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In lieu of The Fingers Weekender, today is a special edition—this year’s very first installation of Buzzwords of The Week of The Quarter. But before we get to that, be sure to check out:

• My column last week at VinePair summing up the beer industry’s M&A-crazed Q1;

• My column last week here at Fingers about why it’s so tough to unionize hospitality businesses;

• A few photos from the Minnesota Craft Brewers Guild’s annual conference, where I delivered the keynote address this past Friday;

And that’s about it. As ever, if someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.

Look, I’ll be the first to admit that 2025’s Buzzwords of The Week of The Year competition could have gone a bit more smoothly. The annual reader’s-choice runoff of asinine beverage-alcohol phraseology was supposed to be administered in a series of four quarterly votes, culminating with the four-way battle royale for top (bottom) honors (shames) for the year. I held the first-quarter vote around this time last year, then just kinda forgot about the rest, setting up a rapid-fire vote-o-rama in early 2026 to get everything sorted out. Oops.

However! The Fingers Fam rose to the occasion, eventually crowning “a lot of concern about the whole immigration question”—that old chestnut from outgoing Constellation Brands chief exec Bill Newlands—as Fingers’ 2025 Buzzwords of The Week of The Year. But this year, I’m determined to do better. I put reminders in my calendar and everything.

Which brings us to Fingers’ Buzzwords of The Week of Q1 2026, the first of what will be four quarterly polls to identify the best (worst) palaver to be proffered by the publicists and poobahs of the bev-alc trade and the broader CPG and hospitality industries. Let’s get to it.

🗳️ Cast your vote for The Buzzwords of The Week of Q1 2026

This year, for the first time in Buzzwords of The Week history, each entry is totally free to read with or without a subscription. Entries are published Friday on the site and on social media, with a link in the following Sunday’s Weekender. You can read them all here, or below.

That said, only paying friends of Fingers are eligible to cast their ballots to elevate (denigrate) their favorite (least-favorite) Buzzwords of The Week candidate for quarterly and/or annual recognition.

🤦🏻‍♂️ Get reacquainted with all last quarter’s corniest corporatespeak

Because the only thing I cherish more than my deleterious Summer of Loko is an informed participatory democracy, I’ve linked each of the nine Buzzwords of The Week entries from the previous three months for your review. Reappraise thyself of the florid rhetoric and bloodless boardroom equivocation below.

Again, Buzzwords of The Week are now free for all to read, and publish each Friday on the site. Read the archive here.

What you philistines may not understand about running a publicly traded beverage-alcohol company is you can never, ever just say what you fucking mean. But now that you rubes understand this core tenet of corporate communications, I think you’ll agree that incoming Constellation Brands chief executive Nick Fink has a bright career ahead of him as he takes over from soon-to-be-former head honcho Bill Newlands, a Buzzwords of The Week first-ballot Hall of Famer if there ever was one. Here’s our man Fink to analysts this past Thursday, as reported by Brewbound:

A “dynamic” “landscape,” you say? What is this, Introduction to Art History? Did I miss the recent stretch during when things were static in the beer business? Certainly not in my lifetime, and at 51, Fink was born the year after Miller Lite hit the market like a freight train. No portrait of stability, that. Is this dynamism of which he speaketh good or bad? Depends on whose ear is there to hear it. And that’s the beauty of painting with such a broad brush. You hayseeds simply can’t appreciate it.

If you see beverage-alcohol corporatespeak in the wild that deserves to be the next Fingers Buzzword, submit it for consideration to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

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Fingers is 100% reader-supported and AI-free. Your paid subscription directly funds more coverage and commentary like this. Hope to see you on the other side of the paywall!—Dave.

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Over the weekend, workers at New York City’s Attaboy went public with a union drive. This is a big deal in part because the cocktail bar itself is a big deal: it is often recognized among the world’s best, and it traces a lineage to the late Sasha Petraske, whose legendary and influential Milk & Honey previously occupied the same storefront on Manhattan’s Eldridge Street from 1999-2013.

But Attaboy Local 134—the workers’ independent union, named for the bar’s street address—is also a big deal because there simply aren’t very many unionized bars. Not in relatively pro-labor cities like NYC, Chicago, or San Francisco, and certainly not anywhere else. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the 8.8 million workers in the United States’ “Food services and drinking places” sector in 2025, just 1.8% had union representation. With the exception of bars attached to hotels/casinos/stadiums/etc., which are sometimes organized as part of broader organizing drives in those businesses, the union bar is a very rare bird.

