Amy Prosenjak was running inventory for a billion-dollar furniture company in Ohio when her husband floated an idea that would change their lives.
Prosenjak and her husband were in their early 30s and had fallen in love with wine tourism, traveling to Napa and to Italy whenever they had the chance. One day, her husband asked why she didn’t get a job in the wine business.
“I said, ‘Well, who would hire me?’” Prosenjak recalled. “And he said, ‘I don’t know.’”
WineJobs.com answered that question for them. A to Z Wineworks, then a small Oregon winery owned by two couples and in the process of buying Rex Hill, happened to be looking for a chief financial officer, and Prosenjak said she sent her resume “kind of on a whim.”
One of A to Z’s founders, Bill Hatcher, who was CEO at the time, called to ask whether she understood cost accounting, and Prosenjak replied, “I’m the director of inventory for a $1 billion furniture company. That is my specialty.”
“He said, ‘Well, I can teach you the wine business,’” Prosenjak said. “And he did.”
Prosenjak sold her house, moved across the country and began what she calls a “wonderful and wild 20-year ride.” Today, 53-year-old Prosenjak is president and CEO of A to Z Wineworks LLC, overseeing A to Z, Erath and Rex Hill, brands that account for roughly one in every four bottles of Oregon-origin wine sold in U.S. multi-outlet retail, according to Circana data. That measure covers grocery, mass, club and drugstores, but leaves out restaurants, tasting rooms and most independent wine shops.
The industry Prosenjak learned to scale has changed drastically. After years of expansion, production across the company’s brands fell about 32% in 2025 to 550,000 9-liter cases, according to the company. A to Z expects to remain around that level in 2026.
“We’re going to follow the consumer,” Prosenjak said. “If we need to be a slightly smaller company, we will do that because we’re going to stay true to our winemaking values. But we want to stay profitable.”
Prosenjak spent much of her career helping build one of Oregon’s largest wine businesses. Her challenge now isn’t simply figuring out how to keep growing it, but how to keep it relevant as the American consumer who fueled the industry’s growth changes.
The Smurfette in the room
When Prosenjak arrived at A to Z, the company was producing about 80,000 cases a year. She said she felt liberated working in a family-owned business where decisions could happen almost instantly.
“We were this kind of unit of trying to figure things out together,” she said. “Within an hour, you could change a policy or do something that benefited your employees.”
Her corporate experience helped give the growing winery a framework to scale. Eventually, Prosenjak moved from CFO to president and then CEO, a progression she describes as more organic than planned.
Growing up, Prosenjak had a poster featuring Smurfette surrounded by male Smurfs. A doorway on it was labeled “president,” alongside the message that girls could do anything.
“I was just encouraged at a young age that I could do anything,” she said.
She’s not the smurfette anymore, though. About 52% of A to Z’s roughly 65-person core team identifies as female, as does about 55% of management, according to Prosenjak. She said winemaking and viticulture have also become more balanced, but distribution remains heavily male-dominated. She still sometimes walks into distributor meetings as the only woman in the room.
Those aren’t the only rooms Prosenjak has learned to navigate. She keeps a closet of clothes at the winery because her job can take her from a construction site to the office to a community event in the same day.
“You need different outfits, different shoes,” she said. “I love shoes.”
She jokes that when she worked for The Limited, nobody invited her to an event and asked her to bring jeans. With wine, people ask her to bring the product.
From family ownership to private equity
The company around Prosenjak has transformed, too. The A to Z she joined was owned by two couples. Today, A to Z Wineworks LLC is wholly owned by private equity firm Sycamore Partners. Sycamore bought Ste. Michelle Wine Estates from Altria for approximately $1.2 billion in 2021, and Ste. Michelle acquired A to Z in September 2022. The terms of the A to Z acquisition were not disclosed.
Prosenjak and her management team retain operating autonomy, according to the company. She sits on A to Z’s board alongside Sycamore representatives and reports results to the board monthly.
“It’s different than being family-owned, but it is a different time in the industry cycle,” Prosenjak said.
Wine is not like shampoo
Scaling a winery presents a problem Prosenjak didn’t encounter in furniture or fashion.
“You have to predict the future,” she said. “You’re never correct about what’s going to happen.”
Wineries have to plan for grapes years before the resulting wine reaches consumers. If demand doesn’t materialize, production can’t simply be turned off overnight. Mother Nature complicates the equation further because the same vineyard can yield different amounts of grapes each year.
“It’s not like you’re making shampoo where you can say, ‘I’m going to make one gallon and that’s all I’m going to make,’” Prosenjak said.
When consumer demand falls faster than production can adjust, unsold wine can sit on the balance sheet while a winery works its way back into equilibrium. A to Z said its 32% production reduction reflected changing consumer demand, retailers dedicating less floor space to wine, distributor consolidation and weaker export demand. The company scaled back portions of contracts with all of its growers and reduced its harvest intern needs.
The pressure extends beyond A to Z. Oregon’s 2025 vineyard and winery census found winegrape production fell 25%, case sales declined 16% and exports dropped 29%. More than half of growers reported leaving fruit unpicked.
Rob McMillan, founder of Silicon Valley Bank’s wine division, has been warning about a broader shift for years. SVB’s 2018 industry report cautioned that retiring baby boomers and younger consumers with different preferences would make it increasingly difficult for wineries to routinely increase both prices and volume.
“The industry was doing very well, and had been doing very well for roughly 30 years,” McMillan told Fortune. “I think it’s probably one of the harder things for any business to do when things are going well: change.”
Now that correction is underway. SVB estimates U.S. wine volume fell to about 329.2 million cases in 2025 from 335.9 million in 2024 and expects declines to moderate before the market reaches what it calls a “bumpy bottom” in 2027 and 2028.
The pain isn’t evenly distributed. “The under-$12 category is the part of the industry that is in greatest distress,” McMillan said. Among premium wineries SVB tracks, he said dollar sales are roughly flat and volume is down about 2%.
But McMillan argues the industry’s fundamental problem is bigger than Gen Z. Baby boomers historically favored wine more heavily when they drank, while younger generations spread their choices more broadly across wine, beer, spirits and other beverages. When an older wine consumer exits the category, one younger consumer doesn’t necessarily replace that demand.
“It’s not about people not liking wine or not understanding wine,” McMillan said. “It’s really just about the change in demographics.”
The consumer gets to vote
When Prosenjak entered the industry, White Claw didn’t exist. Today, consumers can choose among wine, beer, spirits, canned cocktails, nonalcoholic drinks, lower-calorie products and cannabis beverages depending on the occasion.
Prosenjak isn’t assuming A to Z will simply return to the growth trajectory that defined much of her career, but she also isn’t treating the industry’s decline as a catastrophe.
“We’re trying not to panic in this present tense of like everything’s terrible in the industry,” Prosenjak said. “It’s hard, for sure. But we should try to bring some of the fun, leave room for the fun.”
If demand calls for a smaller operation, she said, the company is prepared to accept that. If we need to be a slightly smaller company, we will do that because we’re going to stay true to our winemaking values,” Prosenjak said.
