By Virginie Boone

Late last month, a bankruptcy court approved the sale of all Vintage Wine Estates assets, including several physical wineries and brands in Sonoma County. Based in Santa Rosa, Vintage Wine Estates (VWE) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 24, with over $400 million in liabilities.

Copart Executive Chairman Aaron Jayson “Jay” Adair paid $85 million for B.R. Cohn, Kunde and Viansa in Sonoma Valley and Carneros, a sum that also included Clos Pegase and Girard wineries in the Napa Valley. Bill Foley’s Foley Family Wines acquired many other VWE assets, including Sonoma Coast Vineyards, which has a tasting room in Bodega Bay.

Adair and his wife Tammi own Adair Winery in Suisan Valley and have long produced an estate Tammi’s Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. The couple and their two children moved to Suisan Valley in 1993. In 1997 they bought a piece of land and over the next several years planted it to wine grapes. Their first wine was bottled in 2004. In 2021, the Adairs bought the neighboring property to build an estate winery called Vigneto that will be open to the public.

Dallas-based Copart is an online car auction company founded in 1982 by Willis J. Johnson with just one salvage yard for used and totaled cars in Vallejo, California. Tammi is the daughter of Willis Johnson and Adair is Johnson’s son-in-law.

Between 1982 and 1993, Johnson opened 11 more Copart locations in Northern California, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest. The company went public in 1994, allowing it to further expand.

The Copart website launched in 1996 and soon became the first to accept proxy bids for online bidding, the first to put images online and the first to launch a hybrid auction model. In 2003 it became the first online auto auction to be completely online. Today it sells over 2 million vehicles a year and operates 243 locations in 11 countries.

Johnson was born in Oklahoma where he grew up learning about business from his entrepreneurial father, who ran restaurants, built houses and farmed dairy cows. Johnson now lives in Tennessee and remains Copart’s chairman of the board. He wrote a book about building the business called “Junk to Gold: Lessons I Learned.”

Within its pages he detailed how he never had a doubt his vision for Copart would work.

“I never thought I couldn’t do it,” he wrote. “Some may call it confidence. Some may even think that kind of blind optimism comes from ignorance. But I just never let the possibility of failure enter my mind. And I think when you can leap into something whole heartedly like that you can do amazing things because you don’t have fear holding you back.”

It has since transformed into a global technology company with a platform linking buyers and sellers across the world, with a presence in Canada, the UK, Ireland, United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Spain, Germany and Finland. In 2017 Copart acquired National Powersport Auctions, an auction service for powersports.

Adair serves as executive chairman of Copart. Joining the company in 1989 at the age of 19, his first job was sweeping floors, but with Johnson’s mentorship, he rose to the role of president by age 26, developing a hands-on passion for technology that transformed the industry from traditional brick and mortar auctions to online virtual auctions. He served as CEO from 2010 to 2024. He is estimated by Forbes to be worth $2 billion.

Image By: Erika Greene Photography