(Wines&Vines) - The two top marketing executives at California’s fast-growing, family-owned Michael David Winery will kick off the Wines & Vines Packaging Conference on Aug. 17 by telling the story of the vital role packaging has played in the winery’s rise to national prominence.

Named Winery of the Year by industry analyst Jon Fredrikson, Michael David Winery became the Lodi region’s unofficial standard bearer with courageous and catchy brands including Seven Deadly Zins, Earthquake and the now-surging Freakshow Cabernet Sauvignon.

The speakers will be two Lodi natives, Melissa Phillips Stroud, vice president of sales and marketing since 2012 and the youngest child of winery co-founder Michael Phillips, and Mike Stroh, the winery’s director of marketing, who first worked for Michael David during college and has been with the company full time since 2002.

Now producing more than 600,000 cases with an average bottle price of $18 and a top price of more than $50, Michael David has succeeded through innovation in marketing, packaging, progressive sustainable practices and long-term, non-stop, shoe-leather sales techniques. Fredrikson reported in January that Seven Deadly Zins was up 14% in volume in 2015, and Freakshow was up 90%, helping the winery add 108,000 cases shipped in 2015.