Clyde Beffa Jr. is that rarest breed of - K&L Wine Merchants

Red,
white
& Beffa
Wine merchant’s Coastside roots run
deeper than those in the vineyards of Bordeaux
a By Clay Lambert
Photos by Lars Howlett
Clyde Beffa Jr. is that rarest breed of
men. While many claim they read
Playboy magazine for the articles, Beffa
has the career to prove it.
“I was reading this on the airplane on
our honeymoon,” he says, casually flipping
through the February 1971 issue of
the men’s magazine nearly four decades
later.
“He was reading Playboy,” says wife Kay Beffa from the
kitchen. “I was reading ‘Love Story.’”
Actually, both Clyde and Kay Beffa have been on the same
page for a long, long time. The couple have been married
for 38 years — most of it while living in an idyllic homeplace
along the winding Purisima Creek Road, south of
Half Moon Bay. The Beffa family goes back generations on
the coast. But they are not slave to tradition. Well, at least
not after Clyde Beffa’s eyes fell on that Playboy article,
“Stocking the Urban Wine Cellar,” by William Massee.
“Two days later,” he says now, “I officially started collecting
wine.”
Today, Beffa and his partner Todd Zucker, preside over a
small empire of premium wines. Their company, K&L Wine
Merchants (the initials come from Kay Beffa and Zucker’s
wife, Linda), was founded in 1976. While the company has
had as many as five outlets over the years, there are currently
three stores, in San Francisco, Redwood City and
Hollywood. It is an online sales dynamo — Beffa says that
about 40 percent of the company’s sales are generated from
klwines.com. The New York Times once enthused that
klwines.com “is considered by many to have the best online
wine site in the country…”
Suffice to say, Beffa didn’t see it all coming back when he
was growing up in San Mateo. The family traces its
Coastside roots to the 1870s. His grandfather, Charles, was
born in Montara and grew up to be one of the area’s leg-
12 MAY 2009 | Review Magazine

“ONE DAY I WAS SHOVELING
MANURE OUT OF DITCHES
OR SOMETHING AND A
FRIEND DROVE BY AND
SAID, ‘DO YOU WANT
TO DO THAT WHEN
YOU ARE 60’”
Clyde Beffa Jr., reflecting
on his switch from dairy
farming to wine merchant
Clyde Beffa Jr. poses with wine from his
home cellar.

