A funny way to explicate the colossal tectonic shifts currently rocking the American drinks industry’s middle tier is to consider the sundry capacities for bribery exhibited by the country’s various beverage-alcohol mega-wholesalers.
A trade truism is that beer distributors mostly protect and expand their interests through fearsome and disciplined political contributions at the state and federal levels, whereas wholesalers of the harder stuff tend to be more prone to getting greasy.
This varies by state, and exceptions abound. You can certainly find instances of malt-based case-movers debasing themselves in the annals of American alco-history. In 2014, the owner of now-shuttered Massachusetts craft brewery Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project caused a tempest in a tankard when he tweeted that “Boston is a pay to play town.” (This was perhaps a little more accurate than he knew: a subsequent investigation by the Massachusetts Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission eventually uncovered at least 15 instances where Pretty Things’ distributor had made payments for as much as $12,000 to secure taplines.) In 2017, Anheuser-Busch InBev houses in California coughed up $400,000 to settle a state investigation into pay-to-play practices there. It absolutely happens. But the conventional wisdom that wine-and-spirits wholesalers tend to be more willing to swipe and swindle their way to fortune and potential infamy than their beer brethren is conventional for a reason.
In that sense, it’s a delightful flourish of cosmic coincidence that just two days after federal prosecutors in Northern California announced they had obtained a grand-jury indictment to put former Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits Executives (SGWS) on trial over an alleged — and allegedly wide-ranging — “bribery and obstruction scheme” to control product placements, VinePair broke the news that Reyes Beverage Group (RBG) had expanded its blockbuster January deal to acquire vaster portions of the crumbling Republic National Distributing Company empire (RNDC). For those of you keeping track at home, we’ve got, in order, the country’s largest wine and spirits wholesaler implicated in an ugly and spiraling payola investigation at the very same time that the country’s largest beer distributor is muscling its way deeper into wine and spirits wholesaling by buying territories off those categories’ second-largest wholesaler.
Thus, the thought experiment animating this week’s column. Can beer-born RBG bribe with the best/worst of wine and spirits distributors? Or, in a less-loaded formulation that I’m sure the company would prefer: Does the Modelo-moving mega-distributor have what it takes to handle all this new non-beer volume it’s buying off RNDC?
(SWGS, I am obligated to note, issued a statement after the indictment announcing that it was shocked — SHOCKED! — to find that gambling is going on in here “committed to full compliance with all applicable laws and industry regulations, and we hold ourselves and our employees to the highest standards of ethics and integrity. We have cooperated with relevant authorities and will continue to do so.”)
My request for an interview with the apropos poobah about RBG’s “total beverage” strategy went unrequited by its vice president of corporate affairs, who may have sensed that I had hypotheticals about tied-house crimes on the brain. Instead, I was referred to a corporate blog post from July 2025 detailing how the firm — a nearly national subsidiary of the behemoth Reyes Holdings, the country’s sixth-largest privately held company — is “embracing portfolio evolution.” There, I learned that RBG’s “focus is on doing business the right way, building brands through elite execution, setting our teams up for success and working toward our ambition to be the elite beverage distributor in the U.S.,” according to a statement from its CEO, Tom Day. I also got reacquainted with all the liquor brands it scooped up in RNDC’s catastrophic California exit last summer.
Whether RBG can do for full-bottle spirits what it has done for 30-racks of beer is an open-question. The demands of the job are similar — deliver alcohol to retailer; repeat — but not the same. The trucks are different; the culture is different. One longtime supplier source who shall remain nameless here as they navigate their company through a post-RNDC shitshow out west likes to call wine/spirits reps “feather dusters” compared to their counterparts in beer; the product turns that much slower. This cuts both ways. While beer distributors are known for employing hard chargers (maybe none more so than RBG), just because a guy is handy wheeling kegs and restocking c-store coolers does not mean he’ll be any good hand-selling 750-milliliter bottles of super-premium full-proof liquor. To some extent, it probably means he won’t be.
This is an oversimplification, and it elides the fact that in buying RNDC’s operations in 10 states plus Washington, D.C., RBG will get first crack at a workforce with hands-on experience selling booze. (The firm has repeatedly stated it intends to run its newly acquired territories as separate from the beer-distributing business, though nobody seems to know what that means, and it defies the basic logic of market consolidation.) But it is generally true that these businesses are not guaranteed to be instantly compatible and complementary. And while there’s all sorts of synergistic upside to RBG continuing to master the spirits-based ready-to-drink/canned cocktail trade, selling full-bottle stuff is a different beast.
