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Wine Industry Executive Profile: Jim DeBonis

HEALDSBURG – Jim DeBonis is driven to make a difference in his work and succeed at the same time.

That’s partly why he assembled $234 million in private equity to acquire brands he helped build, rebuild or acquire over the past five years and launch Ascentia Wine Estates earlier this month as one of the North Coast’s largest wine companies.

As chief operating officer for wine divisions of public companies, he had seen the name on the front door of his Healdsburg office change twice, and it was set to change again when he set out late last year to get backers to buy the brands.

It was Allied Domecq Wines USA when he arrived in 2002 to oversee brands such as Clos du Bois in Sonoma County’s Alexander Valley, Buena Vista in Carneros and Atlas Peak in Sonoma.

Then in mid-2005, it became Beam Wine Estates when Illinois-based Fortune Brands acquired the Allied Domecq wines and brought in its own brands, including Geyser Peak in Alexander Valley and Wild Horse on the Central Coast.

Between and after those deals, Mr. DeBonis talked Gary Farrell into selling his high-end Russian River Valley winery, brought in old-vine zinfandel brand XYZin, helped differentiate Geyser Peak from Clos du Bois, refocused Buena Vista on its estate vineyards and concentrated Atlas Peak on Napa Valley mountain appellation grapes.

Late last year, he heard Fortune was going to sell the wine portfolio to focus on spirits. “I wasn’t going to take it lying down,” he said. “All the work I put in place would be acquired, and who knows what would happen.”

On Dec. 17, Constellation Brands of New York acquired the group for $885 million and started consolidating Beam operations into its St. Helena and San Francisco offices for its fine wine and mass-market business units.

Just after the deal, Mr. DeBonis, 48, brought in KeyBank to look for backers for acquiring the Beam brands and found San Francisco private-equity firm GESD Capital Partners and New Jersey-based W.J. Deutsch & Sons, the marketing and distribution brains behind the U.S. success of the Australian brand Yellow Tail.

Constellation kept Clos du Bois and Wild Horse but sold Ascentia the Sonoma County brands plus Columbia and Covey Run in Washington and Ste. Chapelle in Idaho.

Unlike other brands he’s worked with in his 20-year wine career, the Ascentia portfolio has little brand overlap and is diversified in regional sourcing and bottle pricing to meet trends such as popularity of riesling wine, which is dominant in the Pacific Northwest, and consumer anxiety over the economy.

In a separate deal, Ascentia leased more than 600 acres of vines connected to the brands from St. Helena’s VinREIT. “You sure paid a lot of money to get your old office back,” he recalled a staffer at one of the Beam wineries quipping just after the deal.

Indeed, much is remaining the same. Mr. DeBonis is back in Beam Wine Estates’ 15,000-square-foot office in Healdsburg with a head office staff of 20. The Beam winery teams are still in place, and part of the deal with Constellation brought with it Glenn Coogan, who continues to manage the Washington and Idaho wineries.

Mr. DeBonis is applying lessons learned in his time with Allied Domecq and Beam about the best of centralized and decentralized management. Purchasing and finance can benefit from centralization, but he avoids homogenization of brands by too tightly controlling local decisions of each winery.

“A winery without a sense of place is just a commodity,” he said.

Mr. DeBonis started out with dreams of hitting it big in high tech. Armed with an associate of science degree in technology, the Healdsburg native went to work in the late 1970s at the now-shuttered Fairchild Semiconductor plant there. He moved on to a few startup technology companies in Santa Rosa and finally ended up at Material Progress Corp., which became Komag Materials Technology.

As he entered management, he realized that he was good at managing technology but needed to hone his people skills.

After eight years in the industry, he’d had enough of the business cycles, especially after having to scale his production crew at Material Progress from 50 employees to 400 and back to 50 within six months to fulfill large orders.

Mr. DeBonis grew up with a 50-acre vineyard on his parents’ Russian River Valley ranch and enjoyed wine, so he decided to get into the business. In 1987, he saw an advertisement for a cellarmaster at Simi Winery in Healdsburg, but he had no idea what the job entailed.

At the interview, he had to convince winemaker Zelma Long that aptitude in managing high-tech manufacturing would work in her cellar. Mr. DeBonis won over Ms. Long, who was expanding and reviving Simi at the time. Ms. Long sent him to U.C. Davis to learn about winemaking and viticulture.

Four years later, Mr. DeBonis was vice president of production at Simi, which was owned along with Domaine Chandon by France-based LVMH. By 1997, he was general manager of Simi, senior vice president of operations at Domaine Chandon and started traveling around the world to oversee facilities for Domaine Chandon Estates.

“One day I came home from a trip, and my daughter said if I was promoted any more I’d be promoted out of the family,” he recalled.

As he was looking to make a career change, Canandaigua Wine Co. – the former name of Constellation – was eyeing Simi for acquisition. And Bill Newlands, who had been on the executive team at Domaine Chandon and would be at the helm of Beam Wine Estates, joined the company and was trying to persuade Mr. DeBonis to do likewise.

Meanwhile, Augustin Huneeas, president of the St. Helena-based Franciscan Estates portfolio of brands, was recruiting him as senior vice president.

In an example of the small world of North Coast wine, Mr. DeBonis ended up working for both organizations as Canadaigua acquired Franciscan in 1999 as its fine wine group, now called Icon Estates. Three years later, Mr. Newlands left Franciscan Estates for Allied Domecq USA, a Healdsburg-based group of wineries, and convinced Mr. DeBonis to join him as COO.

“I like seeing a vision carried out after I’ve seen the vineyards, negotiated for the barrels and other materials and checked on the making of the wine,” he said.

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