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.
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.
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 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 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.