After half a century of anti-labor legislation, corporate consolidation, media capture, and so forth, it’s not easy to organize any American workplace in 2026. Hospitality operators have the full arsenal of well-honed union-busting tools at their disposal, up to and including summarily shutting down the business where workers are unionizing, like the owner of Brooklyn’s Achilles Heel did in February. But bars and other standalone hospitality businesses like restaurants, coffee shops, and craft breweries also present unique structural and cultural challenges to workers that want to exercise their federally guaranteed right to organize with their coworkers for better pay, working conditions, and a voice on the job.

The physical layout of the industry, with tens of thousands of relatively small shops scattered across the country, is difficult and costly for organizers, who tend to favor bigger facilities with more workers. Hospitals, factories, etc. offer a much better “bang-for-buck” to a union with limited resources (which is virtually all of them.) The wildly successful national organizing drive at Starbucks locations nationwide—680 and counting—is the exception that proves the rule here. Though Starbucks Workers United is represented by Workers United, the baristas’ big innovation has been worker-to-worker organizing—i.e., ground-up instead of top-down.

“That’s just not what's been the culture of our US labor movement” for the past 40 or 50 years, Jonah Furman, a former writer and organizer at Labor Notes who now works for the United Auto Workers, told Fingers in 2022, calling it a “new headspace.” But Starbucks stores are all more or less the same across the country, and its baristas all work for the same boss. (The fact that he made 6,666 times their median salary last year probably helps.) By contrast, the sheer variation from one independent F&B business to the next makes it much more difficult for would-be unionists to organize at scale, and without it, SBWU’s headline-generating, movement-sustaining momentum is extremely hard to come by.

The size of bars can also hobble drives in other ways. As Ben Anderson, Ph.D, a labor researcher, told Fingers in 2022, workers in these businesses often internalize the idea that they’re just too small to be worthy of a union. He recalled a conversation with a craft brewery worker: “I asked him specifically, ‘Would you join a union?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, absolutely, I would join a union in a heartbeat,’” recalled Anderson. “But when I asked, ‘Would you organize a union here?’ He said, ‘Well, no, because we're a really small shop, and I just don't think it'd be viable here.’”

Employee turnover, a potential threat to any drive, can be a particular drag in restaurants and bars, where workers have been conditioned to believe that their jobs aren’t careers and thus aren’t worth fighting to improve. Better to just move on than make trouble. Turnover was “a huge reason the energy left,” Matt Marciniec, a former barista at the Twin Cities’ Spyhouse Coffee Roasters, told Fingers after a failed drive in 2020. As the drive turned acrimonious, workers quit, thinning the ranks of the committed: “They were all supportive of the union but also just weren’t ready to fight it out as long as possible, so they were like, We gotta get out of here, this is not a place for us.”

The relative lack of hierarchy within the hospitality business has also stymied drives. At Death & Co, another high-profile Manhattan cocktail bar where a promising organizing effort collapsed in early 2024, bosses were able to persuade some workers that they were sympathetic to the union’s demands—or even deserving of sympathy themselves.

“I think we as employees don't always put ourselves in the employers’ or higher-ups’ place,” a Death & Co server, Ari Mayaudon, told Fingers following an election that saw the union lose 10-8 after every single worker had signed cards just months prior. (Mayaudon confirmed she’d signed a union card but declined to say how she’d voted in the election.) Anderson referred to this as the “‘we are a family’ myth.” In a close-knit, rarified environment like a high-end bar, where management often looks, talks, and used to be part of the workforce, it can be difficult to convince even nominally pro-union workers to cast a vote that feels like it’s “against” a boss they work with shoulder-to-shoulder.

Pro-union staffers at Attaboy are attuned to these distinctive obstacles. “A victory at Attaboy would send a message to bar and restaurant workers that unionization is a real possibility,” they wrote in a press release debuting Attaboy Local 134 to the world. (Attaboy itself did not respond to a request for comment.) The reverse is also true. A failed drive at Attaboy could underscore the received wisdom that standalone bars are an unnatural fit for unions, and that workers at these elite businesses do not need or want the benefits of collective bargaining. Clearly, some do, and will likely continue to, regardless of the outcome on Eldridge Street. But the stakes are high. One way or another, Attaboy Local 134 is a big deal.

