Derek Benham

“Redwood Empire Founder”

Derek G. Benham’s path to whiskey begins in the hot, dusty farm country of California’s San Joaquin Valley. He was born in 1958 and raised in Bakersfield, at the southern end of the valley, where his family tended vineyards and pistachio groves. Summers meant hard labor in the fields consisting of weed pulling, potato picking, and trellising grapes while country music played over the radio. Those long days gave him firsthand knowledge of agriculture and planted the idea that wine, and eventually spirits, might be his life’s work.

In the late 1970s, Benham left the valley and headed to the Bay Area to study at California-Berkeley. There he earned degrees in philosophy and English literature, graduating in 1982. While his coursework focused on the humanities, his summers and weekends increasingly revolved around wine. The combination of academic training in critical thinking and a practical grounding in farming set him up for a career that would blend creativity, business acumen, and an instinct for what drinkers wanted next.

Once Derek graduated, however, the US economy was struggling; interest rates were high, and the job market was tight. Instead of pursuing a conventional corporate path, Benham went straight into the wine trade, taking a sales position with a small California winery. Over six years he worked his way up to general manager, learning every part of the operation, from grape contracts to bottling lines and balance sheets. By the time the winery was sold to the owners of La Crema, its sales had grown to several hundred thousand cases, giving him a front-row seat to building and then exiting a successful brand.

In 1990, Benham struck out on his own and founded Codera Wine Group. It was there that he created the highly successful Blackstone Merlot, a label that would help define affordable, approachable California Merlot in the 1990s. After seven years of rapid growth, he sold the Blackstone brand in 2001 to Constellation Brands, one of the world’s largest spirits companies. The sale freed him financially and creatively to think bigger about how to bring well-made wine to a broad audience.

That same year he launched his next venture, Purple Wine Company (later Purple Brands), acquiring the dormant label, ‘Mark West’, and turning it into one of the most successful California Pinot Noir brands on the market. Mark West grew to nearly a million cases and twice earned Impact “Hot Brand” recognition before Benham sold it, also to Constellation, in 2012.  Purple Brands continued to expand, adding additional wine labels and custom winemaking operations, but by then Benham’s attention was already tilting toward distilled spirits.

By 2013, after three decades in wine, Benham saw an opening in American whiskey in California. Looking at the cool, humid climate of the Russian River Valley, he believed the region was ideal for long, slow barrel aging. That year he committed to building a distillery in the small town of Graton, surrounded by redwoods and vineyards. Construction began in 2014, and by 2015 the team was filling its first barrels while also sourcing older whiskey from established producers in Kentucky and Tennessee to blend with their own spirit.

The result of that work emerged as Redwood Empire Whiskey, launched in 2019. Named for the 420-mile belt of ancient redwood forest along the Northern California coast, Redwood Empire ties each core expression to a specific protected tree—Pipe Dream Bourbon, Emerald Giant Rye, and Lost Monarch, a blend of bourbon and rye. Labels feature artwork and details about the towering trees that lend the whiskies their names. Benham’s whiskey program grew quickly; within a decade, Redwood Empire had built the largest inventory of aging whiskey in California, even while producing only a handful of barrels a day at the Graton facility.

As demand surged, Benham continued to invest in whiskey. His team expanded the lineup with Bottled-in-Bond whiskies such as Grizzly Beast Bourbon and Rocket Top Rye, as well as cask-strength releases and the Haystack Needle single-barrel series, all firmly within the American whiskey and bourbon space. In 2024 he took a major step by acquiring the Savage & Cooke distillery on Mare Island, a former naval base north of San Francisco. The purchase allowed Redwood Empire to triple its production capacity and establish a larger visitor destination, while keeping the focus firmly on whiskey.