Don Panoz, a serial entrepreneur who helped build Georgia’s wine-making industry, launched motorsports businesses and founded the upscale Chateau Elan development in metro Atlanta’s exurbs, said earlier this year that the word retirement “isn’t in my vocabulary right now.”
"I never become hostage to anything I do," he said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Progress isn't made by looking in the rearview mirror."
Panoz, 83, died at his home in Duluth on Tuesday after a brief battle with pancreatic cancer, according to a press release by his company.
He had his family by him and “enjoyed his last cigarette,” according to the release. Panoz, a smoker, made much of his fortune in the pharmaceuticals industry, where his business included technology used in nicotine patches to wean smokers off cancer-causing cigarettes.
He enjoyed being a maverick.
He grew up in West Virginia and eventually co-founded Mylan Pharmaceuticals. But he built much of his pharmaceutical empire and the Elan Corporation in Ireland, in part because of business frustrations in the United States. He eventually became an Irish citizen.
It was on a business trip through Georgia that he tasted locally-grown grapes and wondered about raising a fancier variety to become the foundation for a winery and resort near metro Atlanta.
“A lot of people told me I couldn’t do it and couldn’t make wine, that we were too far out and people wouldn’t come,” he recalled.
He didn’t heed the warnings.
In the 1980s he launched Chateau Elan in Braselton, Ga. It eventually included a winery, golf courses, hotels, restaurants, convention space, a spa and an equestrian area, as well as nearly 1,000 high-end homes in gated communities. The main winery building, designed to look like a 16th century French chateau, is visible from Interstate 85 near a northeastern edge of Gwinnett County.
