The Scourge of Napa Valley

It's a clear winter morning as Franzia slowly prowls the grounds of his vast winemaking plant in Ceres, California, behind the wheel of his Jeep Cherokee. Ceres lies 100 miles south of Napa in the San Joaquin Valley, part of the larger Central Valley, an area once derided as the "jug wine capital of the world"--don't get Franzia started on that bit of terroir snobbery. This fertile plain, once the floor of an ancient sea, is the center of his wine empire, and outside his windshield looms the citadel: his massive production, fermentation, and storage facility, with more than 400 tanks that collectively hold 80 million gallons of wine. Franzia constantly makes rounds of his production facilities and vineyards to keep a hand in the minutia of his business. His car is well known to his employees as a rolling second office, and the chances are good that if he isn't at this Bronco property, he's at another one. He's twice divorced and by his count works 100 hours a week. "I don't socialize anywhere," he says. "There's no money made in socializing."

Yet Franzia can be charming and extremely funny in his own idiosyncratic way, and there's often a bit of gamesmanship behind his bluster. His profanity isn't necessarily an expression of anger; often it's just an indication that his vital signs are okay. "We often joke in-house that if Fred stops abusing you, you've probably lost some ground," Bob Stashak, a Bronco winemaker and plant manager, says with a laugh. The private man, according to close friends, is somewhat at odds with the public image. "When you start talking about family things, he's very, very tender," says Don Sebastiani, a California winemaker who has known Franzia much of his life. "There's a very, very soft underbelly."

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."

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