Drink Up.(Fred Franzia, owner of Bronco Wine Co.)

Not long ago, Fred Franzia celebrated the sale of the four-hundred-millionth bottle of Charles Shaw, a wine that costs $1.99 at Trader Joe's and is known by the chummy nickname Two Buck Chuck. "Take that and shove it, Napa," he said. "Four hundred million and climbing." Franzia owns forty thousand acres of vineyards, more than anyone in the country; he crushes three hundred and fifty thousand tons of grapes a year, more, he figures, than anyone but his cousin Joseph Gallo, at E. & J. Gallo Winery; and his company, Bronco, has annual revenues of more than five hundred million dollars. Franzia's objective is to sell as much wine as possible--he sells twenty million cases a year now, which makes Bronco the fourth-largest winery in the United States, and would like to reach a hundred million--and his strategy is to charge next to nothing for it. He believes that no bottle of wine should cost more than ten dollars. Jim Carter, a salesman who represents Bronco's products overseas, says that at these prices the competition for wine is bottled water.

Franzia is sixty-five and twice divorced, with silver hair and a smile that steals wickedly across his face. He is not tall, and he is heavy, despite having lost sixty pounds in three months last year. (He has cut out fried food and tries to limit himself to two glasses of wine a night.) His shape is squarish, like a gourmet marshmallow. The way he rolls his eyes, tracing an elaborate, hundred-and-eighty-degree arc, is almost camp. Every several minutes, and sometimes as often as a hundred times a day, Franzia picks up the phone in his office, puts it on speaker, and tells one of his employees to bring him some of his "witch's brew" (instant chicken broth that he drinks to fill himself up), or deliver him his latest stack of mail ("What's this, more money?" he'll say, when the employee hands it over), or get someone on the phone for him to bullshit with. By this he means do business. If the person he seeks--say, his assistant, Barbara, who's been with Bronco since its founding, in 1973, or Anya, the pretty young Russian in accounting he has his eye on and refers to as Mrs. Brain--is not at her desk, he looks momentarily helpless and is likely to mutter, under his breath, "Oh, God damn these women." Then he calls again.

The Bronco operation is vast and complex, and involves nearly every aspect of the wine business. Franzia is both a major seller and a major buyer on the bulk market. He owns several wineries, including one in Sonoma, where he bottles eighteen thousand cases a day, and he acts as a custom winemaker for wineries without his capacity. In 2000, he opened a ninety-two-thousand-square-foot bottling plant in a business park near the Napa airport. With three high-speed lines--one dedicated to Charles Shaw--the plant can bottle twice the amount of the entire Napa Valley. Much of the wine Franzia bottles there is "free-way aged"--it comes up from the Central Valley in tankers and is packaged for quick sale. Although Charles Shaw wine falls under the generic California appellation, the broadest possible designation, it can legitimately be labelled "Cellared & Bottled by Charles Shaw Winery, Napa, CA," a practice that strikes many in Napa as unsavory. "It's called a Zip Code winery," Vic Motto, a business adviser to Napa Valley wineries, says. "The unsuspecting consumer may not realize it's not Napa wine. Fred uses that to his advantage." Franzia says that he built the plant in Napa because that's where so many of the wineries he does business with are based.

Talking about his wine, Franzia can sound like an old-fashioned Democratic populist, though personally he's more of a Darwinian capitalist. "You tell me why someone's bottle is worth eighty dollars and mine's worth two dollars," he says. "Do you get forty times the pleasure from it?" With Charles Shaw, which Bronco introduced in 2002, Franzia invented a category, known as "super-value"--wine that costs less than three dollars a bottle--that is now a significant segment of the marketplace.

Cheap wine--so-called skid-row wine--is nothing new; Franzia's idea was to make cheap wine that yuppies would feel comfortable drinking. He put Charles Shaw in a seven-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre glass bottle, with a real cork, and used varietal grapes--Cabernet, Pinot Noir, Pinot Grigio, and Chardonnay, among others. One way that Franzia keeps the price so low is by acting as his own distributor in California. (Elsewhere, he has to go through a third-party wholesaler, which makes Two Buck Chuck cost roughly $2.99 a bottle.) Another efficiency is the enormous size of the wine lots he buys on the bulk market to put into the Charles Shaw brands. Bronco has an elaborate quality-control system--a high-tech laboratory with mass spectrometers that test for sulfur compounds and yeast byproducts in parts-per-billion measurements--but, partly because of the diverse sources of the wine, absolute consistency is impossible. "It's a moving target," Karen MacNeil, a prominent Napa-based wine writer and educator, told me. Charles Shaw Cabernet, which she had tried on a couple of occasions, had left her unimpressed. "I ...