Miller Family Sells Wine Portfolio to Precept Wine & Spirits

A Seattle-based company is buying one of Santa Barbara County’s largest wine operations, as Precept Wine & Spirits today announced the purchase of the entire wine portfolio of Miller Family Wine Company. The sale represents a deeper dive into California and the Central Coast for Precept, while marking the end of the Millers’ 15-year adventure into large-scale winemaking.

The sales price was not disclosed, nor were the individual assets. But the deal was a massive acquisition no matter the specifics, featuring nine nationally distributed brands — including Butternut, Ballard Lane, Smashberry, Optik, and J. Wilkes, among others — as well as all of associated trademarks, inventory, bulk wine, and a robust private label business.

The Millers retained ownership of the family’s historic vineyards — Bien Nacido and Solomon Hills in the Santa Maria Valley and French Camp in Paso Robles — and will also continue to make their own Bien Nacido Estate wines. The move returns the Millers back to their grape-growing roots after about 15 years of trying to grow into a major winemaking company.  

“My family made the decision that we wanted to focus on farming,” said Nicholas Miller, whose father and uncle, Steve and Bob Miller, started the vineyard business in 1969. “It’s no secret that the industry has been troubled and we were going in a lot of different directions. This is a way we can consolidate what our legacy is, and that’s on the farming.”  

Precept’s CEO Andrew Browne said the Millers represent “generations of craftsmanship and quality,” and that Precept will “carry that legacy forward.” The company owns such brands as Browne Family Wines, Gruet, and House Wines as well as about 4,000 acres of vineyards across the Pacific Northwest and New Mexico. 

The Millers’ portfolio “is a natural fit for Precept as a first substantial investment in California,” said Browne. “We’re eager to build upon the outstanding reputation these brands have earned with consumers in their longstanding histories.”

Precept plans to keep the entire portfolio alive, and will continue to source grapes from the Millers’ vineyards. “No brands are being streamlined or discontinued as part of this acquisition,” said the company’s chief marketing officer, Alex Evans, in an email. “Our goal is to leverage our sales and marketing infrastructure to increase distribution and consumer awareness with the portfolio.”

The Millers ventured into vineyards in the early 1970s, expanding from their citrus and avocado growing roots in Ventura County to plant Bien Nacido and French Camp. In part to develop a customer base for their grapes, they built winemaking facilities in Santa Maria and Paso Robles where emerging vintners shared space and equipment to make their wines. This formula was extremely successful at Central Coast Wine Services in Santa Maria, where so many of today’s winemakers got their start.

The family dipped its toes into making their own wine with the start of Bien Nacido Estate in 2005, and then shifted into more ambitious wine brands through acquiring and/or starting the brands Ballard Lane, Smashberry, J. Wilkes, and Barrell Burner around 2012. They accelerated into this lane further by purchasing Butternut in 2020, and launched a nonalcoholic brand with celebrity chef Cat Cora in 2022 called Hand on Heart. They also launched more brands like Pandemonium, Reciprocity, and Optik, a partnership with Joey Tensley.

Many industry watchers questioned the Millers’ moves, wondering why they shifted from what seemed like a successful farming company into the riskier bottle sales side of the wine business. The Millers believed that they could achieve even more success by vertically integrating their businesses, using their own grapes to make their own wine, thereby increasing profits. 

But there were troubles along the way. The Millers initially intended to base their larger wine operations on the former site of Central Coast Wine Services, where they had cleared out all of their many vintner-tenants, some of whom had been there for decades. Though most understood why they were evicted and still appreciate the family’s formative impact on the region’s winemaking community, there remains lingering resentment around the closure of that facility. 

Then the Millers couldn’t make that facility work for their growing business after all. Citing overly onerous regulations by the County of Santa Barbara — particularly in regard to air quality emission rules — the Millers loudly announced in 2024 that they’d be moving winemaking operations to Northern California. (They continued to make their Bien Nacido Estate wines at a much smaller facility on that vineyard, as they do today.)

But mostly it was a case of bad timing for the Millers’ dreams of becoming a major wine producer. After a brief but significant COVID bump, sales of wine started slumping a few years ago, and show no signs of surging back. 

“We accomplished many things we have to be proud of, but life changes,” said Miller. “The business environment played a huge role in what happened here.”

The downturn affects their vineyard business as well. They’ve pulled out hundreds of vineyard acres at both Bien Nacido and Solomon Hills, replacing them with leases to vegetable, flower, and seed growers.

“It used to be a vineyard with a little bit of other crops, and now it’s more of a working ranch where the vineyard is a component of that,” said Miller, noting that the family is also diversifying into other industries like real estate and hotels. 

Precept, meanwhile, is likely to become more present in the region. “We’re excited and proud to join the Santa Barbara and Central Coast community of winemakers, and to continue promoting these world-class wine regions,” said Evans, the CMO. 

Miller remains optimistic about the future of the portfolio he personally helped develop, explaining, “We are excited about the direction that our brands are going to go.”