(Photograph by Joe Pugliese.)

During that lean period, Coppola began making wine. In 1975, he and his wife, Eleanor, bought the legendary California vineyard Inglenook in Napa Valley. They acquired the 1,560-acre property and used it as a summer retreat. Originally, Coppola had a more modest home in mind than the estate that Gustave Niebaum built in the 1880s, planted with 125 acres of Cabernet grapes and located in the prized Rutherford winemaking region. But the land, the grapes and the history drew him in. Growing up on Long Island in the 1940s and ’50s, Coppola always intended to make some homemade wine. The stories his uncles and father told about how Italian families made wine during Prohibition fascinated him. They brought over California grapes, allotting a share to each patriarch for table wine. As always, he went with his gut. "I’m the opposite of what you would call uptight," he says. "I don’t worry about decisions. I make quick decisions if they feel right to me."

FRANCIS FORD Coppola (right) on the set of Youth Without Youth. (Photograph by Cos Aelenei/courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.)

When One From the Heart decimated his finances, Coppola’s life took a new turn. "Let’s make wine," he told Eleanor. She rolled her eyes at the suggestion. Borrowing $40,000 from his mother to buy equipment, they hired a neighbor as winemaker. They got lucky. One of the biggest challenges new vintners face is creating a track record—storing the wine, bottling it and selling it requires a long lead time and a good 10 years before the vineyard produces income, according to Coppola. They bottled their first Rubicon in 1985, after seven years in the cask.

"I never thought anything of it really becoming a business," Coppola says. "It had 100 acres of these very fine grapes that had once been part of that Inglenook tradition, and everybody wanted to buy them and have contracts for them. And at one point, I said, ‘Well, gee, if everybody thinks these grapes are so good, why don’t we make wine ourselves?’"

While the company has never disclosed the number of cases of wine produced, it generated an estimated 800,000 cases in U.S. sales in 2006 and ranked 18th among U.S. wine companies, according to Wine Business Monthly. The Coppolas bought adjoining property as it came up for sale to reunite the former Inglenook land. In 1995, they acquired an additional 94 acres and a chateau. They built the winery and reintroduced wine-making to the Inglenook property in 2002. The following year, they created a 16,000-square-foot wine cave.

However, as the company expanded, Coppola became concerned that his range of interests might overpower the brand. For example, he worried that he might confuse buyers by keeping his premium wine, selling for more than $100 a bottle, and his more popular wines, the least expensive priced at $10 a bottle, under the same label. He also wanted the flexibility to experiment with new ideas—like wine in self-sealed individual glasses, perfect for picnics or for selling at sports stadiums, he believes. Coppola struggled with the notion of keeping his name on the prized Inglenook wine, originally wanting to maintain the Niebaum-Coppola identity. But in January 2006, he split the business into two separate companies. And while he found it difficult, he thought it was the right decision to remove his name and simply call it Rubicon Estate to distinguish the premium wines. Now, Francis Coppola Presents encompasses the more popular wines, as well as the other businesses, such as Mammarella foods, his international luxury resorts like Blancaneaux Lodge and Turtle Inn in Belize and restaurants in San Francisco and Palo Alto.

"The wines are good quality and there has been supreme effort made to improve on the labels over time," says Peter Meltzer, the auction correspondent for Wine Spectator and author of Keys to the Cellar: Strategies and Secrets of Wine Collecting. While the Coppola wines have not yet reached the status of California cult wines like Harlan Estate or Screaming Eagle, this wasn’t just a vanity investment, Meltzer says. "They’re really serious."

And demand is growing for Rubicon vintages at auction; recent prices include a 1987 fetching $69 a bottle and a 1994 hitting $94.

Ironically, as Coppola returns to filmmaking, his wine industry contacts question why films are distracting him from wine-making. In the beginning, Coppola recalls his filmmaking friends believed he wasted his talent with wine. "They really did say, ‘Francis, you’re a filmmaker. You made one of the most successful movies ever made. Why are you fooling around with this wine company? Get out of that and put all your energy into film,’" he remembers.

But Coppola did not plan on a decade-long break from film. His last picture, The Rainmaker, was released in 1997. Indeed, he struggled, ultimately unsuccessfully, to make Megalopolis, a film set in New York about a master builder searching for utopia. "I hadn’t made a film for 10 years until this last year, but that wasn’t because of the other business, but more because of a big, big dream project I had been trying to work on that took all my effort. Ultimately, I wasn’t able to pull it off," he says. "But it’s true that during that period, I did put this excess creative energy into other projects."

