Two Buck Chuck still making waves – Yahoo! News
Wine making is still a very non-level process… those darn grapes only ripen once a year! That's not what this is about.
Anyway, one item jumped out in this article about a winery that sells cheap (but decent) wines through the Trader Joe's chain:
Making wine is expensive from the ground up, but Franzia owns a lot of ground — 40,000 acres is the common estimate. He won't say. His Ceres-based Bronco Wine Co. also owns the crushing and bottling plants and has its own distribution company.
Until now, another company has supplied the bottles. But Franzia is talking about building a glass container plant near his Napa Valley bottling facility.
Still in the preliminary planning stages, Franzia says the plant would reduce greenhouse gases by limiting truck deliveries and through the use of environmentally friendly technology that would cut plant emissions.
He's a vertically integrated enterprise… from grapes to bottling. Now, Franzia is moving into bottle production…. “near” his bottling facility. Maybe I'm looking for “lean” in places where it doesn't exist, but the notion of reducing environmental waste by keeping suppliers close by, as opposed to importing cheap bottles from China, seems lean in concept, even if not in name.
Franzia will probably also keep inventory low and find other waste-reducing benefits from such a production set up.
What do you think? Please scroll down (or click) to post a comment. Or please share the post with your thoughts on LinkedIn – and follow me or connect with me there.
Did you like this post? Make sure you don't miss a post or podcast — Subscribe to get notified about posts via email daily or weekly.
Check out my latest book, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation:
Doesn’t most Franzia come in a box…?! Egads! Although we live in the midst of 120 vineyards about 250 miles south of Napa (and also where about 50% of Napa winery grapes really come from…!), we occasionally buy two buck chuck. Sometimes not too bad, sometimes it gets immediately added to spagetti sauce if lucky… the product consistency is horrendous.
The sign in my local (Ann Arbor) Trader Joe’s now refers to the product as Three-buck Chuck these days. Is nothing sacred?!?
I think it’s only TWO-buck Chuck in California. I know it was three-buck Chuck in Phoenix, when I lived there. Maybe there are taxes involved wihen shipping it out of state.