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🤐 [Redactables]: Buffalo Trace Daniel Weller Spelt Wheat

Welcome to Fingers [Redactables], a running list of high-end wine and spirits that are so obscenely expensive that anybody who purchases them should be immediately… well… [redacted]. Taxed into the dirt? Pelted with tomatoes? A third thing that I probably shouldn’t write on the internet? You decide!

Buffalo Trace Distillery

Wealth inequality is soaring under the second Trump administration, and you know what that means: revolution! Right? No? We’re not doing that yet? Alright, well, in the meantime, it does mean that stupid status bottles are once again rolling forth from Kentucky’s best distilleries marketing departments to score a slice of that K-shaped economic recovery. Earlier this month, The Sazerac Company’s Buffalo Trace Distillery announced the release of Daniel Weller Spelt Wheat, a new bourbon made with—you guessed it—spelt wheat. Per the release (emphasis mine):

It rules that the press release for any [Redactables] winner could also be featured in Buzzwords of The Week. Maybe a lesson there. The suggested retail price is $549.99 for a 750 milliliter bottle, proving yet again that a thresher separates wheat from chaff, and a Weller Wheated separates fools from money.

🥃 Fingers [Redactability] Rating: 4.5 condo dads suddenly insisting they’ve always been into ancient European grains

🎧 Talking big booze deals and sad Cocktail Guys

Your fearless Fingers editor made some recent podcast appearances that may interest you. Catch me on:

1. The VinePair Podcast on April 2nd for a breakdown of my latest reporting on Reyes Beverage Group’s now-consummated deal with Republic National Distributing Co. for 11 of the latter’s markets.

2. The Brewbound Podcast, also on April 2nd, for more discussion on the above deal, plus analysis on the Tilray Brands/BrewDog/lol situation and a bit on Molson Coors’ acquisition of Monaco parent company Atomic Brands.

3. The Guys Podcast in early March to talk about the Cocktail Guy, an archetype of the modern male experience that will be painfully familiar to readers of this newsletter, with hosts with Bryan Quinby and Chris James. (Sorry I’m posting this one so late, I thought I already had. My bad!)

Big thanks to the reporters/hosts/etc. who included me/Fingers in their work. If you’d like to get My Take™️ on something, get in touch: dave@dinfontay.com. Can’t do every hit, but love doing the ones I can!

See Fingers’ ethics statement about speaking engagements here.

📲 The best Fingers meme ever and/or lately

Don’t miss out, follow Fingers on Instagram today. It’s free and your feed will thank you. (Not really, that would be weird. But you know what I mean.)

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Welcome to The Fingers Weekender, a Sunday digest exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers featuring the independent journalism about drinking in America you love, optimized for hungover scrolling. In today’s edition:

• Tilray Brands’ beverage division was down bad;

• California’s grape crush last year wasn’t down enough;

• Consolidators in the “flavored alcohol” market were down to clown;

• Workers at NYC’s high-end cocktail bar Attaboy are down to unionize;

And much more. As ever, if someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.

Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated periodically with new information. It was last updated on Sunday, April 5th at 1pm ET. If you have tips about what’s going on at Attaboy, please get in touch by emailing me (dave@dinfontay.com) or texting me on Signal (dinfontay.11). Anonymity available.—Dave.

The staff of one of the world’s best cocktail bars has gone union.

On Saturday, workers at Attaboy, an influential cocktail bar in New York City that is often ranked among the global hospitality industry’s most elite outfits, went public with a union drive. They are organizing independently as Attaboy Local 134.

A press release issued by the union did not include the number of workers involved in the drive, or the overall headcount at the prestigious bar, which was founded in 2013 and recognized as North America’s best in 2022 by The 50 Best Awards. Bartender Zack Gelnaw-Rubin told Fingers via text message Saturday evening that the proposed bargaining unit is composed of 18 roles, but declined to share the percentage of workers that had signed union cards.

The drive is significant both because of Attaboy’s global prominence in cocktails/hospitality, and because that sector has been especially resistant to organizing even amid historic popular support for the labor movement. In fact, NYC has been the site of some of those battles. For example, bosses at Death & Co (another rarified downtown Manhattan cocktail bar with some Attaboy overlap) busted an initially promising union drive in early 2024. More recently, Greenpoint’s Achilles' Heel abruptly shuttered following its workers’ unionization with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) in February 2026.

