Experienced across the range of issues impacting wineries – from real estate and operations to environmental and water rights – Shartsis Friese’s lawyers bring an interdisciplinary legal team to the business of wine.
Our Wine Industry Practice Group advises family owned, closely held, and institutionally owned companies in the wine business, leveraging our deep knowledge of people, deal structures, and hot-button industry issues to provide effective, efficient representation for a broad variety of wine industry matters. Clients include prominent California wineries, winemakers, growers and wine industry investors. We have taken lead roles in a wide range of matters, including:
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Real property acquisitions, dispositions, leasing, and other transactions
- Debt and equity financings
- Land use and zoning applications and disputes
- Disaster recovery and insurance coverage matters
- Partnership disputes
- Custom crush
- Vineyard management
- Contract negotiations
- Intellectual property protection and enforcement
- Environmental and water rights issues
- Defending state and federal government environmental enforcement actions
- Defending citizen lawsuits relating to vineyard and winery operations
- Other complex litigation matters affecting the wine industry
Our interdisciplinary team leverages the core competencies of our Real Estate, Corporate, Environmental, Litigation/Insurance Recovery, and Family Wealth Planning practice groups to offer our wine industry clients a broad range of services. Our capabilities include:
- Winery and vineyard acquisition and disposition (buy-side and sell-side), including direct real property and entity level transfers
- Vineyard leases, easements and licenses, water sharing agreements, custom crush agreements, grape contracts, and warehousing agreements
- Debt and equity financing related to winery and vineyard assets (including mortgage loans and corporate debt facilities)
- Land use and regulatory matters for vineyard, winery, and related uses
- Analyzing environmental and water rights issues for wineries and vineyards
- Defending civil and administrative environmental enforcement actions against wineries and vineyard operators with:
- State Water Board
- Regional Water Board
- California Department of Fish and Game
- U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
- Defending citizen lawsuits under federal and state environmental laws against wineries and vineyard operators
- Insurance counseling and recovery
- Securities, partnership and trust disputes; real estate litigation; intellectual property and general business conflicts
- Estate and succession planning for family owned vineyard and winery assets
- Trademark and other protection of wine and winery-related intellectual property assets
