Speaking of the San Joaquin Valley and Napa, Fred Franzia says, “We are who we are. They want to pretend they’re royalty.” Illustration by Ralph Steadman

Not long ago, Fred Franzia celebrated the sale of the four-hundred-millionth bottle of Charles Shaw, a wine that costs $1.99 at Trader Joe’s and is known by the chummy nickname Two Buck Chuck. “Take that and shove it, Napa,” he said. “Four hundred million and climbing.” Franzia owns forty thousand acres of vineyards, more than anyone in the country; he crushes three hundred and fifty thousand tons of grapes a year, more, he figures, than anyone but his cousin Joseph Gallo, at E. & J. Gallo Winery; and his company, Bronco, has annual revenues of more than five hundred million dollars. Franzia’s objective is to sell as much wine as possible—he sells twenty million cases a year now, which makes Bronco the fourth-largest winery in the United States, and would like to reach a hundred million—and his strategy is to charge next to nothing for it. He believes that no bottle of wine should cost more than ten dollars. Jim Carter, a salesman who represents Bronco’s products overseas, says that at these prices the competition for wine is bottled water.

Franzia is sixty-five and twice divorced, with silver hair and a smile that steals wickedly across his face. He is not tall, and he is heavy, despite having lost sixty pounds in three months last year. (He has cut out fried food and tries to limit himself to two glasses of wine a night.) His shape is squarish, like a gourmet marshmallow. The way he rolls his eyes, tracing an elaborate, hundred-and-eighty-degree arc, is almost camp. Every several minutes, and sometimes as often as a hundred times a day, Franzia picks up the phone in his office, puts it on speaker, and tells one of his employees to bring him some of his “witch’s brew” (instant chicken broth that he drinks to fill himself up), or deliver him his latest stack of mail (“What’s this, more money?” he’ll say, when the employee hands it over), or get someone on the phone for him to bullshit with. By this he means do business. If the person he seeks—say, his assistant, Barbara, who’s been with Bronco since its founding, in 1973, or Anya, the pretty young Russian in accounting he has his eye on and refers to as Mrs. Brain—is not at her desk, he looks momentarily helpless and is likely to mutter, under his breath, “Oh, God damn these women.” Then he calls again.

The Bronco operation is vast and complex, and involves nearly every aspect of the wine business. Franzia is both a major seller and a major buyer on the bulk market. He owns several wineries, including one in Sonoma, where he bottles eighteen thousand cases a day, and he acts as a custom winemaker for wineries without his capacity. In 2000, he opened a ninety-two-thousand-square-foot bottling plant in a business park near the Napa airport. With three high-speed lines—one dedicated to Charles Shaw—the plant can bottle twice the amount of the entire Napa Valley. Much of the wine Franzia bottles there is “free-way aged”—it comes up from the Central Valley in tankers and is packaged for quick sale. Although Charles Shaw wine falls under the generic California appellation, the broadest possible designation, it can legitimately be labelled “Cellared & Bottled by Charles Shaw Winery, Napa, CA,” a practice that strikes many in Napa as unsavory. “It’s called a Zip Code winery,” Vic Motto, a business adviser to Napa Valley wineries, says. “The unsuspecting consumer may not realize it’s not Napa wine. Fred uses that to his advantage.” Franzia says that he built the plant in Napa because that’s where so many of the wineries he does business with are based.

Talking about his wine, Franzia can sound like an old-fashioned Democratic populist, though personally he’s more of a Darwinian capitalist. “You tell me why someone’s bottle is worth eighty dollars and mine’s worth two dollars,” he says. “Do you get forty times the pleasure from it?” With Charles Shaw, which Bronco introduced in 2002, Franzia invented a category, known as “super-value”—wine that costs less than three dollars a bottle—that is now a significant segment of the marketplace.

