TPG Co-founder Bill Price Makes Great Wine You Can't Buy

(Forbes) - There’s a great joy in creating a product outdoors in one of the most beautiful places in the world,” says Bill Price, a onetime private equity hawk turned stealth wine mogul. “This morning I was out in a vineyard to see if we were ready to pick, and the fog was burning off and the sun was coming up and the birds were chirping. Pretty great way to spend your workday.”

Price, 57, one of the founding partners of private equity giant Texas Pacific Group (TPG)–”I was the ‘ Pacific’ part,” he says–put in several careers’ worth of more conventional workdays before following his passion into the California wine business. Today he controls seven wine brands and five vineyards, but for a player of his stature he is almost invisible to outsiders. There is no William Price mega-winery on the Route 29 wine road or anywhere else. And frankly, if you don’t already have a line on his best wines, like Kistler and Kosta Browne, you will have to go to some lengths just to taste them.

TPG, which Price left as partner emeritus in 2006, was an exciting ride and afforded him a fine life indeed: He splits his time between California and Hawaii; his 90-foot ketch is docked in San Francisco Bay. He shares office space these days with his family’s private museum of vintage Aston Martins, Maseratis and Ferraris.

His old company did famous deals: Continental Airlines, Ducati, J. Crew, Petco, Del Monte. But it was a midlevel score that actually changed Price’s life: the $350 million purchase, in 1996, of Napa Valley’s Beringer Wine Estates from Nestlé. (In a package with some other winery purchases, TPG would in turn sell Beringer to Fosters in 2000 for a reported $1.5 billion.) Price’s exposure to the wine trade sparked a realization: “In the wine business, everybody is passionate about his product. In a private equity firm, people are in it because they like the challenge and want to make a lot of money. But let’s face it, they are not passionate about spreadsheets.”