#Charles smith cabernet 2 buck chuck portable

It also gets income from providing distribution, bottling, and juice to other wineries. Bronco, which he owns with his brother Joe and cousin John, has (including vineyard partnerships) 3,000 employees and does an estimated $250 million in annual sales of mostly low-cost wines such as Estrella, Forest Glen, ForestVille, Montpellier, and Silver Ridge. You got to have a war at all times.'īut Franzia's main war - the one he's kicking ass at - is against pretentiousness. 'To you, that's a sh*tter,' he says, pointing to a blue kiosk.

#Charles smith cabernet 2 buck chuck portable

There's even a war against the guy who rents the portable potties for the field workers: When the guy raised his prices, Franzia went for his sword and shield he's buying his own portable johns now. He says it so much, to so many people, that when I talk to his ranch manager, Junior Robles, he starts telling me about the war on weeds.

It's not just his favorite phrase, it's the way he thinks about business.

In fact, he's waging war on everything: gophers, ants, competitors, restaurant chains, stores, the state, the Supreme Court. I deeply consider giving him a hug.īut losing the war on bluster isn't a big deal, since it's only one of many wars Franzia is fighting. I find, on the passenger side of his Jeep, an Enya CD, which he claims one of his many girlfriends left there. Looking up at a hawk flying high over his fields, he wonders whether it doesn't have a better life than we do. He shows me the land where he plans to build his house, complete with a bowling alley for his granddaughter. He keeps stopping the car to look at grape plants like a puttering gardener. As he drives his Jeep around the vineyards at Bronco's headquarters in Ceres, Calif., a tiny Central Valley town outside Modesto, Franzia admits he'd much rather buy out of bankruptcy court than directly from my hurting fellow alumni, since 'it's less emotional.' When I ask him about the community service he did after pleading guilty in 1993 to conspiracy to defraud (he sold 5,000 tons of cheap grapes by mislabeling them and sprinkling zinfandel leaves on top), he says of the mentoring of single mothers he was ordered to do: 'I picked up on young girls.'īut Franzia gets soft real quick. Some real dumb-asses from there'), my religion ('A Jew who eats ribs? You impress me'), and my job ('Business 2.0? Hell no, I've never heard of it'). He mocks my college ('We buy wineries from guys from Stanford who go bankrupt. Terroir don't mean sh*t.' After relieving himself by the side of his Jeep, Franzia recounts a trip to Burgundy where, after an elaborate tasting, he told the winemaker at Château Haut-Brion, 'You can bottle gasoline if you can sell that.'įranzia, who rose to fame several years ago when he started selling a $2 bottle called Charles Shaw, calls winemakers 'bozos in a glass.' He really goes off on wine critic Robert Parker, who, he says, likes tannic wines that make people gag. And that Napa's and Bordeaux's claims about their special soils are bogus: 'We can grow on asphalt. Sure, the CEO of Bronco Wine, the nation's fourth-largest wine company, tells me repeatedly that only a sucker would pay more than $10 for a bottle of wine - including his own $35 Domaine Napa. (Business 2.0 Magazine) - There's a war on bluster, and Fred Franzia is losing.