San Francisco Chronicle (Sunday)
Former Google exec takes spirit of innovation to Wine Country
David Drummond lays ambitious plans of inclusion after buying two celebrated Sonoma wineries
A former top Google executive unveiled his plans for an ambitious, multifaceted new wine company in Healdsburg recently.
David Drummond, the longtime chief legal officer of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced that he had acquired Idlewild Wines, a highly regarded producer of Italian-style wines. Drummond has also purchased Armida Winery, a legacy winery and tasting room on Healdsburg’s Westside Road. These investments come six years after Drummond bought a 550-acre Russian River Valley vineyard called Las Cimas, where he’s planted dozens of experimental grape varieties and which will be the source for an additional new wine brand called Comunità.
All of these ventures will now be incorporated under a single company called Overshine Wine Co. Idlewild founder Sam Bilbro is the managing partner, overseeing the Overshine, Idlewild and Comunità brands. Financial terms for the deals were not disclosed.
This frenzied clip of acquisition activity is something more commonly seen in the tech world, Drummond’s first industry, than in the sphere of Sonoma County wine. Drummond — once among the tech industry’s highest ranking Black executives, whom Google paid at least $258 million between 2006 and 2020, according to the New York Times — said he’s motivated by a mission to make wine feel more welcoming to people who might feel intimidated by it, especially people of color like himself.
“I come from a much bigger industry,” said Drummond, 61. “But wine punches above its weight culturally. It’s part of the good life. We’re trying to make that element of the good life accessible to everybody.”
Drummond’s retirement from Google in 2020 drew considerable scrutiny. He was a high-profile member of the company’s executive team, serving as its original general counsel and leading its two investment divisions. But a New York Times investigation in 2018 detailing accusations of misconduct by Google executives included allegations against Drummond. A former colleague, Jennifer Blakely, told the Times that she and Drummond had an extramarital affair while she worked in Google’s legal department, that they had a son together and that after the relationship was disclosed to human resources, she was transferred to a different department.
Drummond declined to comment on the record to the Chronicle about Blakeley’s claims.
By the time Drummond left Google, he had already purchased the vineyard that would become Las Cimas and was living in Healdsburg part time. He originally got to know the small Wine Country town through his brother, Ray Drummond, a jazz musician who performed at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. Though he’d once drunk mostly Napa Cabernet, Drummond said he’d begun nursing an interest in “New California” winemakers, as former Chronicle wine editor Jon Bonné dubbed the cohort of producers working with nontraditional grapes and fresher, lighter styles.
One day, he stopped into the Idlewild tasting room in downtown Healdsburg and started talking to Bilbro, a New California poster child who works exclusively with grapes from Piedmont, the mountainous region in northern Italy. He brought Bilbro out to the vineyard he’d purchased, hidden on a hilly expanse off of Westside Road.
At the time, Drummond had been having trouble selling the Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel grapes that grew at his vineyard. The first harvest season he owned the site, 2019, marked a major grape glut in California, and growers throughout the state were finding themselves with excess crop. “That ’19 harvest really informed a lot of my thinking,” he said.
Under Bilbro’s guidance, Drummond decided to replant most of the vineyard with the sorts of grape varieties that Bilbro and his winemaker peers would be excited to make. Out came the Cab and Zin; in went obscure Piedmontese varieties like Timorasso, Erbaluce, Grignolino and Ruché, plus vogueish French grapes like Trousseau, Aligoté, Gamay and Mondeuse.
In all, there are now 46 distinct varieties planted at the vineyard, which Drummond initially called Rancho Coda and renamed as Las Cimas last year. A cadre of New California wineries including Ryme, Arnot-Roberts, Jolie-Laide and Pax buy its fruit.
“We went from not being able to sell grapes to selling out with a mailing list,” Drummond said. But he soon realized that being a grape grower — especially of varieties that can’t command the high prices of Pinot Noir and Cabernet — was a precarious financial proposition. He decided to make some of his own wine, too.
In 2023, in need of a facility to do so, he bought Armida, a 30year-old, family-run winery with a devoted, 1,500-member wine club. (Armida is perhaps best known for PoiZin, a Zinfandel with a macabre-looking label featuring a skull and crossbones.) For a year, Drummond left Armida unchanged, showing up to wine club events and introducing himself as the new owner. “The idea that we were going to rebrand this place wasn’t obvious at first,” he said. But he and Bilbro ended up giving it a major makeover, modeling the tasting room after a ’70s music lounge and replacing the Armida signage with the new name: Overshine, an allusion to a song by the hip-hop group Onyx.
“It’s meant to feel aspirational,” said Drummond. “Keep your shine on.”
The three wine brands will each have a distinct identity. Overshine is “classic California,” Drummond said, meant to feel approachable to wine novices. The lineup ($25-$75) includes 2023 Russian River Valley Sauvignon Blanc, 2022 Gap’s Crown Vineyard Pinot Noir and 2022 Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel. (Some of the inaugural Overshine release wines were fermented before the acquisition, then blended and bottled by Bilbro.)
The wines of the Comunità label ($35-$85) are all sourced from Las Cimas, all interpretations of cuvees from Friuli, the northern Italian region bordering Austria and Slovenia. The 2022 Monte Regio — an Italian translation of Drummond’s hometown, Monterey — blends the aromatic white grapes Riesling, Ribolla Gialla, Tocai Friulano and Malvasia. Comunità will also release the Friulian reds Refosco and Schioppetino, plus another blend incorporating the white grape Kerner.
At first, it looked as if Bilbro was simply going to guide Drummond through these projects as a winemaker and business consultant, but then Drummond offered to buy Idlewild, which Bilbro founded in 2012. The transaction closed in February, and though Bilbro no longer owns the winery, he does “have an equity package,” he said.
“I’m thrilled to be able to say that Idlewild’s a Black-owned business now,” said Bilbro, 41. “I get to have hard conversations with legitimacy behind it in a way that I never could have done on my own.” Going forward, the Comunità wines will be served at the Idlewild tasting room.
Now that he’s gone public with Overshine and released his own wines for the first time, Drummond said he hopes to get to work on his larger goal: to help diversify wine’s customer base. Just 11% of wine drinkers are Black as of 2023, according to the BMO Wine Market Report, representing a potentially huge opportunity for an industry that’s struggling to attract new consumers.
“There are a lot of gatekeepers in wine,” Drummond said. “There’s a feeling that if you don’t look a certain way, this isn’t for you.” He and Bilbro hope to communicate a different message at Overshine, partly with a no-appointment-necessary policy and a tasting room soundtrack that’s, as Bilbro put it, “less Buffett, more D’Angelo.”
In the long term, he wants to create a tech-inspired incubator program for people from underrepresented backgrounds who want to start their own wine businesses. “I would love for that to be our impact,” he said.
Overshine Wine Co. Tastings $35. Open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. 2201 Westside Road, Healdsburg. 707433-2222 or overshinewines.com
Idlewild Wines and Comunità. Tastings $30. Open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday. 132 Plaza St., Healdsburg. 707-385-9410 or idlewildwines.com