Wine Country Gambler : Brooks Firestone’s Southern California Strategy Pays Off
The unusual thing about Brooks Firestone right now is that he is wearing a suit and tie. Earlier today, as chairman of a committee on the future of the wine business in America, he delivered a report before a special meeting of the Wine Institute in Santa Barbara, and he thought that perhaps he ought to dress up a bit for the occasion. Now, though, he is back home, on his 2,300-acre cattle ranch near Buellton, in the two-story, four-bedroom, 1930s-vintage white-and-yellow wood-frame house he shares with his wife of 29 years and their 12-year-old son. He excuses himself and disappears upstairs. When he returns, he has changed into faded jeans, a gray flannel cowboy shirt and work shoes. He looks much happier. “Whew!” he says. “I do like to get out of that thing.”
Brooks Firestone, who is 51, tall, and good-looking in a vigorous, ruddy-faced sort of way, is a scion of the Firestone tire family and a dropout from Firestone corporate life. He is well-known in local political circles, both as a high-profile Republican candidate for state Assembly in 1982 and as the son of noted GOP supporter Leonard K. Firestone, former ambassador to Belgium and confidant of Presidents. Brooks Firestone is well-known, too, on the amateur polo circuit, where he plays an energetic game on fields from Santa Monica to Nashville.
What Firestone does for a living, though, and what he would prefer to be best known for, is something that can be more strenuous and less predictable than politics and polo: He runs a winery. Firestone once likened his business to “a moon shot, a long-term venture” that takes a long time to make a profit. “For example,” he told a reporter in 1978, long before the winery went into the black, “one month we had sales of $9,000 and paid out $300,000 in costs. . . . If I hadn’t had a master plan to cling to, I probably would have jumped out the window.”
But as founder of the Firestone Vineyard in Los Olivos, just northwest of Santa Barbara, Firestone’s gamble was successful; he is the man who brought premium wine making to the Santa Ynez Valley, now an established, prize-winning wine region. More than that, through his tireless marketing efforts and high-rolling international connections (not to mention the resonance of his family name), he might be said to be the man who finally--and however improbably--put Southern California on the world wine map.
Firestone is also, it turns out, a man who likes to get his hands dirty. He is, as one longtime observer of his career puts it, “a rich man who actually enjoys physical labor.” This soon becomes apparent: “We’ll settle down on the veranda and have a glass of wine in a couple of minutes,” he promises, “but first I’ve got a little chore to do.” He’s playing in a benefit polo match in Arizona in a few days, he explains, and the horses leave tomorrow. This afternoon, he wants to check the tires on his horse trailer--a 24-foot, six-stall affair that he helped design himself--and on the pickup truck that pulls it.
Nancy Carter, a wiry ex-professional horsewoman who helps Firestone both at the winery and with his horses, is already at the trailer when he arrives, loading it with tack. Firestone greets her, then pulls a tire gauge from his hip pocket and goes to work. Everything is fine until he reaches the right rear tire on the pickup: It’s flat.
“Darn!” says Firestone. “This is going to take awhile.”
“Why don’t we just call the Triple A?” asks Carter.
“Naw,” says Firestone. “We don’t need the Triple A.” He gets down on the damp, pebbly ground and attacks the flat.
When he’s finished, he stands up and stretches and then stares for a moment at the flat and chuckles. “Thank God it’s a Goodyear,” he says.
Born A. Brooks Firestone (“The A is for Anthony, but at the age of 5 I took offense at being called Tony”) in 1936 in Cleveland, the future winery owner moved with his family to Beverly Hills in the early 1940s. He grew up in Coldwater Canyon, attended Webb School in Claremont and then went to Princeton. One evening there, he and two friends headed into New York for dinner. “We had a few bottles of wine,” he recalls, “and decided to go over to the old Metropolitan Opera House to see the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. Sitting there, feeling pretty brave, we picked the one dancer out of the program who we thought would be most likely to respond favorably to an invitation to supper after the performance. We sent her a note, and to our surprise she came to the stage door and said yes. She brought along two other dancers, and we paired off. My two friends fell head over heels for their dates, but I didn’t get along too well with mine. So when we all went out again the next week, a different girl came along for me. It was Kate--and this time the heavens opened and the trumpets sounded and I haven’t looked back since.”
