The biggest question that emerged from Republic National Distributing Company’s (RNDC) collapse in California last year was whether the struggling mega-wholesaler would be able to carry on as a mega-wholesaler. With managerial dysfunction within and aggressive rivals without, the country’s second-biggest wine and spirits distributor had clearly lost a step on the “total beverage” battlefield. Could RNDC fight its way out of the corner into which it had painted itself? Or would it have to start hocking portions of its nearly national empire to survive?
I don’t know anybody in the trade who seriously staked a claim on the former outcome. But it was at least mathematically possible until earlier this week, when after nearly nine months of rumors, RNDC announced its plans to sell its operations in six states and Washington, D.C., to Reyes Beverage Group (RBG), the country’s largest beer distributor. VinePair was the first to report this middle-tier mega-deal, advancing trade press coverage that morning featuring a statement from RBG describing “active discussions” about a possible acquisition by obtaining a memo from RNDC’s president and chief executive effectively confirming it to employees.
“[W]e have aligned with Reyes Beverage Group on key economic terms for them to acquire RNDC’s operations in Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C.,” wrote RNDC’s Marc Sachs, in a Tuesday morning email shared with me by a current employee, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation by the firm. “Upon completion of the transaction, Reyes plans to run the newly acquired businesses separately from their current operations.”
Even before RNDC announced its hasty retreat from the Golden State last June, speculation has swirled that the RBG and its parent company, Reyes Holdings — the country’s sixth-largest privately held company — would buy some or all of the business. I framed up that conversation in my column here at Hop Take on June 6, 2025:
As the biggest wholesaler in the state, RBG boasts a grip on the beer game that borders on a stranglehold. So when California tweaked its warehousing regulations to allow beer wholesalers to more easily distribute spirits late last decade, it stood to reason that the company — flush with the capital and swagger that comes from being the wagon to which Constellation Brands has long been hitched — would go looking for full-proof additions to its portfolio. And that liquor brands, especially those with canned-cocktail aspirations, would come calling.
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Intriguingly, several of my deepest sources on the West Coast, none of whom know one another, tell me that RNDC was actually in talks last year to sell its California business to RBG, a claim that would comport with interim CEO Bob Hendrickson’s statement in an internal video I obtained Monday that “the company tried everything in their means to either do a merger, an acquisition … and do what we could to remain solvent in California.” Hendrickson, a longtime executive at RNDC who had transitioned into an advisory role in 2024, only (re)took the reins at RNDC in February 2025 after the resignation of former CEO Nick Mehall; speaking about the company as a third party (“their”) could mean he wasn’t involved in those talks, which would track with the general timeline. Neither RNDC nor RBG replied to a request for comment for this column. But if the companies were discussing a deal in 2024, that discussion clearly collapsed. Now RNDC CA has, too.
(Hendrickson passed away unexpectedly in October 2025.)
Since 2024, RBG has emerged as one of the big winners in RNDC’s losing streak. Early last year, Tito’s Handmade Vodka made the leap from the latter’s portfolio to the former’s in California, setting off a trickle of departures by major suppliers that would eventually turn into last summer’s flood. RBG also snagged Gallo’s High Noon from RNDC CA before its June withdrawal announcement, then cleaned up after the announcement, onboarding Gallo’s “commercial spirits and select wines,” as well as Kirin Beer and Spirits, Infinium Spirits, William Grant & Sons, and bluechip LALO Tequila as suppliers fled its indirect competitor’s sinking ship box truck in the state. By my count — and I was tracking it pretty closely — only Breakthru Beverage Group (BBG) grabbed more suppliers from the wreckage of RNDC CA. Now, with RBG on the verge of buying RNDC’s operations in seven markets, it is poised to consolidate much more wine and spirits volume under its Modelo-gold roof.
It’s a sign of the times in more ways than one that America’s biggest beer distributor is now biting off a big chunk of the non-beer middle tier. For RNDC, it marks the end of any meaningful claim to a nationwide network; while it only reached 39 states to wine-and-spirits leader Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits’ (SGWS) ~45, its geographic scale was still a major selling point to suppliers. (This logic underpinned its acquisition of Young’s Market Company in 2022, opening up the Western states even as it cast the die on last summer’s catastrophe in California.) In the “FAQ” document RNDC circulated to employees last week announcing the exit of Jose Cuervo parent company Proximo Spirits from its portfolio in almost every market, the company more or less conceded as much. “California played a significant role in how Proximo structured its national distribution,” the document, which I obtained from an RNDC employee, reads in part. “Following RNDC’s decision to close the California business, Proximo reassessed its overall approach and determined a different structure was warranted.” In his message to employees this week, RNDC’s Sachs framed the sale of key markets — Florida! Illinois! Virginia! — as a “positive development,” and it may well prove to be. For the firm’s owners, at least, if not its workers. (If you’re an RNDC employee, send me tips about what you’re seeing and hearing within the firm: [email protected] or dinfontay.11 on Signal. You can remain anonymous.) But its days as a serious national challenger to SGWS are effectively over.
