Nancie Oxley weaves through the labyrinth of St. Julian Winery & Distillery — stepping over hoses, speaking loudly over clanging bottles, gesturing at towering pallets of wine cases — as if the building is her dance partner.
For the uninitiated, it can be a dizzying trek through a series of intertwined buildings in downtown Paw Paw that help Oxley do what she’s done for more than 20 years: create award-winning wines for Michigan’s oldest winery.
Red grapes ready to harvest from the winery’s Mountain Road Estate vineyard. (Courtesy photo)
On an afternoon tour of St. Julian, Oxley speaks with the confidence of someone who knows every inch of the property, which is nearing the final phases of nearly $15 million in much-needed modernization investments. As she enters a pristine production room filled with new fermenting equipment, Oxley recalls years ago emphasizing to then-company president John Braganini the importance of upgrades.
“This room had six 70,000-gallon tanks in it. They were old carbon steel tanks with fiberglass linings,” says Oxley, who has been head winemaker since 2010 and was named vice president of winemaking in 2017. “I showed John Braganini a picture of one erupting in South America, and I said, ‘We have these, and this is going to happen.’ He said, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘Someday, it’s going to happen because we can’t actually fix those tanks anymore.’ He said, ‘OK. Let’s do it.’”
In 2019, St. Julian Winery & Distillery began these upgrades as part of a larger vision to update the company, which was founded (under a different name in Windsor, Ontario) in 1921 by Italian-born Mariano Meconi. It has operated in its main building in Paw Paw since 1936. Oxley says this space has been a challenge in terms of process and flow, but the company has “squeezed” everything into it to “make the best of what we had at the time.” She likens the effort to a massive game of Tetris with very finicky pieces. Now it’s time, she says, to improve efficiencies, something she has kept her eye on for years.
In January the company added a new bottling line, and it is currently renovating another portion of the facility to house an expanded distillery operation. In the last few years, St. Julian Winery & Distillery also reconfigured its leadership team and ownership structure to help guide the business under President Apollo Braganini II, who took over the role in 2022.
John Braganini, who is still involved with the company as chairman, says, “The products were really good (despite) the substandard equipment that we had, so I made the decision, ‘What could we be with great equipment?’ I let Nancie make a lot of those decisions.”
“That wasn’t a want. That was a need,” Apollo Braganini says, echoing his father.
Apollo (left) and Julia Braganini. (Courtesy photo)
As one walks through the facility, one sees a massive wall covered in competition awards, backing up John Braganini’s point about Oxley’s success and the company’s boast that it’s “Michigan’s most awarded winery.” Oxley says they’ve run out of space to display all the awards and intend to showcase them differently as renovations continue.
Apollo Braganini says one thing he doesn’t have to worry about is bad wine. “Nancie can do everything. She can make an amazing dry red and Boom Pop sweet wine and anything in between. When you don’t have to worry about the quality of what’s coming out and, creatively, you put a concept in front of a winemaker and she can make it and make it taste good every time, it makes our job a lot easier.”
Tragedy and transition
A decade ago, John Braganini and his sons, Dario and Apollo, did not have day-to-day involvement in the winery. David Braganini, John’s brother, had worked at the winery since 1973 and became its president in 1983. He steered the company into becoming one of the most influential members of Michigan’s alcoholic beverage industry.
Mariano Meconi (Courtesy photo)
Meanwhile, John was a principal of his own successful insurance company, Great Lakes Companies in Kalamazoo, while Dario and Apollo had plans to eventually own a string of car dealerships together. While all of them spent time working in the winery at some point, none of them saw it as the next chapter in their respective career paths.
But on July 5, 2015, David died unexpectedly at age 65. The winery’s future then fell to John, who says there wasn’t much hesitation on his part and that it didn’t take long for the rest of his family to go all-in.
“It wasn’t like we had a succession plan in place,” John says. “I was the vice chairman of the company and (David’s) trustee. I had pretty much carte blanche authority to do whatever I wanted to do. I couldn’t find enough reasons to walk away from it.
“Wineries are difficult to sell unless they are simple operations, and this one isn’t. I like the people who work here. I sold my insurance company because private equity put a deal I couldn’t refuse in front of me. I wasn’t ready to get off the playing field. I split my time between this company and my insurance company until going full bore into this (in 2018). And I have a lot of respect for my kids and my wife” (Sarah Braganini, who oversees St. Julian corporate governance and purchasing).
Workers on the winery’s early bottling lines. (Courtesy photo)
In 2016, John took over as president of St. Julian. He says he spent about a year studying the company and positioning his family to take sole ownership. Dario joined the winery in 2017, and Apollo added his name to the roster in 2018.
Apollo says his family jumped into the business with a lot to learn. Apollo and Dario brought experience in sales, while John’s strengths were infrastructure and finance. They also relied heavily on the existing leadership, including Oxley and Matt White, the vice president of operations, who has spent more than 30 years working at the winery.
“We’ve been in business for 104 years, and the company has moved through four branches of the family,” John says. “We took over in 2016. The company was in good shape financially. We all came from automotive, retail. We brought a sales mentality to the company. Our interest in running it was growing it. We wanted to grow the company. That’s what we like to do. We don’t like to sit still. The company needed massive investment to be relevant into the future. We made the decision to make those investments. That’s what started all of it.”
Staying nimble
One of St. Julian’s early delivery trucks. (Courtesy photo)
Those plans continued through the Covid-19 pandemic and during the recent downturn in alcohol sales, which has hit the wine industry hard. Last year, for the first time in more than three decades, the total number of small U.S. wineries dropped year-over-year. There were 11,450 wineries at the end of 2024, a decline of 1.5 percent. The Los Angeles Times reported in March that U.S. wine shipments by volume have fallen 4.2 percent from 2023 and 11.3 percent from 2019.