Attaboy Local 134 / Instagram

Attaboy Local 134 / Instagram

In its announcement of the drive, Attaboy Local 134—named for the bar’s address on Eldridge Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side—outlined its goals for organizing, which include changes to the bar’s style of management, improved transparency, and better benefits and protections on the job.

“What we are asking for is pretty basic,” bartender Chris Hughes said in union’s release. “We want to have a say in the decisions that affect our working conditions and our livelihoods.”

Attaboy management did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A tried and true method to earn Buzzwords of The Week recognition is inventing new and more irritating words for simple concepts we already had language to describe. For example, fast-food execs use the neologism “dayparts” in place of more familiar terms like “morning” and “afternoon,” because they are depraved perverts. We will never call McDonald’s a “quick-service restaurant,” you absolute freaks! Ahem. The latest rhetorical frippery in the booze industry’s never-ending quest to create new “occasions” for drinking, is the “daycap.” As a publicist recently informed me:

Like nightcaps, but during the day. Do you see? Of course you do. Most people call these “day drinks,” or, if you’re going through a rough stretch, just “drinks.” Getting loaded in a dark bar, or wine-drunk on a beach, or a little loose at a happy hour while the sun is still high in the sky can be dignified, if you know what you’re doing. But if you know what you’re doing, you will never, ever let corporate coinage like “daycap” pass your lips. Do not try to rebrand life’s simply pleasures, you absolute freaks! Ahem.

If you see beverage-alcohol corporatespeak in the wild that deserves to be the next Fingers Buzzword, submit it for consideration to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

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Fingers is 100% reader-supported and AI-free. Your paid subscription directly funds more coverage and commentary like this. Hope to see you on the other side of the paywall!—Dave.

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For decades, the consensus position in American society was that beer is not for children. The beverage-alcohol industry—no paragon of propriety—mostly agreed, correctly recognizing that even the appearance of courting underage drinkers could jeopardize its social license to operate. It was such a taboo, in fact, that The Whitest Kids U’ Know’s cult-classic sketch “Kid Beer,” featuring a boardroom brainstorm at the extremely fictional “Coorheusen Brewing Company,” was almost too far-fetched to really land when it first aired in July 2010. Almost. Have you seen it? It’s an all-timer:

If “Kid Beer” verged on absurd at the turn of the Aughts, it had started to feel decidedly more real by the turn of last decade, when Big Soda giants and their willing joint-venturers in the beverage-alcohol business rushed out soft-to-hard crossover drinks in hopes of capitalizing on the American drinking public’s newly revitalized taste for corporate brands and commodity flavors. Another half a decade later, with booze firms of all pedigrees and market capitalizations having strip-mined nearly every piece of intellectual property from the consumer-packaged-goods sector, the WKUK sketch watches more like an internal product roadmap than line-stepping fringe comedy. Now it’s the bev-alc industry that’s verging on the absurd. And that way, trouble lies.

This is not an April Fool’s Day spoof. And two recent kid-friendly releases from not-small market players mark the latest depths in the trade’s recent descent into penny-wise, pound-foolish alcopop madness.

Welcome to The Fingers Weekender, a Sunday digest exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers featuring the independent journalism about drinking in America you love, optimized for hungover scrolling. In today’s edition:

• Tilray Brands continues doing hilarious deals in the beer business;

• Export data continues offering depressing outlooks on the wine business;

• Uncle Nearest’s receivership continues delivering big drama in the whiskey business;

• Starbucks union workers’ direct actions continue getting the goods in the coffee business;

And much more. As ever, if someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.

A fundamental tension in the consumer packaged goods market is quality vs. commodity. Probably other markets too, but I know less about those. Customers want the best, say, nonalcoholic beer for their money; nonalcoholic beer brewers want the best money for their nonalcoholic beer. Sometimes, they meet in the middle organically. Most times, though, it falls on marketing to close the gap. This week, for example, I learned of a…

In addition to all beginning with “c,” these words all have specific meanings. None of them apply to NA beer as such. Do they apply to this brand? I mean, almost certainly not? Commerce, virtually by definition, cannot be countercultural; pasteurizing malt juice for distribution at scale is not a lay characterization of artisanship; and recurring purchases do not a commune make. Wrapping an undifferentiated product in the parlance of the wholesome and righteous may be an expedient way to move cases, but it is also an expedient way to win Buzzwords of The Week.

