The Mission of Family Winemakers

Family Winemakers of California is best known as the host of the most diverse and comprehensive wine tasting in America: The annual Family Winemakers Tasting in San Francisco.

Yet, the organization's true mission is to support smaller, family-owned wineries. That was the mission when a small group of vintners such as Bill MacIver of Matanzas Creek Winery, Brice Jones of Sonoma Cutrer and Patrick Campbell of Laurel Glen, all dissatisfied with the orientation of the California Wine Institute, choose to break off and start a new organization that would promote values important to smaller wineries.

Based on the editorial I read today in the Orlando Sentinel by Family Winemakers Executive Director Paul Kronenberg, that mission is alive and well:

"We believe distributor middlemen should compete based on delivering service and value and think it is wrong that the distributors are telling consumers which wines they can and cannot enjoy. America's 3,500 wineries produce more than 10,000 new wines each vintage, more wines than distributors can stock and sell. So why are distributors restricting consumer access and threatening winemakers? One word, greed."

Paul's editorial was in response to a wine wholesaler-supported initiative in Florida that only allow wineries under a certain size to ship wine direct to Floridians. It is a wholesaler protection law, as they all are.

And Paul is right. Wholesalers should be forced to compete based on the services and value they can deliver, rather than under the auspices of a state-mandated three tier system that amounts to state welfare for huge wine distribution companies.

Comments

[Doug Wagner]

There is a flaw in that argument. The idea that the distributor model should be based on service is very correct but the idea that the "Mission of the Family Winemakers" is just to protect the small wineries is in error. If you look at the bill that passed the Senate in Florida it puts the limit on winery capacity at 250,000 gallons. That comes out to over 104,000 cases per year. According to "The Winery Web Site Report" only 2.5% of all the wineries in this country produce over 100,000 cases per year. Only 8.7% of the wineries produce over 40,000 cases. The agenda here is to obviously help the large wineries. Maybe that is where a large amount of the funding is coming through. The issues around the Supreme Court decision and the Costco vs Washington State decisions are complex with a lot of different agendas. Honest and straight information (probably nothing we will ever see) is what is really neded in this instance.