Over the past 11 years the Coppola companies have generated compound average growth in both revenues and profits in excess of 30 percent, and the number of employees has expanded from about a dozen to 400, according to CEO Jay Shoemaker, who has worked for Coppola throughout that period. Shoemaker typically hears from his boss 50 times a day, a hands-on approach that dates back to the early days of the director’s career. Shoemaker says that when his boss was filming Finian’s Rainbow in the 1960s, Coppola asked his star, Fred Astaire, how he managed to get around supervising all of his dance studios, and Astaire replied that he did not actually oversee them. According to Shoemaker, even then, Coppola decided he never wanted to start that kind of company. The entrepreneur’s companies and products all reflect his personal taste and aesthetic. For example, the tropical resorts in Belize and Guatemala lack air-conditioning "not because we’re cheap," Shoemaker says, but because Coppola dislikes it. He also objects to large beds (he prefers doubles), but permits queen-size mattresses at his resorts as a concession.

Then there’s the wine-by-the-glass story. As Shoemaker tells it, Coppola had an idea to sell individually packaged glasses of wine. However, after months of work, Coppola was frustrated that the project hit a snag when the engineers couldn’t create an effective seal to prolong the wine’s shelf life. Shoemaker recalls presenting a status report to Coppola explaining the obstacle. "He took one glance and said, ‘I reject this data,’" Shoemaker says, adding that they eventually solved the problem by developing different packaging and using a new industry technique. "We kept working on it because we’re more afraid of disappointing Francis than making fools of ourselves in the marketplace," he says. The product became available last summer.

Coppola also sought to make his children, Roman, 42, Sofia, 36, and granddaughter, Gia, 20 (daughter of the Coppolas’ son Gian-Carlo, who died in a boating accident in 1986), part of the business. They are on the company’s board, and Roman shepherded an award-winning Syrah, RC Reserve, to market. "They were raised in Napa Valley and went to school at St. Helena public schools there," Coppola says. "They’re very much Napa Valley kids, which means they’re wine kids."

And they are also film kids. Roman and Sofia now own American Zoetrope, which emerged from bankruptcy protection in 1991. The legendary studio, whose films received 16 Academy Awards, produced Youth Without Youth. Sofia directed the critically acclaimed The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette there. She won an Oscar for best original screenplay for Translation in 2004. Roman has worked on everything from serving as second-director on Bram Stoker’s Dracula to directing his own 2001 feature film, CQ. He is a producer of and cowrote the screenplay for The Darjeeling Limited, directed by Wes Anderson, which, as Worth went to press, was scheduled for release on September 29.

Coppola sees his children someday succeeding him in the wine, food and hospitality businesses and expects them to take his company over or modify it, he says. "I don’t think they’re going to sell it all and buy racehorses, but, you never know."

Back behind the camera, Coppola savors the freedom that self-financing brings him, as well as a return to personal filmmaking. Youth Without Youth is the story of a septuagenarian looking back at a life with regrets, but who gets another chance by growing younger and younger. He shot the film in Romania last year.

"It’s an experimental film, so the risk is there at the outset, but it’s a story that Francis wanted to tell about aging and about missed opportunity and romance," Tim Roth, the star of the film, says. Before filming, Coppola met Roth where he was working in Siena, Italy, and talked about the story—how when you look back over your life, you have regrets, and this is a story of a man who blew it and gets another chance. This personal story resonated for Roth as well. He had wanted to appear in a Coppola movie since he was a teenager; 20 years earlier he had written Coppola a letter asking if he would cast him in a movie. While auditioning for another Coppola film in the ’90s, the director pulled out the letter. "I asked him if I could have it and he wouldn’t let me," Roth says. "He put it back in his bag."

On the set, Roth says that Coppola rehearsed every speaking role before beginning the filming, which spanned an 85-day period. One particularly memorable shoot: filming a scene in the Black Sea. "It was freezing. It was absolutely freezing, to the point where it just took your breath away. We spent the morning doing that," Roth says. "He wanted us down with the waves coming over us, on the rocks, in our pajamas—very nice." The result? "I’ve seen that scene; it’s beautiful," Roth says. "He was right."

For Coppola, there’s no trick about why. He has full control.

"It’s the golden rule," he says. "The person who has the gold, makes the rule. You can turn down something that’s offered, but you can’t just say, ‘I want to make a movie like this or that.’ You have to then go around with your hat in hand and find someone who will finance you. I find that’s a very difficult, long process and filled with hopes that then are dashed, or the financing changes, or they say, listen you can do it if you change this, and put this actor in," he continues, taking a deep breath. "That was part of the 10 years I didn’t make films. So I’m extremely excited and positive about this new era I’m entering in, because, thanks to these companies and their performance, I’ll be able to finance my movies myself. And if I finance them myself, just like the last one I made, then it’s likely I can make the initial choice correctly."

How confident is he of his success? He is forgoing the standard completion guarantee insurance that most studios now require. For Coppola, that seems like a gamble worth taking. "In a sense, if I make a mistake, I’ll wipe myself out," he says. "But I don’t think I will make a mistake."

Elizabeth Harris is a staff writer for Worth.

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