Bonny Doon sold to War Room Ventures . . .

Didn’t see that one coming . . .

1 Like

I did; they were clearly closing out inventory before that and just closed their tasting room.

Thanks for that, Larry. Wow…that’s a shocker. Didn’t see that coming, either.
Wonder what that means for his Popeluchum effort in SanJuanBatista. Hope not the end of that.
Tom

Congrats to Mr. Graham. Right in that age sweet spot to sell the business he created and labored for so many years. Time to pop a good bottle!!!

Does anybody know anything about these War Room people??

Just read Grahm’s explanation, linked to in that Wine Business story, about how he has reformulated Cigare Volant in a more early-drinking style. My Lord, he likes the sound of his own pen (or keyboard)!

The WB article describes the WarRoom people as follows:

WarRoom Ventures, a wine company based in Santa Margarita in San Luis Obispo County established to invest and develops wine brand [sic]. . .

Perhaps related to the people who just sold the WA to Michelin and have some cash to burn?

does that include popelouchum?

The story isn’t really about how he has reformulated Cigare. That’s just one of the many footnotes.

And yes, he likes to opine. He’s quite Schildknechtian.

Could feel it coming a few years back. Seemed to lack focus after the Popelouchum launch. Loved driving to the tasting room in Davenport and will miss the great staff, but he seemed not to care much lately. Will really mis the Syrahs and Telegraph. Ah well.

Nice article:

Read this article and it was quite illuminating. It describes how ‘ambivalent’ Randall is about selling, about his shortcomings on the running of a winery from a finance side, and about his desire to spend more time on his vineyard project.

It also talks about the new owner’s plans - to slash the number of offerings to four (red blend, white blend, rose and picpoul blanc), to go national distribution on each at the $15-20 price point. It truly is a bummer for a brand that was so well known for their plethora of offerings, for Randall and his staff’s desire to experiment, etc.

The end of an era, somewhat similar to the Qupe sale recently.

Cheers.

My suspicion is that vin Gris de cigare was a huge portion of their sales.

Not really similar to the Qupe thing. Quite a bit different, I think.
Tom

Doesn t the Wine Group own the Vin Gris de Cigare label?? It’s bottled in Livermore, as I recall.

sounds like it doesn’t if they sold it to war room. I thought they bought big house red and others.

Wine Group bought Big House.I got the two confused.

I think this could end up as a good thing for both Randall and Bonny Doon. Some good business management combined with Randall’s inventiveness could work out well.

My point was more about a bigger company coming in and having a plan to shrink the number of offerings, make them more ‘mainstream’ and have them go ‘national’.

The specifics of each sale are quite different . . .

Cheers!

And he sold both his Big House and Pacific Rim labels quite some time ago . . .

Cheers!

Wow. Thanks for posting, Larry. We visited the Davenport tasting room in the fall, and noted that 2 specific wines we wanted were “on sale”. Glad we bought all that we truly wanted: sounds like some of the wines will be phased out. Sign of the times, and the distribution system.