Tim Wallace is bringing Sonoma State into the wine industry spotlight

While graduates of U.C. Davis are famed for their ability to make wine, our local institute of higher learning, Sonoma State University, is hell-bent on becoming the pre-eminent place to learn about the business of wine.

They want graduates to take what's in the bottle and bring it to market.

In order to ferment that wine-biz reputation, SSU has turned to former Benziger Winery CEO and owner Tim Wallace – who's now a month into a new job as SSU's wine business executive in residence.

SSU is the first university in the country to offer a specialized undergraduate degree, an MBA and an executive MBA focused on the business of wine. Wallace has committed to spending several days a week helping build the program, with his time split between curriculum development and industry outreach.

With no interest in retiring after selling Benziger last year, Wallace, 60, says he gave a lot of thought to what he wanted to do next. Over the years, students from Sonoma State had visited Benziger and Wallace got the sense that the university's Wine Business Institute was poised to really take off. After a fortuitous meeting with business school dean Bill Silver and WBI director Ray Johnson, Wallace found that 'their vision and my dreams and availability were perfectly aligned.'

'The Institute is a wine-industry gem in an unbeatable location that is well on its way to becoming the world's most significant contributor to wine business education and research,' says Wallace.

Wallace began his career in consumer products marketing before moving to Sonoma in the late 1980s. While many assume that he grew up in Sonoma, he is actually an Ivy League-educated New Yorker. He graduated from Brown University with a bachelor's degree in English (while also garnering national attention as a Division 1 swimmer) and received an MBA from Harvard.

He has been married to Patsy Benziger for 32 years and helped to catapult her family's business, Glen Ellen Winery, into one of the top wine producers in the country before its sale in 1993. He served then as president and owner of Benziger Family Winery until its sale last year.

His new role with SSU came at a perfect time for him and for the university. Thanks to donations from local wineries and Wine Spectator magazine, the Wine Business Institute will soon call an impressive new $9 million facility home. The new 15,000-square-foot building will feature classrooms, a student commons with areas for student-run businesses and an industry collaboration center. The facility is expected to open in mid-2017. Dean Silver's vision is that students, faculty, industry professionals and alumni will gather at SSU to collaborate on projects that support the success of the wine industry in California, the U.S. and around the world.

'The wine business is changing and the Institute can prepare executives for the demands of globalization, technology, demographic shifts, and changing regulations,' says Wallace. 'Hiring is different now. Wine is now so highly competitive and global that better-qualified and trained executives are needed to navigate this new environment.'

In addition to its MBA programs, the Wine Business Institute offers seminars and certificate programs that are open to the public. Last year more than 600 people from across the country studied at the WBI and professionals from a dozen countries participated in its online programs.

Wallace is currently working with three SSU students to prepare industry case studies that will be used in the curriculum.

'Ever since I attended business school, I have been fascinated by the case study method and convinced that it is the best way to learn,' Wallace says. 'If you can learn how to market wine, you can market anything. It provides you with a great background. It is a tough business from start to finish, very complicated and very sophisticated.'

Today, Wallace wakes up every morning excited by the day ahead, whether his schedule includes heading over to SSU or meetings related to the work he does advising family businesses. He and Patsy are empty nesters now, but enjoying it, he says. Their three children all graduated from Sonoma Valley High and two now work in New York City and one in Tahoe. Wallace devotes a lot of time to the Sonoma Valley Education Foundation and burns off his excess energy by biking, skiing, hiking, golf and swimming.

'I'm fulfilling a dream that I've harbored for some time, which is to give back in a meaningful way to an industry that has enthralled and enriched me for almost three decades,' he said. 'The time has come for me to reorient my focus from success to significance.'

Conatct Lorna at lorna.sheridan@sonomanews.com.