Priced at a mere $1.99 to $3.79 per bottle, this magical ether is cheaper than most bottled water. It’s been knighted as the “darling of the discount wine world” by critics, and boasts a cult following among price-minded consumers.
For Trader Joe’s, the wine is also a gold mine.
The grocery chain has sold 1B+ bottles of Two Buck Chuck since debuting the beverage in 2002. Today, some locations sell as many as 6k bottles/day — or ~16% of the average store’s daily sales.
How is a supposedly decent wine sold at such a low price point? Where does it come from? And how did it rise to prominence?
This is the tale of one wine brand, two vintners, and the unlikely democratization of a historically snobby industry. (...)
The box wine baron
Fred Franzia did not share Shaw’s air d’élégance.
He was unrefined and heavyset, with a body shape the New Yorker likened to a “gourmet marshmallow.” Reclusive and gruff, he shied away from public appearances. He referred to winemakers as “bozos” and didn’t care for France.
In 1973, Franzia launched his own wine company, Bronco Wine Co.
In a rickety wood-paneled trailer held together with duct tape, he set out to produce extremely cheap, high-quality “super-value” wines — wines that rejected the pretentiousness of Napa Valley.
Initially, Bronco operated as a wholesaler, buying bulk wine and selling it to larger wineries at a profit.
But soon, Franzia saw an opportunity to produce his own cheap wines — wines, as he later put it, that “yuppies would feel comfortable drinking.”
Through a legal loophole, he could say his wines were “Cellared and Bottled in Napa” if the brand was founded prior to 1986. So, he developed a strategy of buying out distressed wineries with distinguished-sounding names — Napa Ridge, Napa Creek, Domaine Napa — and using them to sell his stock of less-desirable Central Valley wines.
On a summer day in 1995, a few years after Charles F. Shaw Winery went bust, Franzia purchased the winery’s brand, label, and name for a mere $27k.
“We buy wineries from guys from Stanford who go bankrupt,” he later boasted. “Some real dumb-asses from there.”
Unbeknownst to the real Charles Shaw, Franzia was about to transform the once-fancy wine brand into an impossibly cheap everyman’s juice.
And in the process, he’d change the wine industry forever.
