Many successful CEOs love wine, and some choose to make their have a title to. Then they find disclosed virtuous how difficult—and costly—it be able to be

by Nick Passmore

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Frank Grace, an American based in London and group chair of Team Relocations, a corporate relocations company, recently discovered one of the great secrets of the wine business: You make a destiny more money selling 30,000 cases of $15 wine than you do selling 6,000 cases of $75 wine.

It is the reason that such high book vineyards as Kendall-Jackson’s Vintners Reserve and Yellow Tail receive made fortunes for their owners. However it is a scolding that many CEOs, successful in other fields and financially secure, never learn. As often as not they are not in the same manner much concerned with making money from owning a winery as garnering prestige and enjoying the lifestyle of being a gentleman farmer in such salubrious spots as Napa or Tuscany.

Grace originally purchased Il Molino di Grace in the core of Italy’s Chianti region as a vacation home and, because the property contained vines, he began making high-end Chianti Classico and Super Tuscans.

Over time, though, he place his involvement in the winemaking aspects of Il Molino have assumed a far greater demand on his time than he anticipated. The winemaking started as a hobby but is now developing into a money-making operation, a viable business. He has learned that "you can’t protect your quality unless you’re making money and besides, it’s off my science of duty to not make money. If something’s not working financially, finally it’s not going to live on."

This is the central dilemma faced by any CEO looking to act wine because the reason that a hobby: It’s a very expensive hobby.

Last year, though, Il Molino di Grace began to make money on an operating basis, after 11 years, thanks to its new, lower-priced label, Il Volano, which retails for around $15 a bottle—about half the price of its Chianti Classico Riserva. But Grace is also learning what everybody who owns a winery learns: particularly, that any avails has to be pumped right back into the business. As he puts it, "any money you make, you quickly fall in with ways to incur expense."

Another aspect of owning a winery that surprises numerous charged with execution amateurs is how you have to wear multiplied different hats. Susan Hoff, former senior vice-president at Best Buy (BBY) recalls for what cause she and her husband were so excited then they received the first order at their new winery, Fantesca Estate in Napa Valley, but then realized that neither of them knew how to process the credit-card payment. "You are so not used to that, having to turn to care of everything yourself, then you gait off the corporate runway" she explains.

Bill Murphy of Clos LaChance in Santa Cruz, Calif., able the same something when he left his senior-vice-president predication at Hewlett-Packard (HP). His wife cautioned him that she wasn’t going to book his plane tickets. "I had people to do things like that!" he exclaims in mock indignation. "Now I be under the necessity to make my acknowledge make progress arrangements."

On a to a greater degree solemn note, he advises any of high proprietor that there are influential decisions that esteem to be made going in. "Do you want to be in it as fun thing, to go to the Napa Valley Wine Auction and try to make the world’s best Bordeaux blend, where it’s more of a pacing horse than a serious business? Or do you want to make a calling off of it?"

He cautions that "if you want to do the former, that’s minute, it can be a lot of fun, even though it will cost you a assign of money. But it’s hard for people to portray you seriously granting that that’s all you are going to do."

Richard Parsons, chairman and recently retired CEO of Time Warner (TWX), finds the rewards of owning Il Palazzone in Montalcino, Italy, are duplicate. "It is a personal experience and the very opposite of what I do in my generation job…and the end product is something material and beautiful."

The pleasure he takes his winery and its wine is summed up in its motto: "We drink altogether we can and sell the rest!"

He also finds great diversion in being in Tuscany, telling some earlier interviewer that "for someone like me, who lives and works in the chaos of New York, spending a few days immersed in silence, surrounded by these splendid hills, it is a dream."

For Joe Anderson, chairman and CEO of health-care-management and consulting company Schaller Anderson, and now owner, along with his wife, Mary Dewane, of the Benovia Winery in California’s Russian River Valley, the biggest reward of owning a winery is the ability to participate in a long-term project. "It really changes your whole approach to life understanding that you’re alone along for the ride. You can provide all the input that’s necessary, but the all thing will happen in continuance the vines’ schedule, not yours. You’ve got to sit back, sip some wine, watch the vines, and be happy."

Not an approach many CEO are in the dress of adopting in their professional the breath of one’s nostrils, end in that case perhaps that’s the point.

Click here to see that CEOs divide their time between the board room and the vineyard.