There's not a doubt in my mind that the two biggest things that have happened to the wine industry in the last 10 years are the movie Sideways and Two Buck Chuck.’

—Gary Vaynerchuk, winelibrarytv.com

An advisory committee has selected Fred Franzia of Bronco Wine Co. as Wine Market Report’s Wine

Industry Entrepreneur of the Decade (2000-2009), a recognition and award that every 10 years acknowledges the vintner who has had the greatest impact on the U.S. wine business.

“What was most surprising about the jury-style process that led to this selection was that the panelists realized within minutes of sitting down to deliberate that the winner was all-but obvious to them, given the parameters,” said WMR Publisher Richard Cartiere, who oversaw the process.

He added that the award, commemorated in a blue Plexiglas free-form shape, is not intended to reflect the results of a popularity poll, but to identify the strength of forces at work and underlying the direction and the continuing shape and style of the U.S. wine business.

“Like Time magazine’s annual Person of the Year, our recognition is given without making judgments of the issues, events and actions involved, but rather acts as a gauge of influence and impact and heralds the direction from which some of the wine industry’s future change is likely to come,” said Cartiere at an award luncheon on Tuesday. “Although by its very nature this sort of recognition award looks and speaks to the accomplishments of the past, it is as much about the future and what to expect.”

The ad hoc committee, which previously selected Jess Jackson as Entrepreneur of the 1990s, is comprised of two wine journalists, one retailer, an importer, a distributor representative and a wine consumer. Cartiere participates in panel discussions and only votes to break ties. Participation in the committee is kept confidential in order to facilitate open and frank decision-making.

Franzia was subjectively cited by committee members for the impact of “his” so-called Super Value wine category (“a defining product of the wine industry in the 2000s decade”); the impact that the category has had on reducing California’s excess winegrape supply over the last eight years and encouraging consumer trials of wine and/or expanded consumption by existing consumers; the impact that category has had on battling cheap wine imports; his efforts to liberalize restrictions on the use of geographic wine brand names when the products were in existence prior to the establishment of the referenced appellations; the impact from having expanded into the nation’s largest winegrape grower with nearly 40,000 acres planted in California; his involvement in the international bulk wine sector of the global wine business; and his ambitious plans to begin construction on California’s first new wine bottle manufacturing plant in 58 years.

Franzia heads the 20-million case family business from two locations—a sprawling manufacturing-style winery in Ceres in the San Joaquin Valley and a state-of-the-art, 24-hour wine bottling center in Napa designed on the outside to resemble an Italian castle/villa from the Renaissance.

Key to the committee’s recognition was the success of Franzia’s Charles Shaw brand. The brand’s re-launch in 2003—it was once a Napa Valley-based brand but fell into bankruptcy in the early 1990s, after which Franzia bought the label and trademark rights—created the company’s biggest historical success, humorously known as “Two Buck Chuck” because of its $1.99 per bottle retail price.

Since its inception, the brand has sold 360 million bottles exclusively through Trader Joe’s grocery stores and single handedly created a new category of U.S. wines known as Super Value.

At an unheard-of low price that required the company to squeeze economies of scale and pennies of profit per bottle from its margins at every level of its unprecedented vertically integrated operations, imitators have been slow to copycat the brand. However, E. & J. Gallo last year put “renewed and extra resources” behind its similarly priced Tisdale brand last year, according to sources, and The Wine Group won a private label contract to provide Wal-Mart with its first “$1.97” wine, which the retailer began selling in the last quarter of 2007. Industry analyst Jon Fredrikson, who two years running had named Bronco as “winery of the year” for having the single largest shipments increase of any U.S. producer, said Wal-Mart sold a half-million cases of the line, called Oak Leaf, in the final quarter, which he characterized as making it the fastest-selling wine brand of all time.

Gary Vaynerchuk, a widely popular wine video blogger and New Jersey retailer at Winelibrarytv.com, said recently of Franzia: "There's not a doubt in my mind that the two biggest things that have happened to the wine industry in the last 10 years are the movie Sideways and Two Buck Chuck."

In gauging Franzia's impact, Vaynerchuk added: "Has Two Buck Chuck hurt some $8 to $15 brands? Yes. But it's helped the industry overall by bringing in new people. What Franzia is doing, more than creating outrageous quality, is exposing a lot of mediocre people. There are so many fools in the wine industry who are overpriced."

The committee found evidence suggesting that the U.S. wine trade may not have a clear understanding of the height of enthusiasm there has been and remains at the consumer level for Charles Shaw, nor how that enthusiasm may have spread throughout the adult wine-drinking population and helped fuel the growth in wine sales at virtually every price category during the 2000s decade.

“Although not a statistical survey result, anecdotal evidence from consumer encounters by the committee members showed a clear and consistent theme that suggests U.S. consumers believe that the brand offered them not only dollar savings on wine purchases, but an entrance into the so-called wine lifestyle that was quick, affordable and, surprising to them, unfettered with the complications with wine drinking that they had seen, heard of or encountered in the past,” said Cartiere. ”Along with the launch of so-called ‘fun brands’ by U.S. vintners in the last several years, Two Buck Chuck made wine appreciation and experience easy and fun.”

The brand appears to illustrate success at what is being called “stopwatch marketing” by some consumer-packaged goods experts.

In an information-clogged world, time-constrained consumers, weary of all the marketing chatter about brand choices they must confront every day, may have welcomed Franzia's and Trader Joe's straight-forward brand promise—good reliable quality of a premium wine for an amazingly low price—because the marketing message was both loud and clear, incredibly simple, trustworthy (Trader Joe’s customers depend upon the retailer to all but make these decisions for them), fun and cutting edge, with a relatively low risk-of-failure level and the additional benefit of offering them something not everyone already has (due to exclusivity with Trader Joe’s).

For his part, Franzia has had a remarkably simple view of the success of Charles Shaw that nonetheless hints at a far deeper understanding: “People want to buy things at a reasonable price that are good value. It's not new. It's America.”

Fred Franzia is known for efforts that push limits to their outermost possibilities, which has prompted criticism that he is more of an opportunist than a true entrepreneur. Indeed, no story on his business success can fail to draw instant criticism if it doesn't mention his 1993 felony conviction for conspiracy to defraud after inexpensive grapes were mislabeled and sold by Bronco as much higher priced ones, which Franzia pleaded to but suggests the complete story has never been accurately told to the public.

Franzia often has a gruff demeanor and a tendency to oversimplify to the point of hilarious absurdity (“No wine is worth more than $10 a bottle.”) and a sense of humor that plays to the blue-collar but really has much deeper intellectual underpinnings.

Bronco’s many long-term employees say these characteristics belie the reality that he seems to possess the single-most important characteristic of every entrepreneur—the ability to truly listen to opposing opinions and then act decisively.