“Kate” was Sadler’s Wells soloist Catherine Boulton, the Indian-born daughter of an English clergyman. “It was a somewhat stormy courtship,” Firestone says, “because Kate didn’t want to give up her career. It was not the easiest sell I’ve ever had.” He persisted, though, and in 1958, while he was in the Army at Ft. Ord--having meanwhile transferred to Columbia and graduated with a degree in economics--he and Kate were married. They have four children: Hayley, 27; Adam, 25; Polly, 22, and 12-year-old Andrew.
When Firestone got out of the Army, he did what he was expected to do: He went to work for the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. He worked his way up through the ranks and eventually was stationed in London as head of the corporation’s United Kingdom operations. He didn’t much like it. “The company had by this time gone public,” he explains, “and there was no clear-cut policy either with the family or with the organization regarding the roles family members should play. We were brought in as ordinary management trainees, but of course we were ordinary management trainees with access to the chief executive. It was a tremendous pressure situation.”
Firestone now muses that perhaps someday he ought to write a book for people who are considering working in family businesses--”a book of advice, a source book, with stuff like how to recognize solicitous parents, sycophants, cutthroats and so on.” Meanwhile, he says, “my philosophy is that you let young family members work outside the company for 10, 20, 25 years--until they’re glued together as people. You really cannot get a sense of your own personal worth working in a family business.”
In 1971, seeking that sense for himself, Firestone resigned from the company, brought Kate back to the United States and started looking for a new job. Ironically, what he found turned out to be another family enterprise of a sort: His father, Leonard, had recently purchased 500 acres of farmland in the Santa Ynez Valley, where he planned to plant wine grapes, which were “a trendy investment at the time,” his son says. “The Firestones have always been farmers,” he continues. “My grandfather, Harvey, who founded the tire company, was born on a farm in Columbiana, Ohio--and it was at least partly because he had to plow the ground on steel-rim wheels when he was young that he developed his almost messianic desire to put America on rubber tires. Anyway, I had always had a yen to be in a rural environment myself, so Leonard asked me to come out and take a look at his new property and tell him what I thought. I read all the research, and it was brilliant. Our immediate neighbor had done a 10-year weather study, the contract farmers seemed to know what they were doing and so on. The bad news, I told my father, was that grapes are a commodity, and there were more grapes than there was a market for. ‘If you’re going to do this,’ I said, ‘maybe you’d better make your own wine.’ And of course I offered to help.”
Leonard didn’t know anything about the wine business, but he had a friend who did--Keizo Saji, chief executive of Suntory Ltd., the huge Japanese wine and spirits producer. “My father asked Keizo if he might like to get involved in a California winery,” says Firestone. “Keizo sent his people over to have a look and decided that he was interested.” The Japanese firm put up part of the initial financing for the project, and today Suntory and the two Firestones each control about one-third of the operation. (On its own, Suntory has since bought the Chateau St. Jean winery in the Sonoma Valley.) The first grapes
were planted on the Firestone property in 1973, with Brooks Firestone in charge. He had found himself a new job--and a new life.
