Famed winery sells stake amid succession plan
One of the most famous Pinot Noir producers from California is preparing to hand over control to one of the most famous Pinot Noir producers from France. On Wednesday, Williams Selyem Winery in Healdsburg announced that the Faiveley family, of Domaine Faiveley in France’s Burgundy region, has purchased a minority stake. A price was not disclosed.
John Dyson, who has owned Williams Selyem with wife Kathe Dyson since 1998, said the motivation for selling a stake was to secure a succession plan, since he and Kathe hope to retire in a few years. He called the partnership “a culmination of many, many years of looking for the right people to succeed us.” They had many interested parties, he said, but had some specific criteria.
“What I was looking for was a family, not a corporation, not a private equity group, both of
which have done significant damage to brands of this quality in California,” Dyson said. “And preferably a family that knew something about Pinot Noir,” he added.
Few families know more about Pinot Noir than the Faiveleys, whose company is now run by its seventhgeneration steward, Erwan Faiveley. Domaine Faiveley is a large winery by Burgundy standards, and one of the few of its scale that remains familyowned. It’s known for affordable, highquality Pinot Noirs like its Mercurey Clos de Myglands, which sells for around $23 in the U.S., but also makes wines from some of the most hallowed ground in Burgundy like Echézeaux, which produces Pinot Noirs that sell for closer to $300 per bottle.
This marks Faiveley’s first investment in the United States. Other Burgundy wineries like Louis Jadot, Domaine Drouhin and MeoCamuzet have staked big claims in American wine, many of them in Oregon.
The idea, Dyson said, is that with this minority stake, both he and the Faiveleys can feel out the partnership to make sure it’s the right fit. Then, in three years, they’ll discuss a transaction in which the Faiveleys might take full control of Williams Selyem. Until then, Dyson will continue to manage the business. The full staff will remain in place, including director of winemaking Jeff Mangahas.
“We’re similar in a lot of ways,” said Mangahas of Williams Selyem and Domaine Faiveley. “Not just that we’re both familyowned, but even from a wine style perspective, we both make beautiful, terroirdriven representations of these unique pieces of land.”
Williams Selyem has a singular reputation among California Pinot Noir producers. It began in the 1970s when two friends, Burt Williams and Ed Selyem, started making some wine in a garage in the Sonoma County town of Fulton. (Williams, who died in 2019, was a printer at the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, which produced The Chronicle.)
Their garage wine developed a cultlike following, and soon it became California’s most soughtafter wine.
Although they first made Zinfandel, it was Pinot Noir — especially Pinot Noir grown at the Rochioli Vineyard on Healdsburg’s Westside Road — that really made Williams Selyem’s name. The wines could only be purchased via mailing list, which became long with interested buyers.
It took many years for Williams and Selyem to quit their day jobs and focus full time on the winery, and not long after they did that, they sold it. In 1998, John and Kathe Dyson took over the winery, which by then had moved to Westside Road near the Rochioli Vineyard. The purchase price was $9.5 million.
The Dysons were not newcomers to the wine industry. They’d founded Millbrook Winery in the 1980s, and John Dyson — a onetime deputy mayor of New York City under Rudy Giuliani — already had a distinguished career in agriculture.
Prior to purchasing Williams Selyem, the Dysons had bought a vineyard in Hollister (San Benito County) called Vista Verde. “We’d been thinking about building a winery there,” Dyson said, “but then we figured — why not just buy an existing one?” Kathe Dyson had developed a strong passion for Pinot Noir, especially those grown in Burgundy, so they set their sights on finding a Pinot Noir specialist.
“Plus, I really thought the future of California was Pinot Noir, not Cabernet,” Dyson said.
They had some competition for Williams Selyem, however. “When we started talking to Burt and Ed, a deal with Joe Montana had just fallen through,” Dyson said. According to Dyson, the football player’s business manager didn’t like the fact that Williams and Selyem had failed to keep detailed financial records of their business.
But Dyson said he understood that in the world of agriculture, deals with growers and other suppliers are often done over a handshake, not a contract. “I was familiar with rural informalities,” he said.
During their tenure so far, the Dysons have made major investments in Williams Selyem. They grew production from the 4,000case output in 1998 to about 20,00025,000 cases in a typical year. They built a stateoftheart winery and visitor center at the Westside Road property. They bought more vineyards, including a Guerneville apple orchard that they now call the Drake Estate, and the Saitone Estate, which has Zinfandel vines planted in 1895.
The Dysons own two other wineries — Millbrook in New York’s Hudson Valley and Villa Pillo in Italy’s Tuscany — with no ownership changes planned for either.