The deal is also reflective of the American drinking public’s shifting thirst, and RBG’s exposure to it. Modelo, for so long its golden goose, had a tougher go in 2025, with the Trump administration’s reign of terror on Hispanic communities raining on what had been a half-decade hot streak. Just as Reyes Holdings has diversified across foodservice logistics, Coca-Cola bottling, and beverage-alcohol distribution to stabilize its business, RBG itself stands to benefit from diversifying its portfolio beyond beer after years of category volume declines. That’s if it can execute, of course: Servicing full-bottle spirits and wine demand is culturally and operationally different from beer, and integrating a multi-state acquisition to actually capture those sweet synergies is much easier on paper than in practice. But as John and Jane Q. Guzzler gravitate to spirit- and wine-based canned cocktails, they also move the market further into RBG’s sweet spot stocking single-serve, high-velocity alcoholic beverages in the off-premise in general and the all-important convenience-store channel in particular. There’s a logic there.
Most important to all brewers not named “Constellation” is what this deal suggests about the direction of the middle tier. In the short term, not much. RNDC has never been a major player in beer distribution. It acquired some Bud houses in Alaska a few years back, and likely has shared-service agreements with beer wholesalers in some less dense markets. But its overall book is overwhelmingly weighted toward wine and spirits, so RBG’s acquisition won’t have much of a direct effect on brewers in the markets RNDC is selling. (Any fermented-base brands that are with the latter distributor in those states would have to contend with the strictures of franchise law if they want to be written out of the Reyes Cinematic Universe.) Those markets, by the by, overlap nicely with those where RBG was already strong in its own right. One wouldn’t expect brewers with, say, its Premium subsidiary in Virginia to experience dramatic, protracted disruptions as it takes over RNDC’s business there — though one is occasionally surprised.
But strategically, RBG’s buyout is yet another marker pointing toward a future for the beverage-alcohol market wherein routes to market are dominated by fewer major players, and “a drink is a drink is a drink” regardless of its base alcohol. Brewers, especially those in the craft segment that lack scale and stability, have so far struggled in this consolidated “total beverage” milieu, losing “share of mind” from mega-wholesalers (including Big Gold itself) who have moved onto the next big thing, and losing placements to… well, the next big thing, be it flavored malt beverages, spirits-based RTDs, or the wine-based one-two (riot) punch of BeatBox and BuzzBallz. In his memo, RNDC’s Sachs said “Reyes plans to run the newly acquired businesses separately from their current operations.” RBG itself has said nothing of the sort to date, but it’s hard to imagine it would operate the RNDC properties in a true silo, foregoing the savings of sharing infrastructure, manpower, and other resources. Consolidation is good for the consolidator, and its most important partners, but less so for the long tail — and that’s where most brewers live.
(In this, the RNDC-RBG deal half-rhymes with Anheuser-Busch InBev’s realignment of NÜTRL and Cutwater in California to SGWS, and the macrobrewer’s sale of its wholly owned distributorship in New York to the same. Those 2025 deals were middle-tier consolidation by a wine/spirits colossus into the beer category; this 2026 deal is a partial mirror image.)
And what of anti-trust considerations? VinePair co-founder Adam Teeter posed that question to me on “The VinePair Podcast” yesterday, echoing several sources who have asked me whether RBG’s play for RNDC will fly with federal regulators. I’m no legal scholar, just your Humble Hop Take columnist. Given the Trump administration’s demonstrated predilection for corporate shakedowns, labor suppression, and undoing anything the Biden administration did (namely, scrutinize competition in the beer industry), it’s hard to imagine a substantive objection from the current Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission. But you’ve gotta figure attorneys and lobbyists for SGWS — which is still grinding its way through a Biden-era FTC lawsuit over alleged price-fixing — will be angling for one.
After all, mega-wholesalers deserve a level playing field, too.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Congratulations to the Beer Institute, National Beer Wholesalers Association, Brewers Association, and all the other trade organizations that successfully lobbied the federal government not to lower recommended alcohol intake limits in the latest edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. As a result, we all enjoyed the thrill of watching Oprah’s disgraced TV physician-turned-snake-oil jockey-turned-high-ranking public-health official Dr. Mehmet Oz delivering vibes-based guidance on drinking to the nation last week. “Don’t have it for breakfast,” said the current administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Classic! Don’t worry, he followed up with a joke about how brunch doesn’t count. Beer-mosas and Micheladas for everyone! What’s that? A Reuters item corroborating an earlier Vox report that the Department of Health and Human Services suppressed key research about alcohol’s carcinogenic links as it drafted these guidelines? Shut up, nerd!!!
📈 Ups…
Hail and farewell to Heineken’s chief executive Dolf van den Brink, who announced plans to step down after half a dozen years at the helm and 28 overall at the Dutch macrobrewer… Congratulations to Katie Leinenkugel on her new job as president of the eponymous, Molson Coors-owned brand… The Michael James Jackson Foundation announced its 10th (!) round of bev-alc scholarships… A new bipartisan bill in the U.S. House of Representatives would delay the de facto hemp-derived THC ban another two years, on top of the one already baked into federal law…
📉 …and downs
The tie-up between 2 Towns Ciderhouse and Seattle Cider Co. will see the latter’s Industrial District taproom close at the end of February… Oskar Blues’ taproom in Colorado Springs has permanently closed… The Beer Institute’s latest batch of tax-paids analysis shows the category’s shipments -3.6 percent for November 2025…
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