The Santa Ynez Valley is beautiful, typical California coastal-valley farm country--a landscape of sloping meadows and rolling hills. The only real tourist attraction in the area, in the days before winery tours at least, was the movie-set town of Solvang--founded in 1911 by Danish immigrants from Michigan and today the valley’s largest municipality. Otherwise, the valley has traditionally been mostly agricultural--with an overlay of sophistication provided by the proximity of a number of Arabian horse farms and by the fact that the local ranchers include John and Bo Derek, Mike Nichols, Ray Stark, and Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
The grapevine first came to the Santa Ynez Valley in the 1780s, when Franciscan monks from the Santa Barbara Mission planted auxiliary vineyards on local hillsides. More plantings followed the founding here, in 1804, of the Santa Ynez (Saint Agnes) Mission, from which the valley took its name. By the late 19th Century the area was carpeted with more than 5,000 acres of vines. Prohibition wiped out valley viticulture, though, and by the time the great California wine boom hit in the 1960s, the region was without commercial wine grapes. At that point, the very idea of wine from the Santa Ynez Valley--or from any part of Santa Barbara County--would probably have sounded pretty silly to a wine buff.
Enter Dean Brown, whom Brooks Firestone describes as “basically a very sophisticated cattleman.” Brown owned a ranch in Foxen Canyon, near Los Olivos, next door to what became the Firestone property, and he thought that premium wine grapes might grow well there. It was he who had commissioned the 10-year weather study of the valley. Brown’s first vines went into the ground in 1971, and the initial results were promising. That encouraged the Firestones, who planted their first grapes in 1973 and shipped their first wines in 1976. Their wines were critically well-received, and Firestone’s early success in turn encouraged other vintners. Today there are at least 16 wineries and eight independent vineyards in the Santa Ynez Valley--among the former, such top-notch producers as Austin, Brander, Gainey, J. Carey, Zaca Mesa and Sanford--and most of the major French and German grape varieties are grown, from Chardonnay and Riesling to Cabernet and Pinot Noir. (Brown has since sold his vineyards to Hollywood producer Douglas Cramer, who makes a small amount of wine privately for his own use.)
The Firestone Vineyard is the largest winery in the Santa Ynez Valley today, producing about 80,000 cases of wine a year from seven grape varieties under the supervision of Alison Green, the only female wine maker in the valley, as Firestone proudly points out. Firestone won’t reveal how much business the winery does except to say that it has been “marginally in the black for about five years.” The winery itself is a handsome, contemporary redwood-and-fieldstone structure designed by noted architect (and winery specialist) Richard Keith. Firestone wines are sold all over the United States and in England, Ireland, Canada and Japan. “We do pretty well overseas,” Firestone says, “because most people there don’t know the difference between Santa Ynez and Napa and so don’t have any built-in prejudices against us.”
That brings up the question of just how good a wine region the Santa Ynez Valley is. Will it ever become another Napa Valley? Will it ever produce wines that are truly great? That’s hard to say. All too many local wines, some of Firestone’s included, are aggressively vegetal in character; in other words, they taste and smell more like bell peppers or broccoli or whatever than like grapes. Other wines from the region are simply too bland, lacking varietal aroma and flavor--the qualities that make Chardonnay, for instance, register as Chardonnay on the palate.
Rick Longoria, a former Firestone cellar master who makes wine for the valley’s new Gainey Vineyard, thinks that the Santa Maria area--Santa Barbara County’s other viticultural region--will eventually turn out to be better grape country. Like a number of other valley wine makers, Longoria freely blends Santa Maria and Santa Ynez juice for his wines (a practice Firestone disapproves of). On the other hand, Firestone and a number of other local producers have at times produced wines from Santa Ynez Valley grapes alone that rival anything else made in California--and they have the gold medals to prove it.
Representative of what this valley’s vines can yield are Firestone’s own immensely fragrant 1985 Johannisberg Riesling and bright, delicious Rose of Cabernet Sauvignon--a lovely interpretation of an unfashionable wine type. Other promising releases from the winery include an aromatic 1981 Pinot Noir; an intense, stemmy 1983 Merlot, and a complex, unusual 1979 Vintage Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. Wines like these certainly speak well of the region’s capabilities.
