3 days ago
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
This new Napa Valley winery is charging $250 for tastings. Here's why
Patrice Breton admits that $250 is a lot to charge for a wine tasting. But the Napa Valley vintner stands by it.
When visitors come to his Vice Versa winery, which recently opened in Calistoga, Breton said he opens at least $1,000 worth of wine. A four-glass flight, a 'crescendo in terms of intensity,' will likely include Vice Versa's $575 Magnificent Seven, a Cabernet Sauvignon sourced from name-brand vineyards like To Kalon, Dr. Crane and Las Piedras, before moving on to $350 Les Cousins, a 50-50 blend of Napa Valley and Paso Robles Cabernet that's a collaboration with Paso winery L'Aventure.
Still, Breton hopes he won't have to charge the tasting fee at all. He'd rather customers buy at least three bottles of Vice Versa, which waives the charge. His permit allows him to host a maximum of 10 people a day, so he wants to make every visit count.
'Some people can do as many tastings as they want, and I don't have that luxury,' said Breton.
Since opening last month, Vice Versa has been busy, Breton said. In fact, sales are up about 30% this year, a stark contrast with the overall U.S. wine industry, whose retail sales were down 6% year over year as of April, according to Wine Business Analytics. Small-scale, high-end wines like Vice Versa are performing better than lower-priced wines right now, and companies that rely more heavily on direct-to-consumer sales — which a tasting room enables — are better insulated from the crisis unfolding in the wine distribution tier.
The Calistoga winery opening is the end of a long road for Breton, who has operated Vice Versa since 2003 as a virtual brand with no facility or vineyards of its own. Like many upscale Napa wine brands, he buys fruit from some of the most pedigreed sites, especially those owned by grower Andy Beckstoffer, and employs a famous winemaking consultant, Philippe Melka.
But now that he has a stake in the ground, Breton hopes that Vice Versa will stand out among the Napa elite with an estate whose aesthetic he describes as both 'minimalist' and 'punk rock.'
The 5,000-square-foot steel and concrete structure hovers over an outdoor crushpad, lined with slender stainless tanks and concrete cylinders. (The fireproof materials mean that his insurance bill is only $1,000 a month, he said, a bargain for a rural winery.) The indoor areas are contained almost entirely within underground caves, and an arched doorway leads into a spare tasting room with a single long, black table.
Chaotic paintings from Brazilian artist Bruno Leonardo Franklin de Melo line the walls of the tasting room, a look that Breton said is inspired by his stint as the bass player in a punk band. Despite the loud colors, the place is quiet: Breton spent $1 million on a cooling system that doesn't make the loud heaving noises that other systems do. He will project black and white films like 'Casablanca' or 'Seven Samurai' with no sound.
The look may be minimalist, but the budget was not. When Breton acquired the 11-acre property in 2019, it came with plans for a winery designed by Howard Backen, the famed Wine Country architect who died in 2024. He wanted a different look from the luxe stone farmhouses that are Backen's signature, and enlisted San Francisco architects Olle Lundberg and Lev Bereznycky. They drew up a second floor, but the initial quote of $18 million jumped to about $40 million after Napa Valley's 2020 wildfires, which drove up demand for new construction. Breton decided to hold off on the second story for now.
The Ottawa-born Breton made his fortune in software, founding Mediagrif Interactive Technologies in 1996, an early player in Canada's tech industry. In the span of a few years, he said, he went from a 20-something working in his basement to running a public company with more than 450 employees and over $76 million in annual revenue. When Breton left in 2001, he said he was sleeping four hours a night. 'I wasn't healthy. I was exhausted.'
Although he came from a hockey-and-beer sort of family, Breton had become passionate about wine. His first love was Sauternes, the golden-colored sweet wine of Bordeaux, and in 2002, he came close to buying a 200-year-old chateau there. But the winery wasn't doing very well and he decided against it.
He came to California instead, where he 'loved the possibility to innovate and create.' Winemaker Paul Hobbs took him under his wing, putting Breton on the sorting line during harvest and helping him secure a small amount of fruit for himself. The first vintage of Vice Versa was a blend of fruit from the To Kalon and Stagecoach vineyards in 2003. He managed to generate some buzz on critic Robert Parker 's forum and sold out of his small production quickly.
'Pliant' is the word Breton uses most frequently to describe his desired wine style. He prizes a wine's texture, seeking 'that silky finish.' The wines, like many that Melka advises on, indeed feel smooth and supple — Les Cousins, the Napa-Paso blend, is the most chewily tannic of the bunch — with generously ripe, fruit-forward flavors. He accentuates the silkiness by decanting all wines before serving them to customers as long as nine hours in advance. (Though Melka consults, Spencer Kelly is the day-to-day winemaker.)
Breton seeded Vice Versa with $3 million of his personal funds, he said, and it took him 10 years to break even. That year, 2013, was when Breton stopped traveling back and forth from Montreal and moved to Napa Valley. His investment was still a pittance compared with what it would have cost to buy a winery upfront, he believes. Rather than sink $50 million into real estate, 'I decided to build the brand first.'
His Calistoga property came with 5.5 acres of 30-year-old Cabernet Sauvignon and, surprisingly, Lagrein, a northern Italian red that's rare in California. He's removed the Lagrein vines and plans to replant more Cabernet and perhaps Cabernet Franc. The fruit currently goes into Vice Versa's lowest-priced wine, the $150 Spinning Plates.
Although the winery is permitted to produce up to 10,000 cases of wine a year, Breton said he'll stick with his current 5,000-case output for now. After nearly 20 years of custom crushing, he is looking forward to the greater control that having his own winery will afford him in 2025. In the meantime, he's scouting for his next big purchase to extend further control over his grape quality: another vineyard.
'I've got my eye on something,' Breton said. With many wineries and vineyards closing or selling right now, 'it's a good time to look.'
