Banshee Wines started out as a project born from the partnership of three friends in San Francisco, releasing its first wines from the 2008 vintage. These wines were well-made, fun to drink, and reasonably-priced. They opened a welcoming, casual, and hip tasting room in Healdsburg that served as a counterpoint to the hoity vibe that had taken over much of Sonoma county. In other words, they were an anomaly that seemed to be giving the important young wine drinking demographic what they wanted. Besides, how cool is that label?
But the wine business is tough, and in 2018 Banshee was acquired by international wine giant Foley Family Wines & Spirits. As is the norm, press coverage of the sale painted the future of the brand in rosy terms, using language like "it's a partnership, not an acquisition." But even at the time, Banshee's then-CEO, Baron Ziegler, said, "We have seen a lot of brands get purchased and get ruined - maybe not ruined because they make more money. But the soul of the brand changes."
Fast forward to 2025, Baron Ziegler is long gone. The tasting room in Healdsburg, which I visited early in 2023, and found to be a comically stiff retail front where happy hour was anything but, has since closed and reopened as a "hospitality center" in the former home of Stryker Sonoma, another Foley acquisition, where tastings start at $70 for non-members.
But what about the wine? Last week I picked up a bottle of their 2023 Banshee Sonoma County Pinot Noir ($20.) What was once an inspired thrill ride of a wine is now part of the river of grocery store supply chain homogeneity. No doubt Foley used its vast vineyard holdings and contracts to increase production and hold pricing steady, though very much at the expense of quality.
But Banshee's story is not at all atypical. Longtime wine industry financier Rob McMillan, in the same Press Democrat article covering the sale, remarked that "the wine industry is notorious for larger vintners taking over smaller beloved producers and then churning out more growth, a life cycle that typically ends with the brand becoming a shell of its former shelf."
A quick glance at the brand pages of the largest wine companies reveals a catalog of former glory now relegated to the second from bottle shelves at supermarkets: Chalk Hill, Souverain, St Jean, Franciscan, William Hill, and countless more. Many of these stories are of wineries whose reputation was built on estate-driven production and quality, combined with reasonable prices. Post-acquisition, however, a lot of these labels dropped their original AVA's (i.e. Napa Valley, Chalk Hill, Alexander Valley, etc.) in exchange for the more generic California. In other words, lower priced fruit, but not necessarily lower priced wine.
That kind of switcheroo is not lost on consumers. And the boneyard of brands is littered with names that were short-lived after acquired. Which means the large wine companies know this, too, and have a short window of opportunity to squeeze the brand equity out of their purchases before there's little left.