RUTHERFORD: Rich Frank had already had the career most people dream about. As studio head at Paramount and later president of Disney Studios, he shepherded television hits like The Golden Girls and Home Improvement and films including Good Morning Vietnam and Pretty Woman. Then, in 1993, he launched what is now Frank Family Vineyards, and began a second career in which the budgets were smaller and the product took years instead of months.
There is a particular kind of Napa story that ends with a number. For the Franks, the number is $315 million: the price Treasury Wine Estates paid in November 2021 to acquire Frank Family Vineyards, one of the largest winery deals in recent Napa history. It could have been the end of the story. Instead the Franks negotiated a second act. They continued working with the company under consultancy agreements, which Australian trade press reported in 2026 had been renewed for another twelve months, and in 2024 Leslie Frank joined the Treasury Wine Estates board. The family no longer owns the winery, but they still work in the business, and their name still leads every bottle.
The origin story was pure accident. Frank had bought a second home in Rutherford in 1990 with no thought of making wine; the valley was then in oversupply, and starting a winery looked like a poor bet. But when Hanns Kornell Champagne Cellars filed for bankruptcy, the foreclosing bank had to sell within 24 hours, because a bank could not hold a liquor license. A friend called. Frank offered half the asking price without seeing the financials, treating the purchase as a hobby: a couple of hundred cases a year. The first vintage, in 1993, was 200 cases.
They sold the company, stayed in the building, and kept doing the work.
A fire in 2000 forced a reckoning, and Frank rebranded the winery under his own name and hired winemaker Todd Graff. With his own name on the label, the instincts he had spent a career absorbing in Hollywood, where brand came before everything, took over. The hobby became a business, now producing at a scale its founder never planned.
The family in Frank Family
The winery's second founder is Leslie Frank, a former broadcast journalist who covered 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Michael Jackson trial over a 25-year career before marrying Rich in 2012 and joining the business. She studied winemaking fundamentals through the Napa Valley Wine Academy and the UC Davis Wine Executive Program, and she leads the winery's philanthropic work, including the Frank for a Cause campaign.
The couple's philosophy of hospitality is pure Disney, by their own account: the winery's tasting-room page says it wants every visitor "to feel like guests, not customers." Frank Family's reputation for warm hospitality has made the tasting room on Larkmead Lane one of the valley's most visited, an affection that shows up in local best-of lists year after year.
Napa has seen founders cash out and disappear. The Franks did something harder. They sold the company, stayed in the building, and kept doing the work. More than thirty years after the hobby purchase, the studio head's second act has outlasted many of the films he greenlit. In Napa, that counts as a hit.