Which brings us back to wine. Notably missing from that corporate blog post was any mention of it! Sure, there was a stock photo of a bottle of Barefoot in RBG’s classic “brand collage,” and the post names GALLO, the world’s biggest winemaker, as a business “rooted in family values that align with our own.” (RBG took the firm’s High Noon brand from RNDC in the Golden State in April 2025, and scooped up “select wines” from Big G later that summer.) But while this apparently foundational document at least pays lip-service to how the House That Modelo Built is evolving to service America’s liquor retailer and customer, it is mum on how it plans to sell, say, Mumm. The sparkler was acquired in late 2025 by Trinchero Family Wines, which is with SGWS in most states, but RNDC in half a dozen — some of which RBG will soon own.
Can RBG sell wine? Does it really want to sell wine? Not single-serve malt-liquor drink-alikes like BeatBox and BuzzBallz, but full-bottle stuff with terroir, terrible labels, and all? Or is its super-sized RNDC buy-out just a manifestation of the ancient investment advice to buy when there’s blood in the streets? While terms of the deal have not been disclosed, it’s inconceivable RBG paid one red cent above the firesale price, given RNDC’s dire straits. You could imagine Day and company planning to make their money going in, offering big wine suppliers favorable contracts that confer brand rights (scant few franchise protections in wine and liquor, after all), and leaving the rest of RNDC’s book to twist in the wind or die (ahem) on the vine.
Regardless of RBG’s veritas intentions vis-à-vis vino, its acquisition will narrow the road. “For producers outside the top-volume tier, fewer distributors means fewer options, less leverage, and less likelihood that anyone in the chain has a financial incentive to tell their story,” wrote longtime wine blogger Alfonso Cevola earlier this week in a perceptive piece for The Drinks Business on the pitfalls of large wholesalers’ byzantine and bizarrely misaligned incentive structures.
The same holds true for beer. RNDC does not have much beer in its portfolio, but its partial absorption into the Big Gold Blob represents an accrual of more power in fewer hands — and fewer routes to market, as I argued when the deal was half this size two months ago. Meanwhile, SGWS is pushing into the category from the other direction, and its relatively recent alliance with Anheuser-Busch InBev has caused plenty of agita among the mom-and-pop multimillionaires in the independent red network. Big suppliers will be fine, regardless of the category they’re in. (They’re all trying to play in all the categories anyway. Total beverage, bay-bee!) But the smaller and more specialized firms — your craft brewers, your organic winemakers, your microdistillers — are in for a lot of hand-wringing.
It’s more ethical than palm-greasing, but then again, ethics don’t pay invoices.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
In case a bloodthirsty Republican president’s imperialist war of choice on a Persian Gulf country wasn’t giving you enough déjà vu for 2003, Jared Keller, the journalist behind the defense-tech newsletter Laser Wars found a way to make it worse: Stone Brewing’s own Arrogant Bastard Ale made its combat debut! Sort of. A photograph taken on the USS Abraham Lincoln on the opening day of Operation Epic Fury shows the once-popular beer’s gargoyle logo on an unofficial “morale patch” on a servicemember’s arm. The obvious joke here is that President Trump is about as arrogant a bastard as has ever existed, but there’s really nothing funny about the senseless slaughter of innocent people, and even less when it’s being done with our tax dollars and in our national name. So. Moving on.
📈 Ups…
In Connecticut, workers at Northeast Beverage have ratified their first contract as Teamsters… A new lawsuit in Ohio aims to block the state’s looming hemp-derived THC beverage ban… Chicago craft brewers Half Acre Beer Co. and Maplewood Brewery & Distillery are throwing in together, but promise not to become “a collection of brands”… Hurray for Hurray’s Girl Beer, which just announced the closure of a $5 million funding round…
📉 …and downs
Boston Beer Co. will lay off 66 workers when it shutters Angel City in Los Angeles at the end of April… JuneShine is set to lay off 30 employees as it shifts all its volume to contract production… Yes, George Clooney and his Casamigos amigos launched their long-rumored non-alcoholic beer brand, Crazy Mountain, and yes, I am already tired of hearing about it…
The article With Reyes’ Expanded RNDC Buy-Out, America’s Biggest Beer Distributor Doubles Down on Not-Beer appeared first on VinePair.