“But let’s face it,” concedes Firestone, “because of the overall economic situation, it’s just too late for us to start being another Napa Valley. We’re too far behind, and the costs are just too high now. If the region had gotten going 10 years earlier than it did, though, I think it would be just extraordinary today.”
“I think the whole Santa Barbara area is going to be like another Sonoma,” counters Kate, “with our valley as its Alexander Valley--the shining star in the middle of something pretty good.” If she’s right, she will likely have had something to do with it: On Dec. 31, the Firestone / Suntory partnership took title to another, much smaller Santa Ynez Valley property--the 7,000-case J. Carey Winery--and put Kate in charge.
“At Firestone,” explains her husband, “we already produce about the maximum quantity of wine we should--maybe even a little too much. The only way we could really expand, then, was to buy another winery altogether. Carey had an interesting combination of good wine making and good vineyards (their Cabernet grapes are widely considered to be the finest in the valley), but the winery lacked marketing skills. There are a lot of wineries like that around the state, wineries that make good wine but that aren’t set up on a sound economic basis--and I think larger wineries should buy them and utilize their assets.”
This philosophy of what might be called enological imperialism wasn’t Firestone’s only reason for buying J. Carey, though: “Most of all,” he says, “I bought it because of Kate. She wanted to do something on her own, and she was too valuable to let anybody else have. Her title at Carey is vintner--and she will defend the integrity and style of the winery, believe me. If you come back in two years, in fact, I’ll probably be over at Carey, and Kate will be running Firestone.”
IN 1981, BROOKS FIRESTONE’S ATTENTIONS WERE TEMPORARily diverted from the wine business. With no more personal political experience than a lot of years of, he says, “reading the papers and swearing at the TV set,” Firestone announced that he would challenge Democratic then-Assemblyman Gary K. Hart of Santa Barbara for the 18th District state Senate seat about to be vacated by Democrat Omer L. Rains of Ventura.
His lack of experience, Firestone maintained at the time, was an asset. He would run as a “citizen politician,” he said, with the idea of serving for several years and then returning to private life. “I’m not a hard doctrinaire individual,” he told the Santa Barbara News-Press. He willingly expands on that theme today: “People who don’t necessarily want or need the job have got to serve in government,” he says. “I just don’t believe that we should have a professional class of politicians.”
Professional or not, Firestone apparently worried the Democrats. In September, 1981, the new Democratic Senate reapportionment plan gerrymandered his Santa Ynez Valley ranch out of Rains’ district and into the larger, central California 14th District--where Firestone would have to run against a strong Republican incumbent, Fresno-based Ken Maddy. Firestone promptly moved to Santa Barbara, back into Rains’ territory. “I got angry,” he says.
As it happened, though, Firestone never got the chance to run for Senate. His fellow Republican, Ventura Assemblyman Charles R. Imbrecht, announced his own candidacy for the Rains seat. To avoid a primary fight, Firestone withdrew from the race and declared instead for Gary Hart’s soon-to-be-available 35th District Assembly office. His opponent was Jack O’Connell, a 31-year-old former Rains aide. Firestone was a solid favorite.
He put together a strong support team, headed by veteran Monterey Republican campaign worker Ruth Fenton. He held informal meetings with influential local Republicans--always bringing his own wine along. He had a well-publicized private meeting with President Reagan and was photographed with him. A picture of him sharing a joke with his father’s friend, Gerald Ford, appeared on Page 1 of the Santa Barbara News-Press.
Meanwhile, unnoticed by Presidents past and present, O’Connell was knocking on doors throughout the district and explaining why he deserved to be elected. On Election Day, he marched through heavily Latino southern Oxnard with Cesar Chavez at his side.
“From the voters’ perspective, it was basically a very good campaign,” says Jerry Rankin, city editor of the News-Press, who covered the Firestone-O’Connell contest as a political reporter for the paper. “It was two decent people talking about issues.”