Cheap wine—so-called skid-row wine—is nothing new; Franzia’s idea was to make cheap wine that yuppies would feel comfortable drinking. He put Charles Shaw in a seven-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre glass bottle, with a real cork, and used varietal grapes—Cabernet, Pinot Noir, Pinot Grigio, and Chardonnay, among others. One way that Franzia keeps the price so low is by acting as his own distributor in California. (Elsewhere, he has to go through a third-party wholesaler, which makes Two Buck Chuck cost roughly $2.99 a bottle.) Another efficiency is the enormous size of the wine lots he buys on the bulk market to put into the Charles Shaw brands. Bronco has an elaborate quality-control system—a high-tech laboratory with mass spectrometers that test for sulfur compounds and yeast byproducts in parts-per-billion measurements—but, partly because of the diverse sources of the wine, absolute consistency is impossible. “It’s a moving target,” Karen MacNeil, a prominent Napa-based wine writer and educator, told me. Charles Shaw Cabernet, which she had tried on a couple of occasions, had left her unimpressed. “I thought, What’s the fuss? This is merely a cheap wine,” she said. “I don’t understand how people put this in their mouths.” James Laube, a senior editor at Wine Spectator and the chief California wine critic for the magazine, gave the 2004 Charles Shaw Merlot an underwhelming 77 points, writing that it was “on the medicinal side of herbal, with thin weedy flavors that give the fruit notes a sourness.” The 2005 sauvignon blanc he pronounced “quaffable.” But the 2005 Chardonnay, which went on to win a double gold medal at the 2007 California state fair, he described as “clean and intense, with ripe, vivid citrus and pear flavors that end with a refreshing lemony edge.” Still, there are some in the Napa Valley who refuse to call Charles Shaw by its cute nickname. To them, it’s Two Buck Upchuck.

The recession is likely to bring Franzia more customers. People are drinking more, and cheaper, wine; industry people call it “trading down,” a sharp reversal after decades of aspirational consumption. From his own vineyards, Franzia has a ready supply to meet the increasing demand. In good times and bad, owning so many acres allows him to experiment with up-and-coming varietals, changing the character of his vines by grafting new shoots onto old root stock. “We feed the shortages,” he says. For instance, after the movie “Sideways” created a boom in Pinot Noir, he converted thousands of acres of vineyards, through grafting, to Pinot Noir. “Every year, the vineyards get refreshed,” he told me, explaining that this year he is grafting two thousand acres, or five per cent of his holdings—not much risk, should his bets prove to be losers. “The average farmer would shit in his pants. We’re just adjusting to the market.” Another time, he said, “I’ve got twenty-four million grapevines. My vines alone have a three-hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar value, not counting the land. That’s why no one can catch us. Checkmate, we won.”

Bronco’s headquarters, which sit behind a phalanx of shadowy Italian cypresses, past a secure checkpoint, are in Ceres, an agricultural town on the outskirts of Modesto, in the Central Valley—a term that Franzia finds derogatory, as it fails to acknowledge the geological diversity contained within the valley. (His part of the valley, he points out, is the San Joaquin.) It also irritates Franzia when people describe Bronco’s facility, with its four hundred and fifty-two stainless-steel storage tanks—including six liquid-oxygen tanks that once held fuel for intercontinental ballistic missiles and are now used to make champagne—as being reminiscent of an oil refinery. The place projects the aura of a faintly hostile sovereign state. Out front, there are three flagpoles. One flies company colors, a maroon-and-gold flag that says “JFJ,” with the “J”s standing for Franzia’s partners, Joseph and John, who are Fred’s older brother and a cousin. The others fly the flag of the home state or country of any visitor, and the American flag. “No California flag—they’ve screwed us too many times,” Franzia says. “We shouldn’t fly the U.S. flag, the bastards. They have a felony on us.”

“Have you ever tried buying lots of stuff?” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

In 1994, Franzia pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud with Bronco by falsely labelling grapes. He paid a five-hundred-thousand-dollar fine; the company pleaded no contest and paid a two-and-a-half-million-dollar fine. According to the grand-jury indictment, during the late eighties and early nineties Franzia and Bronco misrepresented about a million gallons of wine worth some five million dollars on the bulk market. Franzia was said to have instructed that Zinfandel leaves be scattered over less expensive grapes, a practice that he allegedly referred to by the Whitmanesque euphemism the “blessing of the loads.” The judge ordered Franzia to step down from Bronco’s board of directors and to relinquish his position as company president for five years; he became the chief financial officer instead. (Today, he is chairman and C.E.O., and Joseph and John are co-presidents.) “It didn’t matter,” Franzia told me. “The chairs didn’t move.” As part of his plea, he agreed to perform five hundred hours of community service, which he did at a child-abuse-prevention center in Modesto, under the alias Ralph Kramden, from “The Honeymooners.” Before George W. Bush left office, Franzia petitioned him for pardon, and was turned down.