US’s largest alcohol distributor sued
On Thursday 12 December, the FTC sued Southern Glazer's, the US’s largest alcohol distributor, for price discrimination. The press release from the FTC states, ‘Since at least 2018 and continuing today, Southern has repeatedly discriminated in price between disfavored independent purchasers—which include neighborhood grocery stores, local convenience stores, and independently owned wine and spirits shops—and favored large chain purchasers of wine and spirits, such as Total Wine & More, Costco, and Kroger.’
Of course, anyone who has bought consumer products for retail sale knows that you can get hefty discounts if you buy at volume … and that’s what Southern says they were offering. Their press release states, ‘The FTC’s lawsuit takes issue with the use of volume discounts that Southern Glazer’s – and nearly every distributor of consumer products in the country – uses to lower customers’ costs and enable consumers to pay lower prices for the everyday goods they need.’
Now here’s where it gets tricky. Volume discounting is not illegal but, as the FTC Commissioner Alvaro M Bedoya points out in his statement, ‘Under the [Robinson-Patman] Act, suppliers can provide different prices when those differences derive from greater efficiency and there is a legitimate cost savings to the supplier from supplying more of a product to a certain buyer.’ However, the FTC alleges that Southern’s discounts for large national chains are not derived from differences in their cost of distributing products to larger retailers, ‘nor do they reflect legitimate attempts to meet prices offered to chain retailers by competing distributors’.
Quite honestly, the only thing surprising about this is that the FTC is using a law that has rarely been used in a quarter of a century because for years critics argued that it protected the inefficiencies of smaller retailers and raised prices for consumers … and there may be some truth to that. But I think that all of us should think about how this affects our ecosystem. If Southern wants to sell volume, which clearly they do, they’ll push large-volume brands to large-volume retailers. If they’re successful at that, which they have been – they are one of the US’s 10 largest privately held companies and sell one out of every three liquor bottles in the US – that results in less diversity of retailers. And because chain retailers often carry the same products, that results in less diversity of wines available. And that eventually results in fewer winemaking companies and less diversity of wine jobs. And if you hate this thought experiment, no matter where you are in the world, the best thing you can do is to buy from locally owned retailers who are excited about the producers they represent.
I wish the FTC luck.
Tandil, Argentina’s newest Geographical Indication
This is older than I would like – I did not hear about this until it was posted on the Wines of Argentina blog on 2 December – but back on 8 July, Tandil became Argentina’s newest Geographical Indication (GI).
Tandil GI is a small rectangle south-east of Buenos Aires surrounding the town of Tandil. Soils are largely sandstone and quartz and the area currently grows Cabernet Franc, Carmenère, Syrah, Sauvignon Blanc and Merlot. While there are around 20 vineyards in the area the only commercial producer is Cordón Blanco, who lobbied for the creation of the GI.
Treasury acquires Chinese winery
On 10 December Treasury announced their purchase of a 75% stake in Stone & Moon Winery in Ningxia province for US$17.9 million. The purchase includes 43 ha of vineyards, the winery and a tasting room. The company had previously been purchasing Cabernet Sauvignon and Marselan from Stone & Moon for their China-origin Penfolds wines, including One by Penfolds and CWT521. Treasury has been making wine from China-grown grapes since 2022 but this is their first purchase of a Chinese wine brand.
While the reason that Treasury is investing more in Chinese wine production is almost certainly because the tariffs that were levied on Australian wine wildly disrupted their business model, it’s cool that their solution to that is to invest more in the local market of a place that they have historically relied upon so heavily for exports.
Finland’s new dietary guidelines
On 27 November Finland launched their new national nutrition recommendations. The recommendations state (roughly translated from Finnish), ‘Since it has not been possible to set a safe limit for the use of alcohol, it is not recommended. However, if alcohol is used, the amount should be as small as possible.’ Previously the recommendations were for at most one drink a day for women and two for men. Felicity Carter, writing for Meiningers, asked a couple members of the Finnish wine trade if they expected the change to impact consumption. She quoted Heidi Mäkinen MW, portfolio manager and partner of wine importing company Viinitie, who replied, ‘I really don’t think these guidelines will be the reason why people are drinking less also here as elsewhere around the world. Consumption is decreasing here too, but this is due to the overall health trend, on top of likely economical reasons.’
Unfortunate as it may be that Finland seems to have jumped on the World Health Organization’s ‘no safe level’ bus, I do appreciate that their guidelines go beyond human health. The new recommendations suggested reducing consumption of meat and coffee – of which Finland has the highest per capita consumption in the world – for both health and environmental reasons.
First harvest estimates for South Africa
South Africa Wine, the country’s national wine body, published the first of its 2025 harvest estimates on 11 December. So far the crop looks to be larger than last year but still on par with the second-smallest crop in the last two decades, and quality thus far looks to be good. Producers, however, are still 2–3 months out from harvest. We’ll keep you updated.
That’s all for this episode of the wine news. If you enjoy this newscast and would like to see it continue, please subscribe to JancisRobinson.com. And if you have breaking news in your area, please email [email protected].
This is a transcript of our weekly five-minute news broadcast, which you can watch below. You can also listen to it on The Wine News in 5 Podcast. If you enjoy this content and would like to see more like it, please subscribe to our site and our weekly newsletter.
