This story appears in the 4/23/12 issue of FORBES.
Tim Bucher was maybe 10 years old when the tractor broke down acres and acres from the family farmhouse in Healdsburg, Calif. “I was cutting thistles in the fields from early morning until dark,” he recalls. To get home he could either stumble through the fields of the dairy farm—or try to fix the engine. Tinkerer that he was, he opened up the hood, repaired the motor and headed back. There was something deeply satisfying about figuring out machinery and working with the soil.
It’s taken him 35 years to bring those two passions together again.
For 25 years or so Bucher designed different hardware for the likes of Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Apple and Dell. For a while he grew grapes and olives. Today he’s got a small but promising operation that combines high tech and agriculture. His website, TastingRoom.com, lets you buy a minimum of six 50ml samplers of nearly 1,000 wines—just enough to roll over your tongue to decide if you want to go the whole hog on $11-to-$110 bottles. Introduced to consumers 16 months ago, the site has 100,000-plus users.
Profits? None yet—the site lost $3.9 million on sales of $5 million last year—though you can imagine that at some point those little bottles, turned out on a state-of-the-art assembly line, might deliver big margins. Early investor Alex Gruzen, a general partner at Corsa Ventures in Austin, Tex., doesn’t sound impatient: “With TastingRoom, Tim’s poised to not only disrupt but improve upon the traditional, well-established retail [business] of wine.”
Bucher was 16 when he and his siblings pooled savings of $100,000 to buy their first vineyard, 2 acres that were ideal for growing zinfandel and French Colombard grapes. His mom, while a teetotaler, encouraged his interests and urged him to study agriculture at UC Davis. But somewhere along the way Bucher (pronounced “boo-CARE”) became captivated by computer engineering.
Graduating in 1986, Bucher joined Sun Microsystems and helped complete a half-finished microchip for an early Sun Workstation, manufactured in a Minnesota clean room. “I spent days in a bunny suit inspecting that place,” he recalls. That work would come in handy later, during stints at NeXt and WebTV, as well as at TastingRoom, for which he designed a clean room that was oxygen free, as well as particulate free.
At WebTV Networks Bucher developed the first WebTV terminals with Philips and Sony. When that company was swallowed by Microsoft, Bucher moved to Redmond and led the TV consumer products unit, which produced both digital TV and dual-tuner satellite DVRs. He worked for Steve Jobs at NeXt and Apple, where he bought up patents on the multitouch technology that became the iPhone and orchestrated the switch from PowerPC to Intel processors in all products. “I was pretty much considered a heretic,” he says of bucking the PowerPC culture.
That ended suddenly in late 2005, when Bucher was forced out of Apple in what he characterizes as political infighting. “They put an envelope in front of me with a lot of dollar signs,” he says. “It ultimately came down to a bit of it’s-me-or-him maneuvering.” Bucher sued for wrongful termination; Apple settled.
By then he had moved on. He had already built—and sold to Seagate for a reported $30 million—a data access device called Mirra. And he was engaged in his next project, an open standard, music-sharing software known as Zing, which was acquired by Dell. The trade press gleefully branded Bucher’s device as “revenge” against his former employer. The Zing-equipped Sirius Stiletto was a $350 portable satellite receiver/MP3 player connecting users via WiFi to Sirius stations. “Everything I’ve developed—the XBox, WebTV, Mirra, Zing—were all devices that gave people access to a Web service,” he says. “I’ve been a device guy, but it’s really the service that gets me going.”
What drove him crazy: endlessly shuttling back and forth between Austin, where he was vice president of consumer and entertainment software at Dell, and Sonoma Valley, home of his tiny olive oil business, which sold small samples online. How could he replicate that business for his vineyards? “I drew sketches on the airplane of the kind of process I’d have to develop in order to rebottle wines without compromising,” he recalls. “I wanted to scale it intergalactically.” That would require getting his hands on far more grapes than his own vines could provide. Bucher spent hours in hotel rooms noodling how to ship to all 50 states—each shackled to different regulations.
Raising money turned out to be the easy part. Already well-known to backers like Camp Ventures, Seraph Group and Corsa, Bucher raised $10 million in a Series A round, still managing to hold on to 10% of TastingRoom. He spent half his nut on developing his clean room and navigating legal labyrinths. Take wine labels: Each must be approved by the federal Alcohol & Tobacco Tax & Trade Bureau, as well as by government agencies controlling importation and sale in every state where the wine is distributed. In Bucher’s case that’s 900 varietals in 50ml and 100ml bottles, shipped to 33 states.
Much harder was convincing vintners to trust him with their oenological lifeblood. Because wine starts oxidizing the second it’s uncorked, Bucher designed a 30-foot-long pressurized chamber he christened the T.A.S.T.E. (“total anaerobic sample transfer environment”) system. One conveyor belt carries 750ml bottles to a hopper where a robotic arm opens and decants the wine; 50ml bottles travel along another conveyor belt and halt via optical sensors and other mechanical arms that fill and cap the samplers. The winemakers weren’t exactly bowled over by his tech dazzle.
“It was brutal,” Bucher says of his first blind tastings, with vineyards that included Napa’s Silverado Vineyards and Seghesio Winery. “My biggest frustration has been the complete anti-innovative attitude within the wine industry.” Without fail, he says, the initial response from the market was that his idea would never work, that you couldn’t rebottle wine without compromising its integrity. While Seghesio became Bucher’s first client, Silverado, to date, hasn’t come around.
But the taste tests won over a few tough critics. “It really is amazing how he’s been able to mimic the quality of a full-sized bottle,” says Ray Johnson, director of the Wine Business Institute at Sonoma State University and a wine reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Now nearly 1,000 wineries are on board, including the prestigious Silver Oak, whose CEO, David Duncan, admits he was initially hesitant. He didn’t think the technology was up to snuff—or that wines like his $100 Napa Valley cabernet were suitable for by-the-glass retail sales. Wrong: Last year, says Bucher, his online consumer business outstripped his B2B sales by 3-to-1.
Now for a little bit of errant cork in the glass. Bucher is still burning through $300,000 a month and has nearly exhausted the $10 million. Not yet breaking even, he will have to go begging for a second round of funding sometime this summer. Will his backers pour again? “They’ve been doing an incredible job,” says Corsa’s Gruzen, “hitting their goals at the same time they’re refining and expanding the retail experience.” That sounds like a yes.
