Andre Gueziec presents a good example of why you should never depend on one large client for your wine grapes.
Gueziec, 57, is fairly new to the wine business. He’s from Alsace, France. and grew up around wine, but he was a software engineer. He developed traffic-monitoring software and sold it to the Weather Network. That gave him the money to buy, in 2020, Domaine Helena, a 215-acre vineyard and winery in Lake County near the Napa County border.
The Valley Fire had ripped through the property in 2015 but left the 82 acres of vineyards undamaged, though it burned trees that were in the middle of vineyards. The property just east of Cobb Mountain and just north of Mt. Saint Helena, hence the name, is at 1100 feet of elevation, keeping high temperatures moderate in mid-summer. Gueziec says the soil, at the foot of the two mountains, is volcanic. The oldest vines are nearly 12 acres of Cabernet Sauvignon planted on St. George rootstock in 1992.
“We get a cool afternoon breeze off [Cobb] Mountain,” Gueziec said. “It’s very clean air. There are no mildew spores from the mountain because there aren’t any vineyards there.”
Gueziec immediately took his vineyards organic, and in July his vineyard became certified organic. He said he was most concerned about his own health after reading about the connection between glyphosate and non-Hodgkins lymphoma. A 2019 study led by two researchers at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health reported a 41% increase in the risk of this type of cancer for people with high cumulative exposure to glyphosate.
“I spend a lot of time in the vineyard,” Gueziec said. “These people who are at the tradeshows asking, ‘Should I be sustainable?’ If they were the ones doing the suckering themselves, they’d be organic.”
Going organic takes a lot of work, and not all of it in the vineyard. Vegetation on the unplanted hilly parts of the property, which had been seared by the Valley Fire, grew back with such exuberance that he couldn’t use the road anymore and had to painstakingly clear it.
“Part of the problem when you go organic is a lot of life comes back, and some of it you have to fight,” Gueziec said.
Organic Doesn’t Guarantee Success
Gueziec didn’t go organic to make his grapes easier to sell; he really believes in organic farming. He’s enthusiastic about taking care of his vineyard. He rips or digs out individual tall weeds himself. Otherwise, he uses a Clemens Radius to trim weeds; it has an attachment that retracts the blade when it hits trellising or a vine.
Moreover, he inherited a large grape client with the property. Gueziec said this winery wanted to be the exclusive buyer of his grapes, though it did allow him to make some wine on his own.
But after the 2022 vintage, the buyer walked away, leaving him with an 82-acre organic vineyard in Lake County and no ongoing winery clients.
The old adage about “the way to make a small fortune in the wine industry is to start with a large one” suddenly became true. Gueziec did make a lot of money in the software industry, but he has already plowed most of it into the property. He has a few clients now for some of his grapes, including T. Berkley Wines in nearby Calistoga, Chacewater in Kelseyville and Lodi’s Michael David Winery.
Gueziec is struggling to stay afloat. He rents out the property’s three-bedroom house when he can on Air BnB and stays in a tiny trailer on the property that doesn’t look long enough to sleep stretched out. Without a major grape client for the 2023 vintage, he harvested and made wine at a custom crush in Napa, but now he doesn’t know what to do with it.
“I don’t want to try to sell bulk wine. Nobody’s buying bulk wine,” Gueziec said.
But that left him in late August with rapidly ripening grapes and few buyers for them. Gueziec has been advertising his grapes for home winemakers in classified ads on wineindustry.com. There are a lot of grapes to be had: 62 acres of Cabernet Sauvignon, 15 acres of Petite Sirah (Gueziec plans to make this for himself if nobody buys it) and 4.6 acres of Cabernet Franc. Unfortunately, it is the small plot of Cabernet Franc that has attracted the most interest.
While being interviewed for Grape & Wine, Gueziec also had a visit from Steve Sebastian, who oversees development for Restoration Hardware, a Marin County-based upscale furniture store chain that has restaurants in 14 of its stores. That sounds very promising, but Sebastian was only there to bring bins in preparation for buying a ton of Cabernet Franc for the personal wine he makes at his home in Sonoma County.
“I looked into the history of the grapes,” Sebastian said. “Some very nice wineries are using them to make very nice wine. I like the elevation. They’re very well-maintained vineyards. I’ve just got a feeling they will make very good wine.”
Martin Pohl, one of two consulting winemakers for Domaine Helena, agrees. For his own winery, nearby Beaver Creek Vineyards, Pohl makes completely natural “zero-zero” wines (Gueziec adds sulfites both at harvest and at bottling to his own wines.) Pohl likes Gueziec’s commitment to organic farming.
“I’m a promoter of making wines without any chemicals,” said Pohl, a native of the Czech Republic. “It’s the future. You see the rise in autoimmune diseases. You see the cancer. It’s the food chain. If I’m going to consume my own wine I don’t want glyphosate in it. If you drink things with chemicals, you end up sick. I want to live a healthy lifestyle. It’s the plan of the gods.”
Gueziec is in the unusual situation of not making a lot of wine but having two winemakers working essentially with the same grapes. The second is Derek Holstein, the main winemaker for Cache Creek Vineyards and Winery (not to be confused with the casino, which is 40 miles southeast). Holstein makes wine in a more traditional method than Pohl, whose red wines tend to be the “glou-glou” easy drinking style.
What is most surprising is, though the berries are very small, neither winemaker’s wines are as concentrated and tannic as you’d expect. Instead, they are juicy with red rather than black fruit. Particularly surprising is his Petite Sirah, which is a light and pretty version of the varietal that was reminiscent of Pinot Noir, something you rarely hear said about Petite Sirah.
“It’s just from what happens in the vineyard,” Gueziec said.
Looking Ahead
Making nice grapes, or nice wine, in 2024 doesn’t necessarily translate into business success. Gueziec tore out a plot of Cabernet Sauvignon that had red blotch but doesn’t have the money to replant. He built a warehouse capable of holding 45,000 cases of wine (that would represent three years production), but he’s not sure that he has the money to pay for air conditioning in summer due to high PG&E rates.
He so far has not received a Williamson Act exemption that would lower his taxes.
“If I farm all my grapes, it’s $600,000 income total,” Gueziec said. “I pay $60,000 property tax. It’s expensive.”
Currently, Gueziec uses a vineyard management company, but he says the 45% surcharge on services is leading him to think about hiring full-time on-site staff. Currently, he has no employees; however, he knows if he does hire staff instead of using an outside company, he’ll lose access to the large, expensive equipment vineyard management companies offer.
“I’m not the only one who will tell you that small farmers are struggling,” Gueziec said. “What happens when the only person growing food is Bill Gates? My 10-year plan was to make this a winery. But it’s hard to live off this much land. I must get this place to work. I’ve got a lot invested in it.”
