The following chapter for Santa Barbara County’s first business vineyard of the fashionable period is prepared for a brand new creator, as Santa Barbara Vineyard was listed on the market this week.
The $9.25 million asking value consists of the model, its intensive stock, the Funk Zone tasting room lease, and the dear trademark. No amenities, vineyards, or different actual property holdings are listed. However the household of founder Pierre Lafond, who died in April 2022 at age 92, is ready to barter for added belongings, together with grape/manufacturing contracts and doubtlessly even land.
“There’s nothing left off the desk at this level,” mentioned Lafond’s granddaughter Sara Deinhard, who’s the chief vp of the household corporations and particularly director of operations for Wendy Foster Inc.
The sale doesn’t embody every other Lafond-related enterprise, because the household will proceed to run Lafond Vineyard & Vineyards, which simply accomplished building of a brand-new facility on Santa Rosa Highway close to Buellton; the six boutique outfitters beneath the Wendy Foster model; and the Pierre Lafond Market & Deli on San Ysidro Highway in Montecito.
“The sale has to do with our household’s need to give attention to the long run and resolve what was doable for us as a household unit,” mentioned Deinhard, who’s labored for the household companies since 2008. A lot of her household can also be intimately concerned within the day-to-day, together with her mother, sister, and uncle. “[Pierre] had this angle of ‘After I’m gone, I’m gone, and no matter will probably be will probably be,’” she defined of his needs for the corporate. “He left it to us to resolve.”
They consider that now’s an opportune time for the sale. “We all know how properly the enterprise is doing, and we wish to see that transfer ahead,” mentioned Deinhard. “It’s very sizable and worthwhile, and there’s such potential progress. With every thing else in our portfolio, we don’t have the bandwidth to do this ourselves at the moment.”
The household hopes the sale will preserve alive the legacy of Lafond, who was a visionary of Santa Barbara’s wine-growing potential but in addition of the Funk Zone, the place he based mostly the vineyard in 1964, lengthy earlier than the waterfront warehouse neighborhood obtained its title.
“We now have a lot pleasure in Pierre and every thing he constructed, particularly Santa Barbara Vineyard, which has an enormous attachment to our household,” mentioned Deinhard. “We’re able to cross it on to hopefully somebody that’s keen to do it justice, to do it in the best way that Pierre would have.”
events can contact Robert Rauchhaus at rrauchhaus@radiusgroup.com or (805) 705-8512.
