and the introduction of a watermelon-flavored cider for summer, the estate has continued its tradition of hosting community events like live music and yoga classes. “Even as we grow nationwide, we’re still a family business,” Wölffer says. “There are people behind this, touching the product, tasting the wine, not just systems and A.I. and all of that,” she adds of building on her father’s goals for the vineyard. In the midst of working on Wölffer Estate’s next launch—a yet-to-be-disclosed non-alcoholic project—Joey Wölffer shared her summer essentials with Observer.
