(SFChronicle) -  From 13,000 feet in the air, Joe Wagner looks out of his private jet and over the Pacific Coast. En route from Napa to Salinas, the winemaker points to each landmark below with the familiarity of a commuter on his ride to work: There’s San Pablo Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, the San Andreas Fault. Asked how often he travels by jet, Wagner laughs. He’s in the air a lot these days, inspecting vineyards sprawled from Oregon to Santa Barbara, many more than an hour away from a commercial airport. For Wagner, time is precious.

Reclining in his seat, Wagner pops a bottle of Steorra, the sparkling wine he’s just released. In jeans and a bright-blue plaid shirt, his hair neatly gelled, the baby-face 34-year-old exudes a confidence that feels imperturbable. “The sparkling wine category is booming right now,” he announces as he drizzles the foam into jet-friendly plastic GoVino cups.

He fingers the Steorra cork, emblazoned with the wine’s logo. “I wanted a branded cork, to make clear that this was our wine. Not just one of those shiners you buy in bulk and slap a label on. We wanted to keep our message clear.”

It’s a typical business-mogul line, but message clarity is especially important for Wagner right now: A lot of eyes in the California wine industry are on him. Born an heir to one of Napa Valley’s most storied empires, Wagner is blazing a new trail, and the industry doesn’t quite know what to make of it.

In the last year, he sold a Pinot Noir brand, Meiomi, for $315 million; broke off from his family’s company, Wagner Family of Wine; and at astounding speed, launched a succession of new wine brands under his new company, Copper Cane Wine & Provisions.

To say that Wagner’s career trajectory looks unfamiliar to the Napa Valley establishment would be an understatement. But his path — from the astonishing Meiomi sale to his greater ambitions for Copper Cane — tells the story of how the wine industry is changing today. It’s a tale in which the power of brand has superseded the value of land in a way that American wine has never seen before.