Family-Owned Glen Ellen Puts a Premium on Quality--Unreservedly

One of the greatest success stories in California’s century-and-a-half wine history is a wine that angers competitors, fosters imitators and is as much misunderstood as it is revered.

Glen Ellen Proprietor’s Reserve is the name, and it’s the use of the term reserve that has so many irritated. The word historically has been used to refer to special wines that are made in limited quantity and thus expensive. They were usually made essentially for the owner of a small estate from a tiny vineyard.

Glen Ellen’s Proprietor’s Reserve wines are made in huge quantities; the price never gets above $5 a bottle, and the grape sources are anywhere in California where the fruit will grow.

Bruce Rector would amend that sentence to read, “. . . anywhere where premium, high-quality grapes will grow,” because as chief wine maker for this family-owned winery, he is proud of the fact that the “PR,” as it’s called by some, is a multi-award-winning wine and one that is consistent enough from bottling to bottling to be one of the state’s fastest-growing brands.

So fast that its sales have increased nearly sevenfold in the past five years from 380,000 cases in 1985 to 2.6 million cases in 1989. Along the way, the PR line created the so-called pop-premium category of wines. (Industry insiders call these wines the fighting varietals.)

The Proprietor’s Reserve wines are little more than premium varietals made from coastal-grown grapes and blended so the price can be kept down. Thus the most expensive white wine grape in the state, Chardonnay, can be made into a wine that sells for $3.99--though it usually is not more than 75% or 80% Chardonnay with the remainder Chenin Blanc or other white varieties.

Of course, this is not “great wine.” It comes about as close to Montrachet as a Yugo does to a Rolls, but the aroma and taste components for this wine typically are close enough to Chardonnay that when the wine is chilled to a fair-thee-well (as happens in most restaurants), it’s fine to sip or for the dinner table.

Though Glen Ellen produces more than two million cases of this wine, a smaller line of wine made here, called Benziger of Glen Ellen, is at the upper echelon of California wine making, though not well known. Most of what appears under the Benziger name is stylishly made and striking, a strong contender for best wine in the state.

Yet it’s the Proprietor’s Reserve wines that are by far better known and, contrary to its opponents’ wrath, these wines have benefitted all wine makers by helping to remove consumers’ fears from varietal wines, encouraging jug wine drinkers to trade up to a better beverage without leaping from $6.99 for a half gallon to $18 a bottle. PR represents a modest but well-made wine at an intermediate price.

The line was developed in the early 1980s by the late Bruno Benziger, a former spirits importer and marketer from New York.

Benziger sold his business in 1979 and told his wife and seven children that he was retiring to a hillside retreat off London Ranch Road in Glen Ellen, a few hundred yards below where Jack London wrote novels. The family moved in more than a decade ago.

But Benziger couldn’t stay idle, not with some of the finest wine grapes in Sonoma County growing on his sloping 85-acre property on the lower foothills of Sonoma Mountain.

The first Proprietor’s Reserve wines were produced in 1982, with Benziger’s stated goal of making a Chardonnay that was affordable. Initial response was good, and by 1985 demand was so high that the tiny winery was too small to produce all it needed.

So 90% of what was bottled in 1985 was wine bought in bulk from other wineries and blended by Bruce Rector, who then spent most of his time at Delicato Winery in Manteca, where Glen Ellen leased wine-making space.

In the next year, as others entered the $5 Chardonnay fray eager to duplicate Benziger’s success, the bulk wine market began to dry up. So Benziger moved quickly into the grape-buying business. He had grapes trucked to various locations, crushed and made into wine. Then Rector blended the lots to make the final wines.

Benziger even signed special planting and grafting contracts with growers to plant certain varieties just for Glen Ellen, and he agreed to buy the grapes over many years.

By 1987 the market for Glen Ellen PR wines was hot: the winery was already at 1.6 million cases and wine was being made at different locations around the state, requiring more work than Rector alone could handle.

So Bob Goyette was hired as wine maker for the red wines that were made at the Martini & Prati Winery in Sonoma County; Cal Dennison worked at Delicato with Rector, who was spending more and more time in Glen Ellen. Charlie Tsegeletos was hired as the roving wine maker, traveling between Delicato and Glen Ellen and even to Charles Krug in the Napa Valley, where some wine was being made for Glen Ellen.

