California winemaker behind the iconic Two Buck Chuck dies

“When asked how Bronco Wine Company can sell wine less expensive than a bottle of water, Fred T. Franzia famously countered, ‘They’re overcharging for the water — don’t you get it?’” Bronco Wine Company wrote in a statement .

Even if you’ve never heard of Franzia himself, you know his wine. Charles Shaw, best known as Two Buck Chuck, has been a popular inexpensive wine ever since it hit the shelves at Trader Joe’s 20 years ago. In a deep dive about Two Buck Chuck, The Hustle estimated that the grocery chain sold more than 1 billion bottles between 2002 and 2018.

Franzia was no stranger to the wine industry. He came from a lineage of winemakers beginning with his great-grandfather, Giuseppe Franzia, who founded Franzia Brothers Winery in the late 1800s, decades before the company was sold to Coca-Cola. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Franzia worked in sales at the family business and later founded Bronco Wine Company in 1973 alongside his brother and cousin. (SFGATE and the San Francisco Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but operate independently of one another.)

Franzia, who vehemently criticized the pretentiousness of the wine industry, purchased Charles F. Shaw Winery for $27,000 (about $52,471.24 today) after the business filed for bankruptcy in 1995. The brand would lay dormant for nearly 10 years before Franzia updated the former elite wine company (known to sell $50 bottles) and turned it into a brand celebrated for deals as low as $1.99.

During the 1990s, Franzia also acquired other struggling wineries and later used wine labels that said “cellared and bottled” in Napa to sell wines made with grapes grown in San Joaquin Valley.

“Although federal law requires a wine carrying an appellation name, like Napa Valley, to be composed of at least 75% grapes from that region, any brands created before 1986 had been exempt,” the Chronicle wrote. “That had allowed Franzia to sell Central Valley wines with names like Napa Ridge, Napa Creek and Rutherford Vintners. (All three of those brands had been created prior to 1986, though Franzia purchased them later.)”

He was also able to offer low-priced wines by cutting bottling expenses that included replacing traditional corks with cheaper materials.

Charles Shaw, the former owner of his namesake wine, had some choice words about the outcome of his business years after it was sold to Franzia. In an interview with the Napa Valley Register, he told the outlet that he considered Two Buck Chuck to be “embarrassing and demeaning.” His frustration seemed to stem from the use of his brand name since he didn’t consider Two Buck Chuck to be a true Napa Valley wine.

“To take that and come out and have a lesser wine from another appellation, that isn’t what I started out to do, was it? And I paid a pretty big price,” Shaw told the outlet in 2003.

Despite how it was perceived by the former owner, Charles Shaw wines would go on to win accolades over the years. In 2004, the brand earned a double gold medal at the International Eastern Wine Competition for its 2002 Charles Shaw Shiraz.