Earlier this week, I broke the news here at VinePair that Republic National Distributing Company (RNDC) plans to “withdraw” from California — like, the entire state — at the beginning of September. The second-largest wine and spirits distributor in the country has been collapsing in the Golden State for years, but its death spiral had tightened considerably since the top of 2025, when major brands began heading for the warehouse door more or less monthly. Now, it’s throwing in the towel.
This is a corporate catastrophe basically without precedent in the United States’ typically stable beverage-alcohol distribution business. There’s simply got to be more to the story of how a firm that Shanken Impact projected to do $2 billion in annual revenue in California at the beginning of the year wound up claiming “no path to profitability” in the state just five months later. I’ll continue to report it out. (If you have tips, email me [email protected] or text me securely on Signal at dinfontay.11. You can remain anonymous.) But in the meantime, I want to use this week’s column to come at this story from a different angle. A beer angle.
By my count, since 2022, there have been almost half a dozen major supplier and/or brand departures from RNDC’s California portfolio: The Sazerac Co. in 2022, then Tito’s, Brown-Forman Co. (B-F), High Noon (owned by Gallo), and Cutwater (Anheuser-Busch InBev) in 2025. Of these, most opted to take their volumes to Reyes Beverage Group (RBG), the country’s largest beer wholesaler and a dominant force in California. That makes plenty of sense on merit: Generally speaking, beer distributors tend to outperform wine-and-spirits houses on placing higher-velocity, lower-price point, single-serve products in a broader variety of retail channels, especially non-chain ones. (Perhaps tellingly, the few significant suppliers that came to RNDC’s California operation in the past few years have been mid-major winemakers without meaningful RTD footprints.)
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.
Don’t get me wrong: Nobody gets a pass from RBG in California, and RNDC was no babe in the woods. The fact that the heavyweight in Constellation’s “gold network” took some of the flailing mega-distributor’s billions of dollars’ worth of lunch money in the state is an indictment of the latter’s mismanagement, not the former’s notoriously sharp elbows. Multiple current and recently former RNDC workers in California have hammered this point home to me, describing a mix of arrogance, incompetence, and cronyism at the company’s highest levels.
“Management has been the biggest issue,” says one current RNDC CA worker, who requested anonymity to speak with me without fear of retaliation. “They started focusing on numbers instead of customer satisfaction and that’s what drove them to their fall.” A recently former RNDC CA worker who requested anonymity to preserve relationships in the industry told me the company was “terribly run” and its execs were “in over their heads” in the Golden State, recounting how it had sent a cadre of Texas-based executives west in hopes of running the same playbook that they had in its home market. “None of them got out to meet the customers, learn the market, or listen to veterans’ feedback,” they say. I should note, there’s been some social-media finger-pointing at RNDC’s Teamster-repped California salesforce as a supposed millstone around the wholesaler’s neck in the state. But that doesn’t square with the facts that a) Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits’ (SGWS) sales people are also repped by the Teamsters under the same joint contract, and b) maintaining a productive relationship with a union isn’t some novel or unheard-of management responsibility. It’s part of the job. Not to put too fine a point on it, but from available reporting so far the Reyes Bros. and the Teamsters didn’t run RNDC out of California… its own executives did.
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 2024, that discussion clearly collapsed. Now RNDC CA has, too.
The fact that the country’s biggest beer distributor has taken advantage of RNDC’s California nightmare to more rapidly restyle itself as a total-beverage behemoth in the country’s second-biggest beer market doesn’t bode well for the country’s smallest brewers hoping to access said market. California already boasts a heavily consolidated beer distribution landscape thanks to RBG, which acquired almost 20 distribution houses in the state between 2018 and 2022 alone, according to a report that year from The American Prospect. Fewer routes to the beer aisle means fewer opportunities and worse margins for craft brewers. Even in the absence of most of the franchise protections that addle brewers in most other states, RBG’s sheer size has given it unprecedented leverage over the rest of California’s beer business, and those smaller brewers struggling to hang onto that business’s withering long tail face a narrowing route to market and a worse outlook. (Ditto winemakers, obviously, but this column is about beer.) It probably won’t get wider as RNDC CA sells off its assets; likely buyers include RBG itself, a lesser California beer-distribution conglomerate, or SGWS. In a total-beverage landscape like California, where beer is often sold alongside wine and spirits, small brewers are liable to get squeezed no matter which category the wholesaler nominally hails from.
This isn’t just an operational consideration. Just like there’s only so much room on a distributor’s truck for cases, there’s only so much room in his (or her!!! but mostly his) brain for brands. Wholesalers tend to focus on what’s hot and ignore what’s not. High Noon is hot, which is why RBG scooped it up from RNDC. Craft beer is not, which may explain the cold shoulder RBG’s California subsidiary, Golden Brands, gave to three-decade-old Anderson Valley Brewing Co. As former owner Kevin McGee told Hop Take in June 2024, the distributor had switched over to servicing independent on-premise accounts by phone, and declined to support a key new beer’s rollout in more than a third of its territory. Of course, RBG is hardly the only distributor to shift its focus away from the craft beer segment as it’s plateaued. This pivot is widespread. But RBG is the biggest beer distributor in the U.S., and California is a crucial bellwether for the national beer industry, so what the firm does there sends ripples through the whole country.
Where is SGWS in this? Where is Breakthru Beverage Group, which just leapfrogged RNDC as B-F’s leading wholesaler upon the megadistiller’s long-rumored middle-tier reshuffle last month? What about the Hand Family of Companies, which just completed some California consolidation of its own? If RBG doesn’t make a move on RNDC’s carcass, somebody else will. And the total-beverage landscape in California — and the country — will shift again.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
It’s de rigueur for craft breweries to back local charitable causes, so when Hurricane Helene wrought destruction upon western North Carolina’s brewers last year, their colleagues in neighboring Virginia organized a per-pint donation program to raise money for the recovery. All good so far. But! The state commonwealth’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority (VABC) put the kibosh on that, reportedly telling organizers of Pouring for Neighbors that the (very common) fundraising tactic ran afoul of its rules designed to reduce overconsumption. But! Earlier this month, a tipster sent me a screenshot from the controller’s own website touting a very similar per-unit fundraising scheme for an unrelated cause from Jason Momoa’s vodka brand. VABC’s spokesperson couldn’t explain the apparent contradiction at hand, but it sets up a potential “bizarro world” dynamic: brewers lobbying for equivalence with distillers, rather than the other way around.
📈 Ups…
Braxton Brewing is taking over Hi-Wire Brewing’s space in Cincinnati in a “mutually beneficial agreement,” so that’s nice… Draft sales were down 3.9 percent year-over-year over Memorial Day Weekend, per BeerBoard data, but they outperformed total bev-alc in the on-premise…
📉 …and downs
The Teamsters are striking Breakthru Beverages in Tampa, Fla., alleging the wholesaler is bargaining in bad faith… Dr. J Jackson-Beckham announced plans to leave the Brewers Association at the end of the month… G4 Kegs announced a “pause” in operations due to “the ongoing trade wars and a decline in the draft market”…
Correction 6/9/25: A previous version of this column incorrectly identified the wholesaler that BuzzBallz departed in California when shifting to RBG in 2024. It departed SGWS, not RNDC. Hop Take regrets the error.
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