The Australian money in Paso Robles
View across the mountain top vineyard at DAOU Vineyards in Paso Robles, California. Photo by Campbell Mattinson.
In late 2023 an Australian company paid AU$1.6 billion for a Californian winery that was sixteen years old.
Treasury Wine Estates already owns Penfolds. It had already spent AU$434 million on Frank Family Vineyards in 2021. DAOU took its American spending past AU$2 billion inside four years, and what it bought was a mountain in Paso Robles, a brand that had grown faster than almost anything in American luxury wine, and the stated ambition of building another Penfolds.
Whether it paid too much is the question that has followed the deal ever since. It is also, from here, the more interesting question – because Treasury is an Australian company, and this is Australian money, and almost nobody in Australia has been up that mountain to look.
I went. I tasted the wines, I met the people, and I came away with a story that runs deeper than the numbers. Georges Daou and his brother were children in Beirut when a missile hit the family home. "I went to bed as a child, but I woke as a man," Georges says of that night. The winery at the top of that mountain is, in a real sense, what came afterwards.
—
DAOU is Sustainability-In-Practice certified, has 2030 as its net zero target, and is working through full organic certification. What that looks like on the ground – drones dropping predator insects over the vineyard each spring, among other things – is covered in how sustainable is California wine?.
