Andy Beckstoffer has made a bundle in the California wine business in the past four decades. Yet the Richmond native, who recently returned to speak at his alma mater, Benedictine High School, remains a down-to-earth guy who wants to preserve the rich land that has brought him fortune and a measure of fame.
"When I went out to California, I was an MBA who looked at the land as a business asset to be exploited," he said with a distinctive twang that has earned him the nickname "The Virginian" in Napa Valley wine circles.
His energy and innovation helped him build Beckstoffer Vineyards into the largest independent family owned vineyard on California's North Coast.
The lifestyle magazine Gourmet wrote last year that Beckstoffer owns, cultivates and harvests more than 3,000 acres of vineyards north of San Francisco, where land can sell for more than $200,000 an acre. He sells grapes to 50 wineries. The premium grapes are used primarily in cabernet sauvignons and merlots.
Beckstoffer Vineyards is worth about $450 million, according to industry sources.
But quantifying his life's work misses the point, said Beckstoffer, 67. Though he initially squeezed the grape industry for its return on investment, he has found a new path to leave the land intact for future generations.
He has become a leading advocate, both in California and Washington, D.C., for reforming federal tax law to preserve and protect farms.
Scenic land such as Napa Valley is always going to be pressured by development, he said, whether it's for new homes or fast-food joints. Until two years ago, farmers could write off only a fraction of their adjusted income on taxes -- creating the pressure to sell property.
"The farmer becomes land poor," Beckstoffer explained. "His land is worth more than the income it produces."
As a result, many farmers around the United States have chosen to sell. Two years ago, he said, Congress temporarily changed the tax code so farmers could write off 100 percent of adjusted gross income produced by their land over a 15-year period.
"Now you can write it all off," he said.
He's working to get that change made permanent, and has been backed by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
"We're gaining momentum," Beckstoffer said. "It's politics and it does cost the treasury money, so you have to convince them it's in the national interest."
He describes his evolution from user to steward of the land as a slow morphing, not a sudden epiphany.
"Beckstoffer was seen by some as one of the barbarians massing at the gates of an ecological paradise," Gourmet mused. Beckstoffer admitted to "the hubris that animated his early career."
He told the magazine: "Now I understand the land is a natural resource to be preserved."
His business instincts helped create the wealth and status that made him an industry innovator and leader. "We did a good job of improving California wines," said the 1961 Virginia Tech graduate.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, his grapes helped make the Napa Valley wines competitive with French products. Grapes made from his storied To Kalon Vineyard -- in cultivation since the 1860s -- fetched more than $250 per bottle last year.
Wealth and accolades weren't enough, though.
"As you go through life every day and see a gorgeous place, you think it's a miracle that we're still predominantly agricultural, and you want to preserve it," he said. "Now I think of it as a national treasure."
Beckstoffer grew up in a large, community-minded family that always gave back, led by his father, Herman Beckstoffer, a patron of Benedictine High School.
Andy Beckstoffer developed a nose for California wines while serving in the Army in the early 1960s in San Francisco. On the weekends, "we would take off and go up to the wine country," he told The Times-Dispatch in 1988.
After getting his MBA from Dartmouth, he returned to California in the late 1960s. While working in mergers and acquisitions for a financial firm, he entered the wine business.
He later bought the business and devoted his life to the vineyards -- employing modern technology such as improved irrigation techniques. He also moved to sustainable farming techniques, using biological methods rather than chemicals to control pests and diseases.
More enlightened tax laws could help protect land around the country, including historic properties in Virginia, he said.
"I firmly believe that in the 20th century, we were users" of the land, Beckstoffer said. "I make no apology for that, but we used up land and water, and created this global-warming problem. In the 21st century, I think we're going to have to be preservers" of the Earth.
Vintner's Success Didn't Come Easily
Sunday, Jun 17, 2007
Before speaking at Benedictine High School's graduation on June 8, the 1957 former cadet leader mused that he wasn't always in demand here.
"I was not invited back to speak at my 25th anniversary of graduating in 1982," he said. He does not blame the school for not inviting him back, though. At the time, he was struggling to pay his bills and avoid having lenders foreclose on his grape-growing properties in the Napa Valley of Northern California.
"Interest rates and falling grape prices left us unable to pay large sums of money we owed and were personally guaranteed by me," he said.
With five children to support, Beckstoffer said, the grape-growing enterprise he had built for 20 years was on the brink of collapse.
"If the lenders had pushed it, I'd have been bankrupt," he said in an interview before his speech.
The moral, he told the students, is that "there is no straight line to success. It wasn't for me, and most likely it won't be for you."
Classmate Bill Bain remembered Beckstoffer as a popular captain of the cadet corps.
"He was a leader," said Bain, a retired Richmond Times-Dispatch copy editor. "I'm not really surprised" at his success.
Beckstoffer advised the 2007 graduates to "get the big things right. Have a vision, a plan and a passion to get it done. . . . Remember who you are and where you are coming from, and life can be beautiful."
Chip Jones,
Richmond Times Dispatch
