In 1877, after finishing his secondary education, his parents arranged for his emigration to the United States, where he lived at the grape plantation of his uncle Louis Grozelier in San Jose, California.

[1] In 1879, he became a student of Charles Lefranc (owner of the Almaden Vineyard and Wine Company), one of a number of French immigrants who had expanded the viticulture introduced into the Santa Clara Valley by the Catholic mission fathers.

After college, he returned to San Jose, California due to the depression in the French wine industry caused by the Phylloxera plague and became the winemaker at Almaden.

[2] With the ban on alcohol during Prohibition, Paul Masson Champagne Company suffered major financial difficulties and had to rework his business model to instead manufacture canned fruit.

The company was, however, allowed to produce a small quantitiy of wine for sacramental use in Catholic churches, as well as bottles of "medicinal champagne".

"[7] A widely circulated and much-parodied outtake for one commercial from the campaign features Welles attempting to deliver his lines while severely inebriated.

[9]: 225 Despite the ads' success at the time, the Paul Masson brand has suffered from a long-term image problem, particularly since its founder's death in 1940, in being synonymous with low-end wines.

Unfortunately, the smell quickly permeated the cabin making astronauts physically sick, and public pressure over taking alcohol into space led NASA to abandon their plans.

It was Seagram who, worried by the brand's sagging sales in the 1970s, brought in first Orson Welles (1978–81) and then John Gielgud (1982–85) as advertising spokespersons for the wines.

Over the next twenty years, the American wine industry would dramatically segment itself with, essentially, all the large volume brands falling by the wayside.

Internal competition and resulting cannibalization dramatically reduced the combined sales of Paul Masson and Taylor (as it did with Almaden and Inglenook, also owned by a single parent company).

In 2021, it was announced that the Federal Trade Commission had approved the sale, allowing production of the brandies to return to California after 28 years of being made in New York.