A year after Aimee Chang’s father invested in a 40-acre vineyard in Napa’s prestigious Pritchard Hill area in 2010, her family decided they wanted to go beyond selling grapes to making and selling their own wine. “But we had zero experience in the wine industry,” admits Chang, 38, a licensed architect who had worked in New York.
She needed to get up to speed—fast.
So she enrolled in Sonoma State University’s Executive Wine MBA, the only such program in the U.S. She commuted weekly to California for almost a year and a half, graduating in 2015. “We couldn’t have launched Nine Suns winery without that,” she says. “Our business model grew out of a class I took on wine distribution.”
Using her architecture skills, Chang also designed the winery building. She is now the winery’s director of finance and design.
Judging by the emails I get on a weekly basis, an awful lot of investment bankers, marketing executives, software engineers, architects and more dream about working in wine. Some aspire to own and manage a winery; others wonder if they can shift careers by transferring their existing business skills to the companies producing the pinot noirs and cabernets they’re passionate about.
The answer, says Ray Johnson, executive director of SSU’s Wine Business Institute, is yes. You just need a bit of further education. “A degree gives them a road into the wine business. During the program, they connect into a network of executives in the wine community, and this gives them a great head start on their career pivot.”
While many universities have winemaking programs, Sonoma State is one of very few offering degrees in the business side of wine.
What You Get Out of a Wine MBA
John Stayton, executive director of SSU’s graduate and executive business programs, points out that many of their graduates are now in executive roles, or are even winery owners.
In other words, the courses are a good way to skip the traditional ladder-climbing in learning to run a winery, which usually starts with pouring wine in a tasting room or working in the office. For owners, they offer a quick way to gain essential knowledge, whether their wineries are tiny startups or entail lavish investments. SSU’s Wine Business Institute, an education and research institute in the School of Business and Economics, started as an undergraduate program in 1996. It launched the U.S.’s first (and only) MBA specializing in wine in 2008 (20-month course, $25,000 to $35,000) and in 2012 added an executive wine MBA, the first in the world (weekends for 17 months, $49,500). Since then, SSU has conferred 112 EMBA degrees. Students come from more than 25 countries to learn the ins and outs of the industry from economists and branding experts, as well as former chief executive officers of local wineries.
Sarah Montague, 49, who spent 25 years in the advertising business working on Kraft and Pepsi accounts, discovered through her course of study that the SSU campus location in Rohnert Park, near Santa Rosa in the heart of Sonoma wine country, was prime territory for networking. She found inspiration in her fellow students, many of whom were heirs to wineries, and met her current boss, the owner of John Anthony Vineyards in Napa, at the valley’s Bottle Rock Festival. “The university is still a resource for me,” she says.