If you see beverage-alcohol corporatespeak in the wild that deserves to be the next Fingers Buzzword, submit it for consideration to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🤝 Consider upgrading to a paid subscription!

Buzzwords of The Week is free, but most of Fingers’ award-winning independent journalism about drinking in America is not. For the full experience, become a Friend of Fingers today:

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Fingers is 100% reader-supported and AI-free. Your paid subscription directly funds more coverage and commentary like this. Hope to see you on the other side of the paywall!—Dave.

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Editor’s note: This column was originally published on April 19th, 2024 back when Fingers was much smaller. Following the news Monday that Molson Coors will acquire gas-station stalwart Atomic Brands, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the latter firm’s dismal nuclear-bomb-themed RTD brand, Bikini Island Cocktail Co. The piece below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.—Dave.

“Booze brand does outrageous thing for press coverage” is not usually newsworthy. Today, I’m making an exception, because a mid-market beverage-alcohol player just released a canned cocktail brand that elides decades of human suffering with Endless Summer-meets-nuclear winter kitsch, and that calls for a closer look.

Introduced by Atomic Brands (which also owns Monaco Cocktails, a popular-in-gas stations line of single-serve mixed drinks) earlier this month, this spirits-based canned cocktail line is “[i]nspired by the historical events at Bikini Island in the [sic] 1940's and 50's that led the world into the atomic and nuclear era,” according to a press release. “Party like it’s the end of the world!” the brand’s slogan urges.

Logo for Bikini Island Cocktail Co. | Atomic Brands

Branding for Bikini Island Cocktail Co. | Atomic Brands

It’s corny stuff, trying to profit off the aesthetics of America’s nascent rise to nuclear superpower without grappling with the material destruction underneath. It doesn’t even seem like Atomic has the energy to pretend there’s any more to it, either. At publication, Bikini Island’s official Instagram handle had zero photos and 11 followers, and Fingers is one of them. Initially, that led me to believe this was just a belated April Fool’s joke. However, Carolina Calandriello, Atomic Brands’ marketing & innovation director, confirmed to Fingers via email that it was “a legit product launch!”

Folks from the Marshall Islands (of which Bikini Island and Bikini Atoll are a part) are less enthusiastic.

Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated periodically with new information. If you have tips about what’s going on at Uncle Nearest, please get in touch by emailing me (dave@dinfontay.com) or texting me on Signal (dinfontay.11). Anonymity available.—Dave.

Last Wednesday night, Uncle Nearest cofounder Fawn Weaver appeared on an episode of ABC’s business propaganda hour Shark Tank and “invested” $125,000 in a beer brand called Beer Girl. Brewbound managing editor and apparent masochist Justin Kendall watched the show, reporting Friday morning that (emphasis mine throughout):

If Weaver did indeed sign a contract to buy 20% of Beer Girl for $125,000, hopefully it has already cashed the check. After all: not only has Uncle Nearest been very publicly collapsing under the weight of ~$108 million in defaulted loans for much of the past year, but less than 24 hours after the Shark Tank episode aired, a bankruptcy judge dismissed Weaver’s Hail Mary Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. Below, I’ve got some notes, updates, and reporting odds-‘n-ends, picking up from where things left off last Wednesday—when Fingers last covered this situation.

Sundays are normally reserved for The Fingers Weekender, but I’m on the road this weekend, so instead, I’ve got a special announcement below. Normal programming resumes next week. In the meantime, make sure to check out:

• My report at Fingers on Pernod Ricard’s near-total exit from RNDC, including a memo from the troubled mega-wholesaler’s CEO;

• My column at VinePair trying to make sense of George Clooney’s new nonalcoholic beer brand;

• The Buzzwords of The Week at Fingers, which are, of course, “empathy-first”;

• My mid-week report at Fingers on the Uncle Nearest bankruptcy that kinda wasn’t;

And that’s about it. As ever, if someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.

Longtime readers know Four Loko holds a special place in… well, if not my heart, per se, some part of my psyche, at least. “With fruity flavors, an inscrutable name, and enough caffeine to fire up even the poopiest of party-poopers,” I wrote in “The Summer of Loko,” an essay about the halcyon, high-gravity late Aughts published in this very boozeletter, “it was THE drink of twenty-something ‘heavy users’ during this heady era. And make no mistake, this was THE era for heavy-using twenty-somethings, too.”

