British Brewer Guinness to Sell Sonoma Vineyards

True to its vow to exit the California wine business, giant British brewer Guinness said Monday that it has put up for sale its 1,200-acre Sonoma Vineyards and related properties that it acquired last year in buying Schenley Industries.

The brewer’s New York-based subsidiary, Guinness America, said the sale would include Windsor Vineyards, a wine mail-order and telemarketing business, the Rodney Strong brand and distribution network, as well as the rolling acreage in western Sonoma County.

Also put on the block as a separate sales entity was Tool Summit Inc., an independently operated retail business in Arizona that once was a division of Sonoma Vineyards before the winery ran into financial difficulties in the early 1980s. It, too, passed later to Schenley.

The industry grapevine has been abuzz with rumors of potential buyers for the wine property. Candidates include Napa Valley’s Beringer, a subsidiary of Swiss-based Nestle, one or more Japanese companies and possibly wine maker Rodney Strong. (Strong was out of town and unavailable for comment.)

According to industry analysts, Sonoma Vineyards could fetch as much as $35 million. That would rank the winery sale among California’s largest. Suntory, the Japanese beverage concern, paid a widely accepted but unconfirmed $41 million for Chateau St. Jean in Sonoma Valley in 1984, and Canada’s Hiram Walker paid about the same amount earlier this month for another Russian River winery, Clos du Bois of Healdsburg.

Guinness in March sold Concannon Vineyards, a 65,000-case winery and 220 acres of vineyard in the Livermore Valley, for an undisclosed sum that an industry analyst put at between $5 million and $8 million. The company had acquired Concannon two years ago in buying the winery’s parent, Distillers Co. Also up for sale is the other wine property Guinness got from Distillers, San Martin Winery in Santa Clara County.

Last November, in a filing with British securities regulators, Guinness said it intended to divest itself of the California wine properties, which were acquired as elements of larger beverage concerns. Guinness said it intends to concentrate on its beer and spirits businesses worldwide.