A row of trellised vines with the winery visible in the background©Francis Ford Coppola Winery
The Francis Ford Coppola Winery is a California producer in Sonoma County owned by the eponymous filmmaker, famous for directing The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now. The winery has the highest production among the varied Coppola wine estates and produces the group's value brands.
Coppola had entered the wine industry in 1975 by buying the historic Inglenook estate in Rutherford, Napa Valley, and establishing the Neibaum-Coppola Winery with its flagship Rubicon red blend. The Francis Ford Coppola Winery was created decades later to separate the different brands the Neibaum-Coppola estate had cultivated.
In the mid-1990s Rubicon gained prestige, earning critical praise and a following, and increasing in price. As a result Neibaum-Coppola added a range of value wines priced at less than $20, which soon became the largest earners for the winery. These wines were released under a variety of labels including Francis Coppola Wines, Francis Coppola Presents and the highly successful Diamond Collection. The majority of fruit for these wines was purchased from growers with the wines carrying the broad California designation – the estate fruit was reserved for Rubicon.
By the early 2000s, Neibaum-Coppola was largely associated with its entry-level wine collections. Wanting to distinguish the Rubicon label (which at the time accounted for only around 5000 of the estate's 268,000 annual case production), Neibaum-Coppola changed its name to Rubicon (now Inglenook Winery after another name change in 2011) and moved the production of its other wines, including the Diamond Collection, to Sonoma establishing the Francis Ford Coppola Winery.
The winery now has an extensive list of wines under multiple collections and at varying price points. The most well known is still the Diamond label which is made up of a variety of offerings from popular California grapes: Cabernet Sauvignon is widely represented as a single variety and in blends, along with Merlot, Malbec, Zinfandel, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Sauvignon Blanc among others.
The Francis Ford Coppola Winery was built as a fairly lavish attraction among Sonoma wineries. It has multiple tasting bars, tours, two restaurants, a swimming pool, a movie gallery, performing arts pavilion and a park with bocce courts. Much of the film memorabilia which had drawn large crowds to the Inglenook estate has been relocated to the Francis Ford Coppola Winery to maintain the focus of Inglenook as a fine wine producer.
Coppola owns a second Sonoma estate opened in 2015 called the Virginia Dare Winery.
