Coppola acutely feels the influence not only of his extended Italian family, but also of the Finnish Gustave Niebaum, founder of the vineyard Coppola bought in 1975. In that year, Coppola was living in San Francisco with his wife Eleanor and their two young children. They wanted just a small, summer house in the country, a place to write, to plant a garden. Instead, "one thing led to another," Coppola says, and they purchased 1,500 acres, which comprised most, but not all, of the old Inglenook estate in the Rutherford appellation of Napa County.

The vineyards and winery were originally developed by Niebaum, an entrepreneur and former sea captain. He purchased the Inglenook property in 1880 and set about developing it into a wine estate that would rival the finest chateaux of Bordeaux, France. The winery that Gustave Niebaum completed in 1887 was indeed as beautiful as many French chateaux. After Niebaum died in 1908, his widow managed the business for many years and, upon her death in 1937, left the property to her grand-nephew John Daniel Jr. and his sister, who had both grown up there. In 1964, John Daniel sold off 94 acres, including some of the vineyards and the historic Inglenook Chateau winemaking facility, divesting a small but highly important part of the estate. During the Niebaum family's stewardship, Inglenook wines were served to U.S. presidents and their esteemed guests and were honored with numerous international awards.

Amazingly, only after Coppola had purchased the property did he learn that he had become the "custodian" of a great wine estate. It was, he explains, "the Queen of the Napa Valley, that had so impressed the world in 1941 that its wine was put on the list of the ten greatest wines ever made, the 1941 Inglenook." For Coppola, the realization became a mandate to recreate and develop further the grandeur that had fallen into disrepair. "I tend to be an enthusiastic person about whatever I'm involved in at the moment," he says. So Gustave Niebaum's goal became Coppola's own, to make the property and its wines truly the equivalent of a French first-growth estate, "the equivalent of Chateau Margaux here in California," Coppola says. He named the winery Niebaum-Coppola to express his commitment to Niebaum's aspiration, a continuing process requiring generational effort.

In 1995, the Coppolas purchased the 94 acres that John Daniel had sold off, including the glorious Inglenook Chateau winery. Francis derives particular satisfaction from having reunited the two properties, restoring the estate to its original dimensions. In 2002, he added the contiguous J.J. Cohn property, bringing the total vineyard acreage to 260 and the total estate to 2,000 acres. The two-story stone chateau that Gustave Niebaum built 116 years ago embodies the glory of the estate with its background of lush vineyards, rolling hills, and wooded mountains. In the large courtyard in front of the Chateau, Coppola has added shallow Roman pools with quiet fountains and a wide colonnade trellised with grape vines that shelters visitors from the sun and frames stunning views at both ends. The interior of the chateau is part grand hotel, part movie set, part tasting room, part museum, and part working winery. All sound floats up to the towering ceilings, leaving the floor level quiet for browsing visitors.

While it was Coppola who developed the estate and winery into its present state of beauty and success, he believes that his predecessor showed him the way. And the only risk for the future is "focusing too much on the short term goal of making money rather than the long term goal of trying to become the grand wine estate of Napa," he says. "Fine wine, premium wine, requires lots of patience, and you have to be willing to plan to take care of the vineyards in a way that is very costly. And then you have to wait many years for those grapes, and then make the wine in the most scrupulous and costly way. "