Interview: Shawn Schiffer, President, Foley Family Wines & Spirits
August 12, 2025Foley Family Wines & Spirits, the drinks company founded by billionaire and Las Vegas Golden Knights owner Bill Foley, has assembled a wide portfolio of premium brands across both the wine and spirits categories, with wine volume at approximately 1.7 million cases last year, according to Impact Databank. Foley’s wine stable includes California stalwarts like Ferrari-Carano, Chalk Hill, and Silverado Vineyards; Oregon brands Acrobat and The Four Graces; and imports such as Dashwood, Lucien Albrecht, and Nieto Senetiner, among many others.
On the spirits side, the company counts brands including Minden Mill Whiskeys, High Ground Estate Vodka, Charles Goodnight Texas Straight Bourbon Whiskey, Evil Bean Cold Brew Coffee Liqueur, Ampersand Whiskeys, Sabé Canned Cocktails, New Zealand’s Lighthouse Gin, El Mexicano Tequila, the Loch Lomond Group portfolio of Scotch and spirits, and Two Stacks Irish Whiskey and Killowen Distillery. SND executive editor Daniel Marsteller recently met with Foley Family president Shawn Schiffer to hear about trends across the portfolio.
SND: How is the Foley portfolio faring amid the current market conditions?
Schiffer: In total wine in the U.S., the dollar share of the category is about 42% in combined $11 to $15 and $15 to $20, and that’s down 1%. We are at 67% of our dollar share in those two price segments and we’re up 5%, so we’re slightly outperforming the total wine category in the U.S. in the price points where most of our volume is. That’s been the case for a couple years now. While we’re certainly not where we need or want to be, that remains positive. Our shipments in wholesale as a company are up 15% over last year; some of that’s from the brands that came in the Vintage acquisition. (Editor’s note: Foley acquired the Swanson Vineyards, Sonoma Coast Vineyards, Cosentino, Cherry Pie, and Bar Dog brands, totaling about 150,000 cases, from the now defunct Vintage Wine Estates last year.)
SND: What are you prioritizing from a brand standpoint on the wine side?
Schiffer: Ferrari-Carano, Chalk Hill, and Silverado are all priorities. Ferrari-Carano shipments are up 13%. Chalk Hill Sonoma Coast is up 20% and then Silverado is up almost double from last year at this point. We’ve got a big portfolio. It requires a lot of discipline to focus on the items that really drive the business, and those are going in the right direction. In general, at the mid-year, I would say we’re showing strong growth. We’re behind the ambitious goals we set for ourselves by a little bit, but still in a pretty good position.
We’re starting to see consolidation in Oregon occur in a nascent way as has been going on in California for many years. So The Four Graces and Acrobat are really important brands to us as well. We are going to continue focusing on that set of brands over the balance of the year for organic growth, and we’ve incorporated the Vintage brands that Bill acquired into the portfolio. Those are still new members of the family.
We’ve also got some interesting things happening in terms of development. One of the assets that we acquired was the tasting room for Sonoma Coast Vineyards, which is out in Bodega Bay. We’re going to launch two wholesale SKUs under that brand either later this year or at the start of next year. It’s a beautiful spot for a tasting room that gets a lot of consumer traffic. We’re excited about bringing that brand name to the three-tier system.
SND: What do you see as the keys to growth in wine moving forward?
Schiffer: It’s the ability to focus. We’ve got a massive number of SKUs, so giving our sales team and marketing team good, clear direction on priorities and having the discipline to stick to those is really what we’re trying to do. We’re looking through our portfolio, rationalizing out items that don’t perform. When there’s a downturn or headwinds like we’ve experienced, you’ve got to become even more disciplined and either halt or remove some of those items, which ultimately become unprofitable distractions.
As growers of a lot of fruit, we’re also continually looking at ways to innovate, to find ways to profitably find a home for those grapes. So we’re looking at a few spaces on the wine side where we haven’t played previously. There’s some higher-abv, higher residual sugar items that are getting a lot of play with consumers right now and we might move into that space looking into 2026. We’re investigating all kinds of different ways to weather the conditions and hopefully come out of it even stronger as a company.
We’ll have more on the Foley spirits portfolio in the second part of this interview.
| Foley Family Wines & Spirits’ Leading Brands (thousands of 9-liter cases) |
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| Brand | Origin | 2023 | 2024 | Percent Change1 |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ferrari-Carano | California | 463 | 462 | -0.2% | ||
| Chalk Hill | California | 183 | 177 | -3.5% | ||
| Banshee | California | 145 | 166 | 13.8% | ||
| Acrobat | Oregon | 158 | 148 | -6.5% | ||
| Sebastiani | California | 106 | 92 | -12.8% | ||
| Silverado | California | 68 | 76 | 11.5% | ||
| Dashwood | New Zealand | 48 | 69 | 44.1% | ||
| The Four Graces | Oregon | 62 | 66 | 6.4% | ||
| Total Leading Brands2 | 1,233 | 1,255 | 1.8% | |||
| 1 Based on unrounded data. 2 Addition of columns may not agree due to rounding. Source: IMPACT DATABANK © 2025 |
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