A Stock to Savor : Winemaker’s Shareholders Are In It for the Fun, not Fortune

Somewhere between the CEO’s annual report to the shareholders and lunch, a voice over the loudspeaker reassured the unconventional company gathering that all was well: “If anyone is alarmed, don’t worry--wine is on its way.”

The 1,603 guests under an enormous white tent in the rolling hills of Monterey County applauded and laughed. After all, they had been sampling wine since 11 in the morning, enjoying their perks as investors at the unofficial meeting of the publicly traded Chalone Wine Group in a field near here over the weekend.

When the Chalone Wine Group fetes the stockholders each May, about the last thing they want to know is how the stock did. So what if the stock has never paid a cash dividend in the 12 years it’s been publicly traded? Most bought into the company for what is becoming a legendary and expanding annual celebration of wine and fine food.

Anyone holding at least 100 shares of stock--which has varied in value from about $5 to $11 a share--is invited. Guests eagerly fly and drive their way to this remote part of the Salinas Valley, attired in shorts and sun dresses and hats, to sip wine, down oysters and lamb and poached salmon and coo over the tiny sculpted sorbets.

This may be the only stockholders’ meeting in the country where you are greeted upon arrival with a plastic name badge holder and an empty wine glass, embossed with the Chalone name, for your day of wine drinking. The badge, they want back at the end of the day to recycle. The wine glass is yours to keep as a souvenir.

“I personally couldn’t care less whether the stock was $1 a share or $50 a share,” said Tony Tortorice, a consultant for Coopers & Lybrand who lives in Long Beach, as he snapped a picture Saturday of parading platters of antipasto while a trumpet fanfare played over the loudspeakers. “I’m never going to sell it. I’m just going to come to this party and drink wine.”

In fact, the company holds a more serious annual meeting at their company headquarters in Napa to discuss the prospects of its wineries. The company operates four high-end boutique California wineries: the Acacia Winery in Napa Valley, Carmenet Vineyard in Sonoma, the Edna Valley Vineyard in San Luis Obispo and the Chalone Vineyard--producer of a highly respected Chardonnay--which was the site of the Saturday festivities. Canoe Ridge Vineyard in Washington state is also part of the Chalone group.

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Because the French company, Domaine Barons de Rothschild, owns 40% percent of Chalone stock, the Chalone Wine Group also has an interest in the management of the famed Chateau Lafite-Rothschild and partial ownership of wineries in France, Chile and Portugal.

The annual report Saturday was a light affair. It lasted about 45 minutes and included a detailed statement of how much more food they were about to consume compared to last year’s event.

“Oysters are up 17%,” said chief financial officer Bill Hamilton, wearing a print shirt and white shorts. “We have a couple of new issues--we have 9,463 spears of asparagus.”

And the stock? It’s up to 10 3/4--a number that was hardly mentioned.

“The price was bouncing around between 7 and 8 all last year,” said Hamilton later. “The bottom line is if we told people the stock was 5, they’d say, ‘OK, pass the food.’ ”

Most of Chalone’s shareholders are well-heeled, safely invested professionals who can afford a frivolous stock or two. “Even our broker was laughing,” said 33-year-old John Greer, owner of a San Diego based management consulting firm and interactive media development company. “He said, ‘We’re putting this in the having-fun category.’ ”

Stock also entitles shareholders to special wine offerings, discounts up to 25% on the wine purchased from the company, and special VIP winery tours. Even so, chief financial officer Hamilton admits that you could probably find equal discounts through wine discounters. Belonging to the company is really just about that--belonging to a group of people who manufacture a product with an elegant mystique.

“There was a time when we considered having all our stockholders be wine club members,” said W. Philip Woodward, the CEO. “They said, ‘No way, we want to be owners.’ There are not many opportunities for wine lovers to own a winery and not spend a lot of money. So we come along and offer them a chance to be an owner of a winery. And here they own a little bit of a lot of wineries.”

Tortorice’s wife, Kay, a high school librarian, echoed the company’s chief. “It is fun to have friends over and drag out a bottle of Chalone wine and say, ‘This is the family winery,’ ” she said.

For Greer and his wife, Christine--the two met while tasting wine in Santa Barbara--the annual gathering here is a family affair. They came to the festivities with her brother, a pharmacist from San Francisco, and her father, Hal Brunson of Coronado, a wine aficionado who owned stock before they did, and his wife.

Stockholders come from all over the country, sometimes combining the day’s events with a vacation to Big Sur or Carmel. “This year, we decided to find someone to watch the kids and fly out for lunch,” said Mark Ambrose from Muskegon, Mich.

They love wine, know something about it, and range from collectors with 200 bottles in a converted closet to people with 1000 bottles stored in a proper cellar.

“There are some high-end wine people here,” said Hamilton, “but I’d say 80% of the people, if you sat them down and gave them a test, they’d probably be middle of the road in their wine knowledge.”

And they spent Saturday drinking in more knowledge. Outside the big tent where people sat for lunch were little tents where the individual wineries poured taste after taste--the exquisite numbered Chalone Vineyard reserve Chardonnay over here, two Acacia whites over there.

The company provides a fleet of buses to carry guests to and from their hotels--a nice touch when you’ve been drinking wine in the sun all afternoon. John and Christine Greer drove in their own car, since her four-month pregnancy has sidelined her wine-tasting.

But she’s accomplished enough at it that she can enjoy wine-tasting it from a sniff or two. She takes a glass in hand and gives it a swirl.

“I can’t drink,” she said, “but I can smell.”