In Wine, Luxury and Ambition Are Being Redefined
Bottom lines at companies like Lawrence Wine Estates show that baller bottles can only get you so far, without a vision for authentic sustainability
Luxury, and what it means, is evolving.
1,000 years ago, luxury was overt and codified by sumptuary complex sumptuary laws. Spices like pepper were so rare, and considered so valuable, they didn’t just symbolize money and purchasing power, they functioned as currency.
100 years ago, luxury was understood and expressed through finely wrought objects comprised of rare and valuable ingredients, often produced by now-iconic brands (Louis Vuitton, Cartier). Luxury also signified a certain lifestyle: it meant indoor plumbing, air travel.
Today, luxury can still mean bling: yachts, space travel, multiple mansions. But it also often boils down to time, authenticity, sustainable production values, and increasingly, experiences over objects.
Our definition of premium wine has dovetailed with our sense of what luxury means. At relatively new, but ambitious wine companies like Lawrence Wine Estates, that has proven to be a mixed blessing. But there are signs of a brighter future ahead for Lawrence Wine Estates (and perhaps all of us, if luxury also encompasses preservation, sustainability, and quality).
“We arrived in this part of the industry in a difficult time,” says Lawrence Wine Estates CEO Carlton McCoy, Jr., . “And we have overcome many hurdles, which come with a need to evolve quickly. As an enterprise we have been blessed to see small growth over the past few years.”
Indeed, amid cratering wine consumption (it’s currently at its lowest level since 1961 across the world) and withering sales (down about 6% in the U.S. alone), flatlining, never mind increasing sales, is a victory.
“It’s not where we want to be but I am very proud of the work that my team has done to hold the line or show growth,” McCoy says. “Wineries have to work twice as hard to get results that would not be acceptable five years ago.”
Lawrence Wine Estates’ Foundational Principles
Lawrence Wine Estates was launched in 2018 when Gaylor Lawrence Jr. purchased Heitz Cellar. The winery was founded in 1961, when Napa had fewer than a dozen wineries. It quickly rose to prominence, helping to define a new, exciting, and resoundingly successful era in Napa wine.
Lawrence hired master sommelier Carlton McCoy Jr. to lead Heitz and Lawrence Wine Estates, and the pair embarked on a wine and vineyard-purchasing spree.
But not just any wineries and vineyards: only storied ones in prime neighborhoods with organic or biodynamic farming in place, or transition.
Their current estates—Burgess, Heitz Cellar, Ink Grade, Haynes Vineyard, Stony Hill, Trailside Vineyard—are all in Napa, but they also purchased a chateau in Bordeaux and launched the import company Demeine Estates.
Clearly, Lawrence and McCoy were serious wine people, committed to building a new kind of wine company, with luxury and sustainability as foundational principles. And they still are.
“We are committed to focusing on estates we have to make the greatest wines from each terroir,” McCoy says. “It’s a very fulfilling journey for us. We have only acquired wineries or vineyards that fit into the profile of wine and philosophies that we are interested in.”
But neither McCoy nor Lawrence had experience in the wine growing and production business per se. (McCoy was a highly regarded Master Sommelier, who led a renowned wine program at The Little Nell is Aspen, Co., among others. Lawrence was an Arkansas agriculture tycoon).
Everything seemed to be going well for the first years thanks to their carefully laid plans and high-level strategic thinking, when consumption broadly fell off a cliff following the pandemic, cracks began to emerge.
