A custom La Cornue range from France, Namibian marble in the bath, King’s pine floors and a wine room the listing calls secret. Joseph Carr is selling the house on Scargo Lake; the label left home years ago.
Behind one of the doors in a house in Dennis Village, on Cape Cod, is a wine room the listing calls secret. The rest of the 6,087 square feet carries King’s pine floors, accents of Italian Carrara marble, and a primary bath lined in Rhino white marble shipped from Namibia, described in the listing write-up as almost blindingly white. The kitchen holds a custom La Cornue range, imported from France. The lawn is wide enough to pour for a crowd, and it runs down towards Scargo Lake. The asking price is $4.25 million.
The man who built it is Joseph Carr, a former sommelier from upstate New York whose father’s nickname sits on the neck of several million bottles a year. The brand is Josh Cellars. The house, half an acre of it, went on the market in October.
Dennis Village, 2012
Carr and his wife, Deirdre, built the house in 2012 and settled in Dennis the same year. The architect was Mark Zebrat and the builder was Gable Building, both of Chatham, a few miles east, and the brief was deliberately contrary: make it look less like coastal Connecticut and more like the Hudson River Valley. Cape Cod does grey shingle and white trim. This one does dark wood and imported stone.
Deirdre Josephine Carr, known as Dee, was born in January 1948 and was the president of the company, a fact the Albany Times Union reported she had to remind her husband of more than once. In early 2016, on the day of her 69th birthday, she had surgery after the discovery of a glioblastoma. “We knew it was terminal the day they gave us the diagnosis,” Carr told the Times Union two years later. She died on 5 April 2018, aged 70, after fifteen months of illness. He has since described her as the unrecognised force behind Josh Cellars. They are survived by a daughter, Cailen Marie LaBarge.
So the house on the lake had six years of the two of them in it, and eight of him.
Lebanon Valley, New York
The brand name is not a marketing invention, which is the part people get wrong. “My dad’s nickname was Josh. It was a nickname he got when he was racing stock cars in Lebanon Valley, New York,” Carr told the Cape Cod Times. Joseph “Josh” Carr was a military veteran, a lumberjack and a volunteer firefighter. He died in 1992, long before anyone had thought of putting him on a label. Carr’s mother, Jean, suggested the name; she died in 2021, by which point her husband’s nickname was the most recognisable thing in the premium shelf set at the supermarket.
There was no family estate behind any of this. “We didn’t have a vineyard. Everyone’s favorite white wine was Budweiser,” Carr told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which describes Josh Cellars as the number one premium table wine in the country. He waited tables and poured in New York restaurants during college, became a vice president at Beringer, then ran Mildara Blass USA, the business later folded into Treasury Wine Estates. After 11 September 2001, and after what he has called a long talk with Dee, he quit and started Joseph Carr Wines in 2002. The first Josh Cellars vintage was developed in 2005 with the Sonoma winemaker Tom Larson.
What Deutsch Bought
By 2011 the brand was selling around 25,000 cases a year, which in American wine is a rounding error. That year, according to Marketwatch Magazine, Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits took a 50 per cent stake in Josh and took over sales, marketing and winemaking, with the consultant Wayne Donaldson brought in on production. The deal included Carr’s higher-end Napa brand, Joseph Carr.
Then it ran. Marketwatch Magazine, citing Impact Databank, put projected volume at nearly 1.5 million cases by 2016, the year the privately held Deutsch business was reported at roughly $600 million in revenue on 8 per cent growth, company-wide rather than Carr’s alone. The Press Democrat had the brand approaching three million cases in 2019. The Cape Cod Times reported five million bottles sold in 2022 and 6.2 million in 2023. In between, Wine Enthusiast named Josh Cellars its 2021 American Winery of the Year, and the announcement from Deutsch quoted Carr under a careful title: Brand Founder.
Founder is doing a lot of work there. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that a year after the 2011 deal the company bought Carr out and retained him as the face of Josh; Marketwatch Magazine dates the full buyout to 2014. The two accounts have never been squared in public, and nothing in the record settles what, if anything, Carr holds now beyond the role. No serious outlet has put a figure on his fortune. The distance between a famous name and the entity that legally owns it is a familiar subject here, from Soho House to the Del Vecchio heirs.
A Petition Against Deutsch
There is a live argument about what those trademarks are worth, and Carr is not in it. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Tom Steffanci, a former president of Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits, filed a petition stating that his 2013 twelve-year employment contract gave him the chance to buy a 10 per cent equity stake in the Josh Cellars and Joseph Carr trademarks, sellable back to the company only when his employment ended. The petition asks a court to force a third-party valuation of the Josh trademarks and a buyout of his portion, a claim the paper reported as running to hundreds of millions, and it characterised the company’s allegations against him as “a shameless attempt to smear Steffanci’s reputation.”
Deutsch has not had the matter resolved in any reporting that has surfaced since. Carr is not named as a party. The relevance to a lakefront listing in Dennis is arithmetic rather than gossip: when a former executive’s sliver of a trademark is argued about in those numbers, the whole name is worth a great deal more than the house that the name’s inventor is selling.
The Lawn, Listed
The listing is with Katie Clancy of William Raveis Real Estate’s Luxury Portfolio International division, and she has been selling the biography along with the four to five bedrooms and the five to six bathrooms. “Joe came from humble roots. He was just a regular guy. He worked his way up, as a sommelier,” Clancy told Realtor.com, adding that on a Cape where the houses are grey and white and ice-cold, this one has a soul.
What the listing does not carry is what the house cost to build, what the land cost before that, or why it is being sold. None of that has been published. The reasonable assumption is the dull one: a house designed for two people and a lawn built for parties, priced at $4.25 million in October.
The range stays with the house. The name is already somewhere else.
