A Different Way to Sell Your Winery

Its been one of the hottest rumors and worst kept secrets of 2007 so far. Duckhorn has been exploring a sale and unlike most winery sales which are kept quiet to keep distributors and retailers from stopping sales focus on the wines, this one has been made public, although its been "somewhat" denied. “Currently, we don’t have a buyer and our company is not for sale.” says Alex Ryan. Someone needs to tell Mr. Ryan how to lie better, or how to lie at all.

Sales of big wine brands are usually kept as quiet as possible, but for some reason, management elected to tell the employees in advance that Credit Suisse had been hired to value Duckhorn and to explore sale options. The outcome of this has been (as I'm told by an employee friend) that employee morale has never been lower. I imagine that other employees will follow former winemaker Mark Beringer out the door and many are probably updating their resumes as I type. The whole thing is odd and perhaps the saddest thing of all is that this highly-successful company may end up in the hands of a private equity firm looking for quick arbitrage.