In an upcoming episode of CBS's hit series, Undercover Boss, Rick Tigner, president of Kendall-Jackson Wine Estates, gets choked up during the hour-long reality show.
Production of the show started last spring, around the time that Tigner's boss and mentor, wine industry icon Jess Jackson, died. Jackson himself gave the go-ahead for the show early last year.
Undercover Boss, which puts chief executives on the frontlines of the companies they run, took Tigner back to his working-class upbringing in Modesto.
"It kind of really brought it back to home," Tigner says during the show, which received a press screening Thursday at Kendall-Jackson's Santa Rosa business offices. The program will be aired at 8 p.m. Jan. 29.
As president of Kendall-Jackson, which has 1,000 employees and produces 5 million cases of wine a year, Tigner is responsible for leading the global sales, marketing and production operations, as well as the administrative functions of the family business.
During the show, now in its third season, Tigner poses as a former grocery store worker from Plano, Texas named Jake Williams. He sports cowboy boots and hat, a horseshoe or biker mustache, and braces.
Tigner tells workers he is considering a career change, and during the seven days of taping, no one discovered his true identity, he said Thursday.
He tries a number of job, but because the show was taped prior to harvest, he was spared early morning grape picking.
He hustles between vineyard rows with Spanish-speaking workers, estimating the season's crops by counting the number of flowering vine clusters. The counting must be done without disturbing the clusters, some of which fell to the ground from Tigner's inexperienced handling.
"That's like dropping money on the ground," says Laura Porter, an assistant vineyard manager, who was training "Jake."
"This is definitely a difficult job," Tigner comments to the camera. "Irespect the people that do this every day."
Other jobs included working with an abrasive truck driver, a tasting room employee and a bottling line supervisor.
The latter, Marcos Guillermo, a native of Guadalajara, Mexico who has been with the company for 20 years, was present during Thursday's screening. In fact, Guillermo started working for Jess Jackson's company the same week that Tigner did.
When Tigner's true identity was revealed to Guillermo, the two men expressed their gratitude for the opportunity that Jackson gave them.
When the screening was over, Tigner said the show had given him the opportunity to help define his own path as president of the company, at a time when all eyes were on him.
At the end of the show, the employees who were profiled were awarded various gifts for their work. CBS requested that details of the rewards and the show's ending not be revealed.
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