Firestone spent $494,000 on his Assembly bid, including $80,000 from his father. O’Connell spent $213,000 and had the support of Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and Democratic Party heavyweights Gray Davis and Richard Alatorre. When the votes were counted, to the surprise of almost everyone (except perhaps the energetic, optimistic O’Connell), Firestone had lost the election--by 1,190 votes of 102,550 cast.
“I won because I out-hustled him,” says O’Connell, who is now serving his third term in the office. “I think he was somewhat complacent.”
Firestone, who eventually moved back to his ranch, says the Assembly race was probably his last campaign. “It’s so difficult for an amateur to do,” he says. “Regardless of one’s expertise in whatever field, that political thing is a world apart.”
“Brooks was 30 or 40 years too late,” says ex-political reporter Rankin. “He would have been the ideal California politician in the ‘40s or ‘50s, before the state got a full-time Legislature. But today, I think it’s just as well he lost. He’s not cut out for Sacramento. He wouldn’t have enjoyed himself. It would have hurt his personality, his job, his family. Brooks has done a lot more for the state of California by making good wine than he ever would have done in politics.”
Firestone’s importance to the California wine industry is first of all historical: He was a pioneer, an inspirer, an expander of possibilities; he took a chance on an untried wine area, then stuck with it and made it pay. More than that, though, he has helped the new region to develop its own identity in what is after all a very large world of wine. “Besides a viticultural integrity,” he says, “a wine region must have a philosophical integrity”--and he has helped provide that. His first concern, of course, remains his own wines--which he promotes at every opportunity. He tours the country with them, pours them freely, donates them to charity, arranges for them to be served at state banquets in England and America. “The best thing I can do for the winery,” he says, “is to be on the road, to represent the wines. It just takes a tremendous amount of promotion and marketing to make this business work.”
When he’s not on the road, says Firestone, he leads a simple life. “I rise early and fade fast. If it’s light when I get up, I ride a fence line or whatever, just as an excuse to goof off on a horse. Ideally, I’m back in time to have breakfast with our disreputable 12-year-old. Then it’s off to the winery. On a good day, I meet a couple of pals at Bent’s Deli in Los Olivos and have lunch and complain about something. Then there are always visitors coming to the winery, auditors, all the usual industry people. When we’re bottling, Kate and I sometimes relieve the workers on the bottling line for a while. It’s a lot more fun than talking on the telephone.”
One former Firestone employee, who prefers to remain anonymous, says Firestone has never done as much manual labor around the winery as he would like people to think. “I remember one time when he came into the winery with a photographer,” the ex-employee says, “and grabbed a hose, and then had his picture taken as if he were working. In truth, though, he never mingled that much with the lesser employees.” On the other hand, Tony Austin, who was wine maker at Firestone from its first vintage in 1975 through that of 1981, before leaving to open his own Austin Cellars winery nearby, states emphatically that “Brooks works . Very few people in his position know how to. He even worked for me, working as my cellar master for a year when we were shorthanded--which is a very labor-intensive job. And he was probably the best cellar master I’ve ever had.”
The trouble with Brooks Firestone is that he sometimes seems too good to be true. What’s the catch? Is Brooks Firestone for real?
“Absolutely,” says Jerry Rankin of the News-Press. “His whole attitude, his friendliness and so on, is absolutely natural and genuine. I worked in Sacramento long enough to have developed a pretty good b.s. detector, and I can tell you that it’s never once gone off around Brooks. He’s a lot like Ronald Reagan in that sense. They’re both exactly what they seem to be. Brooks changed a tire in front of you? Ronald Reagan would have done exactly the same thing--and not cared what anyone thought. I can assure you, Brooks didn’t either.”
But what would Brooks Firestone like people to think? How would he like to be remembered? “For the homely virtues,” he says immediately. “As a good family man, a good friend, a good citizen. In wine, specifically, I’d like to be remembered as one of the stable--someone with consistent quality rather than a super name. I’d like to be remembered as a standard, not as an exception.”