wine
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Silver Oak spent 54 years on Cabernet. Then came a $40 white.
The California winery bought its own barrel maker and rebuilt around Cabernet Sauvignon. Its new Sauvignon Blanc reveals how a company changes its signature without losing the plot.
The Wine Group
It invented boxed wine, made Franzia the best-selling label in America, and quietly became the largest wine producer on the planet. Now the employee-owned house behind Cupcake and Chloe is buying its way further upmarket.
Treasury Wine Estates
The company behind Penfolds spent a decade buying wine brands. Now it is cutting three quarters of them - and betting the whole business on the bottles people are willing to pay the most for.
BAXUS
BAXUS is a New York-based peer-to-peer marketplace for fine and rare wines and spirits, built on the Solana blockchain. It authenticates physical bottles, stores them in climate-controlled vaults, and issues digital tokens representing direct ownership - giving collectors and institutions real-time pricing, instant trade settlement, and the ability to use bottles as loan collateral. The platform has facilitated over $20 million in whiskey trades and raised a $5M seed round led by Multicoin Capital in 2024.
Offset
Offset is a Napa Valley company that pairs a direct-to-consumer ecommerce platform built specifically for fine wine with a brand design studio. Formed in 2015 from the merger of Byron Hoffman's design firm Hoffman & Co. and the development shop 750 Group, Offset gives wineries and fine-wine merchants both the software to sell - allocations, clubs, open cart and point of sale - and the identity, packaging, and storytelling to stand out. Clients range from legacy estates like Frog's Leap, Grace Family Vineyards, and Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant to new producers such as RAEN.
Byron Hoffman
Byron Hoffman is the Co-CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Offset, a Napa Valley-based company that is simultaneously a premium wine ecommerce platform and a brand design studio. Born and raised in Napa to a family steeped in food and wine culture - his grandfather was a winemaker at Christian Brothers and his grandmother Sally Schmitt was the original founder of The French Laundry - Byron brings both heritage and craft to his work. He co-founded Offset by merging his design studio Hoffman & Co. with Tyson Caly's 750 Group in 2015, having first collaborated on Last Bottle wine in 2011. Today, Offset serves legendary wineries like Frog's Leap, Grace Family Vineyards, Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Kosta Browne, and Realm Cellars. Beyond wine, Byron spent ten years producing and designing his grandmother's memoir and cookbook 'Six California Kitchens,' which won the 2023 IACP Award for Best American Cookbook and generated coverage in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Wall Street Journal.
Jeff Seibert
Jeff Seibert is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor best known as co-founder and CEO of Digits, the world's first AI-native accounting platform, and previously co-founder and CEO of Crashlytics — the mobile crash reporting platform acquired by Twitter for over $100 million just 14 months after founding. A Stanford computer science graduate who taught himself to code at 12, Seibert also served as Twitter's Head of Consumer Product, appeared in the Emmy-winning Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, and has made 100+ angel investments. He is based in San Francisco, California.
Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary Vaynerchuk, known as GaryVee, is a Belarusian-American serial entrepreneur, CEO of VaynerMedia, Chairman of VaynerX, and founder of VeeFriends. He grew his family's $3M liquor store into a $60M e-commerce empire before building one of the most influential digital marketing agencies in the world. With 38+ million social media followers, 8 bestselling books, early angel investments in Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Venmo, and Coinbase, and a relentless content machine that runs 365 days a year, Gary Vee is one of the most recognizable voices in entrepreneurship, brand-building, and the creator economy.