Vineyard Brands was founded in 1971 by Robert Haas. Bob began his career in 1950 working as the import buyer for M. Lehmann, his family’s wine shop in New York City which would later become Sherry Lehmann. As Bob became more interested in the import wine business and less interested in the retail business, he began importing and selling wine in markets other than New York through Leeds Imports Corporation, a wine import company started by Bob and his father. In 1967, Bob’s father retired from the wine business and Leeds Imports Corporation was sold.

In 1971, Bob moved to Vermont and founded Vineyard Brands with 2 employees. The company’s office was located in a remodeled barn on the Haas family farm in Chester, Vermont until 1997 when the company moved its headquarters to Birmingham, Alabama.

In the 1980s, Bob began to explore ways to fulfill a life-long dream to start his own winery, which would mean leaving Vineyard Brands. Bob ultimately decided to create an employee stock ownership plan (an "ESOP") to allow the employees of Vineyard Brands to purchase the business from him to allow him to start his winery, Tablas Creek Vineyard. In the late 1990s, when the ESOP completed its purchase of the business from Bob, he fully exited from Vineyard Brands.

As we are a "family" owned enterprise by virtue of our ESOP, we have chosen to represent family-owned wineries. We have a wealth of experience representing both small producers and large volume brands. We represent over 80 wineries from the major wine-growing regions throughout the world. Our portfolio includes some of the best wines available from Argentina, Chile, Spain, Portugal, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Austria, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, and France, including over 25 growers of estate-bottled wines in Bordeaux, Burgundy, Chablis, the Rhône, the Loire Valley, Alsace and Southern France.

One of our primary missions is to understand and respect the goals of each of our producers for their individual brands. We have a proprietary sense of pride in our brands and understanding that the only way to achieve long-term success is building a good distribution network. We work closely with our distributors across the United States to ensure that not only do we have good sales and depletion volumes, but that our distribution is optimized for the long term.