How St. Francis Winery Cut Email Investigation Time by 90% Across Three Wineries with Adaptive Security
~90%
less time investigating each reported email
20 min
to deploy email security, versus 5+ hours on the prior gateway
0.7%
failure rate on hyperrealistic phishing simulations
“Having all the AI analysis right there took a lot of the guesswork out of it for me. Adaptive lays it out in plain language, so I can tell whether something is safe or malicious a lot quicker.”
About St. Francis Winery
St. Francis Winery traces its roots to 1971, when Joe Martin planted his first vines in the heart of Sonoma Valley. He opened the winery in 1979, and in 1988 St. Francis partnered with the Kopf family, whose own wine and spirits legacy reaches back to 1933. Today St. Francis farms more than 400 acres of certified sustainable estate vineyards and is known well beyond Sonoma for its wine and food pairings. St. Francis shares its technology team with two sister wineries, Sequoia Grove in Napa Valley and Résonance in Oregon's Willamette Valley.
Challenge
A hard-to-tune email solution
Rudy Shaw has served as Director of IT for the three wineries for about five years. He sets policy, chooses and buys the tools, and handles support. That makes every tool he runs a direct claim on his own time, and every bit of friction between tools lands on him.
Rudy had already moved security awareness training to Adaptive, but email filtering still ran on a separate legacy gateway. It was harder to navigate and harder to tune, and it placed its own warning banners on messages, and those banners competed with the Adaptive Phish Alert Button his employees had learned to trust. Muting those banners kept people focused on one habit, but it also meant he could not fine-tune the gateway the way he wanted.
“The old gateway was putting its own banners up asking people to mark things safe or malicious, when I wanted them using Adaptive's Phish Alert Button. That button was paying a lot more dividends, and I didn't want to retrain everyone to press two different buttons.”
The Turning Point
A single pane of glass
Rudy's relationship with Adaptive started with training. He had never been happy with his legacy awareness provider, so Adaptive's AI tools, deepfake content, and phishing simulations stood out immediately. Just as important was how simple the platform was to run, with simulations, training, reporting, and analysis tied together in one place.
So when the contract on his email gateway came up for renewal, he called Adaptive first.
Overseeing three companies, he wanted training, reporting, and email protection in the same platform, with one button for employees and one console for him.
“It's nice to have one pane of glass instead of bouncing between one application for this and another for that. It was really important to me to have both systems in the same place.”
Solution
One loop for training and email security
Getting Adaptive Email Security running took minutes, and Rudy was protecting mail across the wineries the same day. A week later he fine-tuned auto-remediation, and that was the whole implementation.
“It took me about 15 minutes to get dialed in the first day, and about 20 minutes total. The other product probably took me a good five or six hours to get everything set up how I wanted.”
On the email side, Adaptive analyzes every inbound message and explains its verdict in plain language, alongside the technical evidence. Each verdict comes with a confidence score, so Rudy knows at a glance which messages he can act on right away and which deserve a closer look. That is what turned a manual investigation into a quick decision.
“Rather than doing a full investigation, I can just read through the description. It gives me peace of mind right up front about how far I need to dig, and the fact that it's always learning definitely helps.”
On the training side, Rudy builds content around the wineries' own policies. The most recent example is a new AI policy he finished and loaded into Adaptive this fall. Simulations and training also feed each other, so an employee who misses a simulation moves straight into follow-up training, while leaderboards and scores keep the program engaging.
“I have a lot of user policies, and the fact that we can just upload our current policies and Adaptive builds the training around them was great. Having the phishing simulations and the training tied together is great too.”
Results
Thirty-second decisions
The clearest return is Rudy's time. Reviewing a suspicious email used to mean roughly five minutes of research. With Adaptive's AI analysis, it now takes about thirty seconds. Setup told the same story, with about 20 minutes to deploy and tune email security compared with hours on the previous gateway.
“It's dropped from about five minutes of research to about 30 seconds.”
More threats stopped before anyone sees them
In a 30-day window at St. Francis alone, Adaptive caught over 100 malicious messages, and filtered thousands of spam and graymail messages, all of which were missed by native filtering. Adaptive is blocking more than Rudy's previous gateway did.
A workforce that reports first
The people side has moved just as far. At St. Francis, employees fail phishing simulations just 0.7% of the time, even as the simulations grow more realistic. Nearly half of simulated phishing emails are reported through the Phish Alert Button, and employees have flagged more than a thousand messages in total. Training completion sits at 100%, and so does completion of remedial training.
“They are better trained, but more importantly, they're more hypervigilant. When in doubt, report it. And the system makes it easy, both for me and for them.”
What comes next
With the foundation in place, Rudy plans to extend the program into video and voice simulations as employees progress through the current phishing levels, preparing the wineries for the AI-driven impersonation that comes next.
“I love the video and voice features, because that's where things are going and that's where people are going to start getting tricked more. I've been really happy with the product so far.”
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