Industry experts cite a variety of reasons for the decline, including changing customer tastes, more competition, rising costs from inflation, and people drinking less, particularly the younger generation. None of those factors appear to be changing drastically anytime soon.
“I look at the landscape right now as an opportunity,” Apollo says. “If consumption is going to go down, the best operators are going to thrive. We are trying to make sure we are in that category that continues to grow … We are very nimble. We are able to change on a dime.
The Mountain Road Estate Vineyard. (Courtesy photo)
St. Julian is essentially split into three business “channels”: direct-to-consumer and e-commerce sales; wholesale and distribution sales; and specialty services, such as private label work. St. Julian will add its 10th state for distribution this year, and its collaborative work with others in the wine industry remains solid. The company’s Wine Club boasts more than 20,000 members, who provide real-time feedback on products, and its Spirit Club, still relatively new, continues to grow at an exciting pace as St. Julian places more emphasis on its spirits, especially its bourbon program.
Oxley highlighted the surprise success of last summer’s Punch Line wines, 20 percent alcohol-by-volume white blends sold in a variety of fruit flavors. The concept came to Oxley’s attention through the St. Julian Winery sales team, which spotted the growing popularity of the fruit-flavored XXL Wines. She put her own spin on fruit-flavored wines, and their sales took off, forcing the production team to adapt quickly. St. Julian plans to roll out more new flavors this summer and is mimicking this approach with flavored spirits as well.
When Oxley started at St. Julian in 2002, she says, the company produced between 30 and 40 products. Today she counts more than 200 different offerings. It can become an unwieldy portfolio to manage, but it also makes the company uniquely equipped to adjust when necessary.
A harvest tractor in the vineyard at sunset. (Courtesy photo)
“We’ve played into the hand of these crazy flavored wines,” she says. “I didn’t go into winemaking to make cotton-candy-flavored wine, but if it’s going to keep the lights on here when wine drinking is down, … it’s hard to say no to it.”
She notes that within two years, St. Julian’s cotton-candy-flavored wine was selling 10,000 cases a year. When sales of that product slowed, the company released a peanut-butter-and-jelly-flavored wine.
“That’s still doing well,” she says. “This summer we released Boom Pop, which is a blue wine that tastes just like a melted popsicle. We could not make enough of it fast enough.”
She says that the company is “in a double-digit growth moment, and we are figuring out what works for us.”
The balance of longevity, flexibility, ingenuity and planning gives St. Julian’s leadership team confidence as it approaches the homestretch of its modernization moves.
“We saw the slowdown coming,” John Braganini says. “It was happening right in front of us. We aggressively planned an inventory reduction and brought in just-in-time purchasing. It made a huge impact on our balance sheet and expense structure — right before interest rates went up.
An employee samples one of the barrels in the winery’s cellar.
(Courtesy photo)
“This doesn’t make for a good wine story, but one of the reasons we are relevant is we are paying attention to stuff that can get you into trouble. We have the right people in the right seats. We have them locked in. We can ride a storm out if we have to. I think probably five years from now we will be done (with improvements). We will have a world-class facility. It will look better on the outside and on the inside.”
Leadership and legacy
Not as visible, but just as important to the company’s longevity, is its Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP. Six members of the winery’s leadership team, including Oxley, own 10 percent of the company. The Braganini family owns the remaining 90 percent. The family set up the plan in 2023, — a rare move in the wine industry.
Apollo views it as a two-way vote of confidence between the leadership team and the majority owners.
Crates of harvested white grapes on their way to the winery. (Courtesy photo)
“When everybody is involved and they have ownership, big-picture discussions are much easier to have and help us make sure we have the same vision,” he says. “Our name may be on some of these bottles, but we couldn’t get it done without the people around us.”
Oxley applauds the relatively young but experienced group at the helm of the long-running winery and distillery, saying, “We have some newer faces that bring in a different aspect. It’s a fun time for someone of our age — mid-career — that gets to take a company to new heights.”
With Apollo fronting the business, John, who is in his 70s, says he can “wind down a bit” as the next generation takes on more control. Dario and Apollo have young families and are beginning to spend more time inside the business.
Workers prune vines in the vineyard. (Courtesy photo)
The winery walls are a living scrapbook for the Braganini family. Black-and-white framed photos of siblings, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts and uncles dot the hallways, office spaces and tasting rooms. Apollo and Dario say they often talk about the next outgrowth of their family tree.
“My hope is one of my children or nephews or a combination will want to keep the legacy going,” Apollo says. “My oldest boy, Apollo III, we call him ‘Tray,’ just turned 13. He is planning to work his first summer here. We will see how he feels after the summer, but that’s the goal — keep this place going strong and pass it down. That would be the ultimate satisfaction for me.”
“We are going to work him hard and toughen him up!” John Braganini shouts with a laugh.
By the Numbers
200+: Products produced by St. Julian Winery
45,000: Cases sold in 2024 of Sweet Revenge, St. Julian’s top brand
18,000: Cases sold of all flavors of the Punch Line wines, introduced in July 2024
10: States where St. Julian Winery & Distillery products are distributed
20,000+: Members of the company’s Wine Club
1.5 million: Gallons of total capacity
6: Tasting rooms (in Paw Paw, Union Pier, Dundee, Troy, Frankenmuth and Rockford)
4,200: Tons of grapes harvested each year
53: Grape varietals used by the winery
Nearly 300: Tons of tart cherries used every year
25: Number of acres at the estate vineyard in Coloma, maintained by John and Sarah Braganini
