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USF alumnus takes career from stock clerk to vineyard consultant

August 18, 2016
by Hilary Lehman

Vic Motto knows his career as a consultant in the luxury wine business is an enviable one.

He has grounds for comparison, too - working in wine wasn't his first career or even second, but a third line of work for the '74 USF Muma College of Business alumnus. Since forming his consulting and wine investment business nearly four decades years ago, the CEO of Global Wine Partners has advised wineries around the world, including Robert Mondavi. When he started, there were 40 or 50 wineries in Napa - now there are 500.

Motto began his career as a musician, worked as a clerk at a liquor store, dabbled in entrepreneurship, earned an accounting degree and became a CFO - all before landing on his passion. He was a high school dropout who had earned a GED, and he was apprehensive about college.

"Going to USF gave me those tools that I lacked," he said. "I had instinct, I had a passion for something, I had dreams, but I didn't have an education."

But experiences in starting both successful and failed businesses pushed him to try. He realized after a failed guitar store launch that the accountant who looked at the company's bills understood more about the business than he did.

When he enrolled in USF to pursue an accounting degree, Motto was 32, taking classes with students at least 10 years his junior. When he got all A's in his first classes, Motto said he thought to himself, "If I could get four A's in one term, I could get four A's every term." He only got a few B's in his time at USF.

"Doing that really gave me confidence," said Motto, who often comes back to USF to speak to students about his career journey. "It gave me the confidence to say, 'I can compete in the world because I can compete at USF.'"

While he enjoyed success in accounting after graduation, even rising to the level of chief financial officer at a company eventually, he felt his career lacked a certain spark. He thought back to the time he was working as a stock clerk at ABC Wine & Spirits Liquor, and how he had enjoyed learning about the wines and areas where the grapes grew. He had always wanted to see California, so he went to visit Napa Valley.

"At that time, Napa Valley was going through a huge revolution," he said. "New people were going there to open wineries, and this place that had been the same for 100 years was being modernized."

He figured that since everyone in the business was new, he could do it as well as anyone else could. After opening that first office in Napa, he opened an office in Sydney, Australia, and an office in Paris, and started to become known in Italy and France. This being the early '90s, email made it possible for him to do business globally. Later, the licensed investment banker and CPA started consulting about wine in Spain, Germany, and South America.

"We started working with wineries all over the place because the industry was growing at two or three times the rate of the general economy," he said.

Motto said he realized that he was doing something that had never been done before when he saw his own face on TV.

"There I was talking on the local news, and there was a caption under my face that said 'Vic Motto, wine business consultant.' And the news anchor said, 'Wine business consultant, now there's a job,'" Motto remembers. "It's a designer job. I made it up. Seeing it on television made me realize that yes, I had accomplished something."

While Motto, who lives with his wife in their homes in Napa Valley and Sarasota, has answered thousands of questions about wine over the years, he says there's still one question he says he can't answer: "What's your favorite wine?"

There are hundreds of thousands of wines in the world, Motto says, with more than 20,000 U.S. grocery store bar codes for wines. That's more than any other grocery store category except vitamins.

"Wine is incredibly diverse. You take the same grape and you plant it in 12 different places, you have 12 different taste profiles," he said. "You can't have a favorite out of that."