“I’m not going talk about wine. I’ll let the wine speak for itself,” said Frank Family Vineyards founder Rich Frank as he began his Wine Experience presentation, for which he brought his 92-point Chardonnay Napa Valley Carneros Lewis Vineyard 2020 ($85).
Sure enough, the vintner and former film and television executive captivated the audience with Tinseltown stories, including one in which he convinced executives to change the name of a movie from $3,000 to Pretty Woman. He also joked that despite rubbing elbows with movie stars and presidents, it still took him 80 years and selling his winery to be called a star himself.
Originally from Brooklyn, N.Y., Frank worked alongside his father at the family’s meatpacking business. After majoring in business and marketing at the University of Illinois, his first job was as a junior buyer for an advertising agency. At 31, he took over as president of Chris Craft Television; and from 1977 to 1985, he served as vice president and president of Paramount Television Group before becoming president at Walt Disney Studios, where he was responsible for the production, marketing and distribution of Aladdin, The Lion King and more.
In 1990, Frank began looking for a weekend property in Napa Valley. “The house I bought had 107 acres in [Rutherford]—who knew what that would be worth later on?” he said. Frank befriended Koerner Rombauer of Rombauer Vineyards. When Frank started tinkering with the idea of making wine, Rombauer initially told him to keep his day job; however, later he encouraged him to purchase a recently bankrupt winery that would become Frank Family Vineyards two years later.
Frank said he quickly found parallels between the film and wine industries: “In film, you start with a script, and [in] wine, you start with grapes. In one, you hire a director; in the other, you have a winemaker. In film, you cast actors, and winemakers cast barrels and yeast, and they both take about a year to make.” Frank added that in the early days, selling wine was about giving people a taste, much like a trailer for a film, and that getting his wines on by-the-glass lists at restaurants was the best trailer to lure people to the winery to buy more.
