by Kent Jennings Brockwell
Staff Writer
Bottling propane and bottling fine wine might sound like two totally different business operations but local businessman Charles Sawyer seems to have made the transition from gas to vino just fine.
Sawyer, the former owner of Sawyer Gas, a large propane gas business in Jacksonville from 1960 to 1991, is now the owner and namesake behind Sawyer Cellars in California. Sawyer spoke at the Rotary Club of Jacksonville’s luncheon Monday about his wine-making venture.
“I have been asked often if it was difficult going from the propane business to the wine business,” Sawyer said. “Well, I have been putting liquid into bottles for a long time so I couldn’t see the difference.”
After selling his Jacksonville gas and air conditioning businesses in 1991, Sawyer purchased a 40-acre vineyard in Napa Valley where he began working in what he calls “heaven on earth” as a farmer. In his first years of vineyard ownership, Sawyer sold his annual harvest of grapes to other cellars in the area but, in 1999, Sawyer Cellars was born and he now produces 4,200 cases each year.
Sawyer Cellars is a smaller label but Sawyer said he likes being the little cellar in the big valley. Even with dozens of huge cellars and vineyards flanking Sawyer’s operation up and down the valley, he said competition in Napa is virtually nonexistent.
“None of us look at each other as competitors because none of us are making the same thing,” he said. “You can go to my next door neighbor and have a totally different tasting wine than ours.”
Sawyer said the real competition comes from the wine drinker. Due to the thousands of different variations when it comes to wine, Sawyer said it really comes down to palate matching.
“Those with palates that enjoy your wine will buy it,” he said. “They might not like mine and might like my next door neighbor’s better. Most of the cellars out there are quite successful and competition is really not a problem. We are all really good friends. It is very cordial.”
He said the wine business, unlike the propane business, is more about quality and less about widespread availability.
“When you are selling a product that every body is familiar with (like propane), business is business,” he said. “In the wine business, you make the best wine that you can but there is hardly anyway to market it. People have to find out about it.”
Luckily for Sawyer, people have found out about his wines. So have the big wine magazines. On a 100-point scale, Sawyer’s wines consistently score in the 90s when reviewed by expert wine tasters.
“We were lucky enough to get some early-on nice ratings and started being found,” he said. “The great thing about the wine business is that what drives us is the quality. It is not about seeing who can make it the most inexpensively, it is all about quality.”
Though he would like to grow to a 7,000-case per year business, Sawyer isn’t pushing the idea too hard. Maintaining his level of quality is a main reason Sawyer wants to keep his cellar on the small side. By remaining small, he said, Sawyer Cellars is able to continue doing quality assurance things like hand checking each bunch of grapes before they go into the crusher.
But for right now, he is just happy people are enjoying his wines and hopes they will continue doing so because as Sawyer says, “If two glasses a day is good for you, think what a whole bottle will do.”