endary dairy farmers. At one time, the
family ran five dairy farms, including
one near where La Nebbia Winery now
sits and another not far from Beffa’s
current home. In fact, a young Clyde
Beffa Jr. used to look longingly at land
that is now home. “I started working
for my grandfather when I was 13 —
cutting hay and things — and I always
said I wanted to live on this spot.”
Beffa wasn’t content to simply follow
in the footsteps of his father and
grandfather. He wanted to work in
agriculture, but he knew there was
more to know than his family could
teach him. So he enrolled in college at
the University of California, Davis.
And, in the turbulent and exciting
1960s, he was in no particular hurry to
go home. He was also enrolled in the
ROTC program, a move that had significant
meaning during the Vietnam
War.
The Summer of Love was a moment
of truth for Beffa.
“College was fun,” he says. “I was
going to grad school in Davis. Then
my grandfather said, ‘I think you
should get a dairy.’ I said to myself, oh
boy, that meant work.”
And so it was that Beffa became a
businessman. He ran a dairy in Tracy,
and it was back-breaking work.
Decades later, he remembers thinking
that the dairy business was young
man’s work. “One day I was shoveling
manure out of ditches or something
and a friend drove by and said, ‘Do
you want to do that when you are 60’”
Beffa recalls. “Well, I was in my mid-
20s. I wasn’t thinking about it, but I
didn’t think I wanted to be doing that
when I was 60.”
The U.S. Army intervened for a
while. Beffa was required to serve after
his ROTC experience. He says officials
let him get his business off the ground
for one year before he was brought
back to put on a uniform. He served
one year and two months, all of it
stateside and all of it under the specter
of the Vietnam War. He said the Army
was set to ship him into combat but a
visit to the doctor revealed knee trouble.
“They didn’t want to give me surgery
and then there would be rehab.”
Beffa was honorably discharged.
After his stint in the service, Beffa
returned to working the family’s live-
TRUISMS FROM THE CELLAR
Coastsider Clyde Beffa is not only in the wine business as co-owner of K&L
Wine Merchants, he also knows a thing or two about enjoying a bottle after nearly
four decades of collecting. Here are some tips:
t Drink what you like.
Beffa says too many well-meaning enthusiasts become enthralled with outside
influences such as magazine reviews and expert opinions. “A lot of people just
follow the ratings without tasting it first,” he says.
t You don’t have to spend an arm and a leg.
He says there are perfectly enjoyable $10 and $15 bottles of wine out there. And
they are often ready for consumption the minute you buy them, whereas highend
wines may need to develop in the cellar.
t Don’t count on that alcohol percentage.
All wine bottles include a percentage of alcohol by weight. Beffa says those numbers
aren’t exact and that you can expect the true alcohol content to vary by a
point and a half either way.
t You don’t need a cork … necessarily.
Beffa isn’t a fan of those plastic or composite “corks” favored by many manufacturers
these days. Too hard to pull, he says. But he does like some screw-top
wines, as long as the cap isn’t damaged to let air in. “A cork at the table is
always better, though,” he says.
— Clay Lambert
stock. When his grandfather died in
1972, he got a significantly bigger portion
of the family’s business.
In the meantime, of course, there
was that Playboy magazine. Beffa had
become a wine collector. At first,
Zucker was a friend who ran a discount
liquor store in San Francisco
and therefore had access to the wine
Beffa craved for his collection. In 1976,
they decided to go into the business
together. Zucker would handle the
hard stuff. Beffa was in charge of premium
wines. Their first store was off
El Camino in Millbrae.
Today, K&L is a family affair for the
Beffas. Clyde Beffa’s son, Clyde Beffa
III, or “Trey,” is vice president and
Review Magazine | MAY 2009 15

domestic wine buyer, working out of
the Hollywood outlet. Daughter Kerri
Beffa is the company’s events coordinator
and lives in Phoenix, Ariz. (A dog,
“Bailey Beffa,” is listed on the company’s
Web site as “director of recreation.”)
Like the wine itself, the business can
be intoxicating, or it can give you a
headache. Last year was the company’s
biggest ever in terms of sales, Beffa
says. But these days sales are off, and he
says, on average, wine prices are down
about a quarter. Last month, the Wine
Institute reported that 467 million gallons
of California wines were sold —
up 2 percent from 2007 — but the
retail value of that river of wine
dropped from the previous year. A
restaurant trade group reported a 10
percent drop in restaurant wine sales as
consumers looked to conserve. Despite
some burgundy-red ink in the business,
the U.S. Department of Agriculture
remains relatively bullish on the wine
business. “Despite deteriorating global
economic conditions, world demand
for wine is likely to ease only marginally
in 2009 as consumers shift to lowercost
brands rather than significantly
reducing their consumption,” the
USDA report said.
Of course, the beauty of putting away
bottles in a personal cellar, as Beffa
does, is that their value today is of little
consequence. Beffa has hundreds of
bottles stashed in a climate-controlled
cellar at his home. He favors French
Bordeaux and routinely travels to the
region to sample some of the best
wines in the world. The bottles in his
cellar may be dusty, but they are never
forgotten. He says he opens the door
and pulls something tasty from the
rack about once a week.
The Beffas are quick to share a glass
with visitors. Their passion for the
wine — and each other — only
becomes more evident when the cork is
pulled from a new bottle. On a rainy
day in April, Clyde Beffa poured a 2007
Gerard Boulay Sancerre Chavignol,
from the Loire Valley of France. It was
a sauvignon blanc with a mineral, delicate
taste. A grateful visitor asked Beffa,
as an aside, what causes headaches
when he drinks too much wine Before
he could answer, Kay blurted, “Me!”
Everyone laughed. 1
Clyde Beffa Jr. pours a French
sauvignon blanc for visitors to his
Coastside home.
Review Magazine | MAY 2009 17