Many other winemakers cultivate their public image as much as their vines. They build architectural wineries, retain publicists, spend face time with customers, and tell romantic stories about their wines. Franzia has followed a different formula: Deliver value, reinvest in the business, and screw the pretense.
The proof lies outside his windshield. His production facilities are an industrial behemoth. Franzia slowly drives through the complex and points out huge lots where hundreds of trucks line up during harvest, crush pits that can process 16 truckloads of grapes per hour, tank presses, enormous decanter centrifuges. He brakes and points at one tank that holds the equivalent of 3,500 wine bottles per vertical inch. It's 42 feet high and holds only half as much as the 700,000-gallon tanks farther down. There are 414 such huge containers of various sizes; the place looks like a tank farm.
"We built this from literally nothing to where it is today in less than 30 years," Franzia says. "Sometimes even I think it's been pretty rapid."
He drives into a cavernous warehouse, clicks a remote control inside his car, and opens automatic doors to reveal storerooms stacked with wine cases and thousands of oak barrels.
"You been through some wineries in Napa, haven't you?" he asks. "You seen any with that many barrels in one place?"
Bronco owns 50 square miles of vineyards and adds three to six square miles every year. The company grows vines, crushes grapes, bottles wine, and runs its own distribution operation, Classic Wines of California. It buys and sells bulk wine. It operates storage and production facilities in the towns of Ceres, Napa, Sonoma, Escalon, and Madera. It bottles about 30 of its own labels, including Charles Shaw, Crane Lake, Forest Glen, and Forestville, plus wines for other companies under contract.
Bronco's wines are associated more with the brands, or labels, than with the place the grapes were grown. (Franzia talks of a new label named Harlow Ridge, after a street on an industrial development where Bronco's bottling plant is located--how's that for terroir?) The company's 17 winemakers pick from wines coming through the inventory to enhance blends for a particular label. They might mix a bit of Shiraz with Merlot, for example, or wines aged in oak barrels with those aged in steel tanks. There's nothing unusual in this, but it's bold to insist that these blended wines are every bit as good as Napa wines that cost several times as much, which of course Franzia does. "I defy anyone that charges more money to let me conduct a blind tasting," he says. "He'll look like a fool with his own wine."
Franzia says a lot of things, but nothing from his repertoire causes as much eye rolling within the industry as his claim that no bottle of wine is worth more than $10. "I'm not sure that his sense of taste is that refined," says Vic Motto. "If he disdains things that cost more or are of higher quality, he may not understand what the differences are. He does not seem to be a nuanced type of person."
In fact, Bronco does sell a few wines for more than $10. Franzia says he doesn't like those prices either, but he claims his hands are tied by the cost of wines from premium appellations such as Napa and Sonoma. And he'll apparently break the two-figure barrier when buying wine for himself. "He will publicly say he won't pay over $10, but he's paid a lot of money for some of my wines in the past," says Michael Mondavi, scion of the famous wine family and a lifelong friend of Franzia's. "He did it because he liked them."
Franzia was born in 1943 to one of the most prominent wine families in California. His grandfather, Giuseppe Franzia, emigrated to the United States from Genoa, Italy, in 1893 and began commercial wine production in the San Joaquin Valley by 1915. His five sons continued the business after the end of Prohibition and built a winery in Ripon. Fred spent summers and holidays stacking cases and pruning vineyards alongside his brother Joseph and cousin John. He grew up around the founding fathers of California wine, including his uncle Ernest Gallo, Julio Gallo, Robert and Peter Mondavi, and August Sebastiani, and he considers these men his models.
The admiration ran both ways. Don Sebastiani recalls how his father, August Sebastiani, enjoyed sparring with the young Franzia. "My father was stunned by Fred," he says. "The guy was born with amazing business acumen and personality. Fred would offer advice to my father almost like an older man would to a younger one."
Franzia went to work for the family company, assuming that one day his generation would take its turn at the helm. Then came a painful blow. In 1973, Fred's father and uncles sold the family winery to Coca Cola Bottling. (Coca Cola later sold the business to the Wine Group, a San Francisco company, which continues to sell Franzia wine as a bag in a box. The Franzia family has no connection with its namesake wine.) "I just didn't feel selling was the right thing to do and I told my dad," Franzia says. "I ended up not talking to him for seven years afterward because I thought he made a mistake."
Fred, Joseph, and John struck off on their own. Bronco incorporated on December 27, 1973. Fred serves as chairman and CEO, Joseph is co-president and runs the company's distribution arm, and John, also a co-president, oversees production. A dozen members of Fred's family now work for Bronco, including two of his five children (his other children are a doctor, an actress, and a Navy SEAL).
Franzia says he later reconciled with his father, but some friends believe the loss of the original family business stoked his ambition. "Let's face it, Fred's a driven man," says Marc Mondavi, president of Charles Krug Winery in Napa Valley. "I'm sure that had some influence on the three of them--we're going to start over and, by God, we're going to show everybody we can do it."
They did. And they collided with the law. In 1993, Franzia and Bronco were indicted on federal charges of conspiracy to defraud for misrepresenting cheap grapes worth $100 to $200 per ton as Zinfandel and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes worth five to 10 times as much. The indictment charged that Fred Franzia himself instructed others to sprinkle Zinfandel leaves on top of loads of cheaper grapes in what he called "the blessing of the loads"--a parody of the traditional blessing of the harvest. All told, prosecutors said, Bronco misrepresented 5,000 tons of grapes and one million gallons of wine that were sold on the wholesale market for $5 million.