Meanwhile, Benziger’s widow, Helen, and their children became involved in all aspects of the business. Helen is director of hospitality. Mike Benziger, 38, is managing general partner; Bob Benziger, 37, is national sales manager; Joe Benziger, 35, is cellar master; Jerry Benziger, 33, of White Plains, N.Y., is East Coast sales manager; Patsy Benziger Wallace, 31, supports the hospitality and public relations efforts, and her husband, Tim Wallace, is head of marketing; Chris Benziger, 26, is marketing director for the Benziger of Glen Ellen premium line of wines, and Kathy Benziger, works part-time at the winery in public relations.

Family members Helen, Mike, Bob, Joe and Jerry as well as Tim Wallace, Rector and Mark Stornetta (chief financial officer) all are 10% owners of the property; additional family members are eligible for shares.

Benziger died of heart failure last July. By then, however, the future of the winery was well in Mike’s hands.

Mike is credited with being the driving force behind the move away from the Glen Ellen name to the Benziger name for the premium line of wines.

“The Benziger line is made up of wines that are estate bottled as well as wines that are all from Sonoma County,” said Mike. “And at one point (about 1987), the Glen Ellen brand was losing its identity, so we decided to use Benziger.” The Benziger wines cost between $11 and $20 a bottle.

In addition, there is a line called the Imagery Series that sell for between $14 and $17 a bottle; these are wines with vineyard designations and have specially designed labels.

To make matters more confusing, the winery also makes another pop-premium line of wines, under the M. G. Vallejo label. The wines are different from the Glen Ellen line but priced about the same.

Rector is the wine-making force behind these projects. Each requires attention to much detail, especially to keeping the various wines separate. (Glen Ellen buys grapes from some 240 growers statewide; only a small percentage of it comes from the hot central San Joaquin Valley.)

Rector says that of the 2.6 million cases of wine made last year, 90% was for the Proprietor’s Reserve program and 9% for the M. G. Vallejo. The Benziger line is about 25,000 cases and includes Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot, Fume Blanc, Semillon and even a 600-case lot of Muscat.

Many of the wines represent some of the best examples of wine making in the state. For example, the 1986 Benziger Cabernet ($17) is a wonderfully deep, complex wine of enormous potential. There is a rich black cherry spice and red currant lilt to the fruit, a masterful effort.

About two years ago, Rector said, he began to get the feeling that in some quarters people were bad mouthing the PR line, suggesting that the wines were made from the dreaded hot-region fruit of the San Joaquin Valley, which generally makes lower-quality wine.

One reason for such rumors, unquestionably, was that Glen Ellen was then leasing space at Delicato, which is located in the San Joaquin Valley, and people simply assumed Benziger chose Delicato because it was near the source of his grapes.

Whatever the reason, Rector was bothered by the thought, so he set out to show what the component parts of Glen Ellen Chardonnay are all about. He kept separate small amounts of Chardonnay from the seven major areas of the state from which he gets fruit. These seven areas account for about 97% of the Chardonnay Glen Ellen buys.

I tasted these samples the other day and found different fruit components from each of the regions--Santa Maria, Sonoma, Napa, Monterey, Clarksburg, Paso Robles and Mendocino.

“We call it farming for flavor,” Rector said. He said he has packed up some of the seven-bottle sets into boxes and sent them to the various growers they deal with, “so they can see the flavors we are getting from their region and other regions.”

The idea is not to get the Clarksburg growers to try to grow their vines so as to mimic the fruit character of Napa, he said, but “just to get more of what they usually give us.” He said that blending the various elements creates a complexity that Glen Ellen aims at.

Proprietor’s Reserve wines are all vintage-dated (except in California, where the Chardonnay is nonvintage). Yet these wines change from bottling to bottling as the year goes along.

“We put our best foot forward on the first blend,” said Rector, indicating that soon after a new vintage is released, the consumer may get a slightly better wine than later in the year.

However, Rector says he guards against inconsistency by bottling the wines based on how they develop at the winery. Thus an earlier-maturing lot of wine may be bottled before one that is backward and needs time in the vat.

Wine of the Week: 1988 Raymond Sauvignon Blanc ($9.25)--Family-owned Raymond has always made a tasty Sauvignon Blanc, but this striking wine is a leap forward. It impresses most by increments, not like a baseball bat to the side of the head. The aroma is delicate, like melons and lime, not at all grassy. The lush fruit in the mouth is sweet but not with sugar; it is the delicate sweetness of mature fruit touched with a trace of oak.