Running a small wine business speaks to the romantic side of any winemaker’s ambition. Nobody aims to become a cog in a corporate operation, spinning the gerbil wheel of paperwork, committee meetings and goals set by bean counters.
The aim instead is to express a personal vision through your own independent brand, farming according to your standards, making the wines you want to make, doing things your way.
Many of the most interesting and exciting American wines come from exactly these sorts of small businesses, run by visionary founders who had the courage and skills to do something that diverged from the mainstream.
And yet, for even some of the most successful such winemakers, the journey can be riddled with hazards. Financial pitfalls abound as independence might come at the cost of avoiding meddlesome but wealthy investors. Climate change has made each vintage a potential disaster, with once rare calamities like spring frosts, drought, hail and wildfires becoming an annual worry.
Growth is necessary to achieve profitability, and yet it, too, creates problems, increasing the mundane administrative work that comes with a growing staff, keeping on top of sales and distribution and myriad other tasks that get in the way of doing what you love to do. And if you hope to have a family life, that’s one more piece to juggle.
Add in the current wine economy: decreasing sales, sagging consumption and public health warnings, and you’ve got trouble no matter how popular or critically acclaimed your brand might be.
In Sonoma County, responding to exactly this situation, five independent winemakers have merged into a sort of collective in which ownership of six brands is shared but each brand will maintain its integrity with the founders retaining operative control.
The winemakers will share resources and expertise, collaborate on unlovable chores like paperwork and other administrative tasks, and aim to achieve greater efficiency and economies of scale by operating as a larger unit.
The collective includes Martha Stoumen of Martha Stoumen Wines, Noah and Kelly Dorrance of Reeve Wines and BloodRoot Wines, Sam Bilbro of Idlewild Wines and David Drummond of Overshine and Comunità. Mr. Drummond, a former chief legal officer for Alphabet, the parent company of Google, will be the founding partner and primary investor in what is now called the Overshine Collective.
More typically, when small brands reach certain difficult points, the founders sell their brand to a corporation. The founder may stay with a brand for a transition period, but more often things end unhappily, though there certainly are exceptions.
In the case of Overshine, each partner has shares in the overall company, which owns all the brands.
“Most wineries grow and then slowly fade away,” Mr. Bilbro said. “This is our chance to dream up something different, with a chance to retain a piece of something we started and go into the future. It’s antithetical to a corporate takeover.”
For Mr. Drummond, a wine lover who did not get into the business until 2018, when he bought a vineyard in the Russian River Valley, the collective gives him an opportunity to do something ambitious with what he sees as a group of like-minded entrepreneurs.
“Artisans being absorbed by a conglomerate, that takes away the magic,” he said. “What about more of a partnership and collective, with the benefits of scale, collaboration and what that means for costs? What you want is for folks to continue to be entrepreneurial while maintaining the individual integrity of the brands, which makes them what they are.”
Aside from assembling a group of wine producers compatible to his own tastes — lower-alcohol, higher-acid wines made with grape varieties often outside the California mainstream — Mr. Drummond said he saw this as a good investment opportunity, despite the currently dismal outlook for wine.
“In most investment categories, when doom and gloom prevail, and you think it’s a market that’s not going away, that’s the time,” he said. “Wine is an enduring thing. It brings people together, and it fosters community connection, something we really need these days.”
Ms. Stoumen, who makes fresh, lively wines from lesser-known Mediterranean varieties grown in Northern California, said she had been considering for some time how best to manage the pressures she was feeling with her business, particularly after becoming a mother in 2019 followed by the burdens imposed by the Covid pandemic and the Northern California wildfires.
“How do I make this business sustainable financially and supportive of a personal life,” she said. “There’s only so long you can be grinding constantly.”
Mr. Bilbro, a friend of Ms. Stoumen’s, had gotten to a point in 2024 where he felt he no longer had the resources to continue growing Idlewild, which specializes in wine made from northwestern Italian grapes like barbera, dolcetto, freisa and arneis.
“A small, self-funded Piemontese brand didn’t make any sense, but it worked,” he said. “I got to the point where I thought it couldn’t go further, but I was interested in the next plateau.”
Last year he sold Idlewild to Mr. Drummond, an arrangement in which Mr. Bilbro became the managing partner for all three of Mr. Drummond’s brands, Idlewild, Overshine and Comunità. Even so, he said, it didn’t feel like the right size or fit. Both he and Mr. Drummond wanted the more collaborative feel of a collective.
Ms. Stoumen, who had pondered whether to bring in an investor, discussed her situation with Mr. Bilbro, who was enthusiastic about his own experience with Mr. Drummond. In fact, Mr. Bilbro told her, they had been talking about other small brands they admired. Slowly the idea for a collective was born.
“This really spoke to my craving partnership and not wanting to hold up the globe on my shoulders,” Ms. Stoumen said. “I always found ways to thread the needle, but I was a little worn out and feeling it.”
Also joining are the Dorrances, a husband-and-wife team with two labels, Reeve, which makes single-vineyard pinot noirs, chardonnays, sangioveses and vermentinos, and BloodRoot, which specializes in lower-priced Sonoma pinot noirs that sell for around $25 a bottle.
Unlike much of the California wine industry, Mr. Dorrance said, they have prospered over the last couple of years, but they needed more resources in order to grow. Like Ms. Stoumen, they’ve never had their own winemaking facility.
“We are ambitious and entrepreneurial,” he said. “We’ve wanted to have our own winery and joining forces with Overshine will give us the underpinning to be able to grow. Having our own space together, it’s a goal for the future.”
As the partners discussed how a collective would operate, they went over what they felt their strengths and weaknesses were.
“Martha is head-and-shoulders better at company culture and organization,” Mr. Bilbro said. “I’m, ‘Here’s the to-do list,’ and Noah and Kelly are branding and hospitality superstars.”
In one collaborative example, Ms. Stoumen is for the first time opening a tasting room, in Healdsburg, Calif. She says she has very little experience with hospitality.
“While I’ll ultimately be in charge of the look and feel of the place since it should feel like the embodiment of my wines,” she said, “I will be leaning on Noah and Kelly’s expertise as well as Sam’s in terms of how best to operate.”
Mr. Dorrance offered another example: Martha Stoumen Wines, Reeve and BloodRoot have the same distributor in the Northeast. The collective would allow them to collaborate on bringing the distributor out to Northern California to visit their operations, which helps the distributor to sell their wines. It would have been too expensive to do that individually.
“A lean mom-and-pop versus a large conglomerate, there’s got to be something in the middle that delivers a lot of magic,” Ms. Dorrance said.
All the partners feel strongly about working to increase racial and economic diversity in the wine business and to expand opportunities for women. They say that will be an important component of Overshine Collective.
“The right thing to do from a business perspective is to appeal to all kinds of people and backgrounds,” Mr. Drummond said. “Wine has been exclusive, hasn’t reached out to all demographic groups, and that’s a mistake.”
The partners all said that consumers will not see any difference in the wines or the branding, which Mr. Drummond said was the point.
“The brands will stay strong,” he said. “It’s a coming together in service of making the brands more sustainable.”
If all goes well, new members may be added and new facilities created. But for now, the overall feeling seems to be of relief.
“Being with like-minded people, pooling together, it feels more stable,” Mr. Dorrance said. “Kelly and I will continue to do what we’ve been doing for the rest of our lives, it’s a feeling of securing.”
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Eric Asimov, the chief wine critic of The Times since 2004, has been writing about wine, food and restaurants for more than 30 years.
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