Feeling nostalgic, my fellow former twenty-something who’s now pushing 40? Then, boy, do I have the hat for you.

Now at in stock at The Fingers Shop is an extremely limited run of the all-new I MISS THE OLD FOUR LOKO hat, designed with the discerning elder millennial in mind. This is no janky drop-shipping job, either: I’ve got 10 of these finely embroidered, 100%-cotton beauties in inventory here at Fingers HQ, ready to ship out anywhere in the United States. Reminisce on the alco-addled days of your youth in style, or grab one for a friend/spouse/etc. When they’re gone, they’re gone, so don’t miss out.

Buy now

Buy now

Buy now

Also back in stock at The Fingers Shop are these three classic boozeletter designs. They’re all on the same one-size-fits-all 100%-cotton embroidered hat, and they all sold out in the inaugural run. If you want one, don’t sleep on it.

Last but not least, Fingers sticker packs are always available at the shop for those who’d like to show off their impeccable taste in independent journalism about drinking in America on their laptops, water bottles, etc.

The wide and weird world of nonalcoholic drink-alikes (“elastic drinks,” in previous boozeletter coinage) is a reliable source of inscrutable neologisms, in no small part because the products tend to be fairly inscrutable themselves. And so it is perhaps not surprising that 2026’s first Buzzwords of The Week winner pulled from a proper press release—as opposed to an earnings-call transcript or court record—hails from said category. The other day, a colleague forwarded me a pitch they’d received for…

…which as far as I can tell is just grape juice that’s hOlDiNg SpAcE for alcohol. Heyo! No but seriously, this is not how words work.

If you see beverage-alcohol corporatespeak in the wild that deserves to be the next Fingers Buzzword, submit it for consideration to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🤝 Consider upgrading to a paid subscription!

Buzzwords of The Week is free, but most of Fingers’ award-winning independent journalism about drinking in America is not. For the full experience, become a Friend of Fingers today:

Upgrade

Fingers is 100% reader-supported and AI-free. Your paid subscription directly funds more coverage and commentary like this. Hope to see you on the other side of the paywall!—Dave.

Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated periodically with new information. If you have tips about what’s going on at RNDC, please get in touch by emailing me (dave@dinfontay.com) or texting me on Signal (dinfontay.11). Anonymity available.—Dave.

The hits just keep coming for Republic National Distributing Company. On Thursday, chief executive officer sent an internal memo to employees announcing that Pernod Ricard USA (PRUSA), parent company of some ~200 brands like Absolut, Beefeater, and Jameson, would be exiting the flailing mega-wholesaler’s portfolio “in most markets.”

“I want to be clear that Pernod's decision is not a reflection of the execution, commitment, or professionalism of our teams,” wrote Marc Sachs in an email to RNDC staff late afternoon on March 19th. Fingers obtained a copy of that message from a current employee, who has been granted anonymity to share information from within the company without fear of retaliation. “This does not impact the progress we're making as a business, and it does not change our path forward, including our ongoing pending Reyes transaction.”

In a press release Friday morning, PRUSA confirmed the broad details of the move, which will see it realigning with RNDC’s middle-tier foes Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits and Johnson Brothers in some markets.

“Contingent upon closing of Reyes Beverage Group's acquisition of certain markets from Republic National Distributing Company, Reyes will distribute the Mainline and RTD portfolio in Maryland and Washington, D.C.,” the release adds. This appears to conflict in part with Sachs’ Thursday memo, which stated that RNDC “will still represent the [PRUSA] portfolio in Maryland and Washington D.C. and will retain Gem Brands in Colorado.”

Neither firm immediately responded to a request for clarification.

The near-complete exit of the spirits conglomerate represents the latest departure in a multi-year exodus that has drained RNDC of key suppliers and crucial volume. Since the top of this year, Proximo Spirits and Delicato Family Wines have both announced significant exits, compounding the chaos and losses stemming from the wholesaler’s catastrophic collapse in California last June. Layoffs have followed apace.

“I know I’m on a sinking ship, I’m just hoping the waters not too cold,” a current RNDC employee told Fingers, reflecting on the PRUSA departure.

On Tuesday, embattled Uncle Nearest cofounder Fawn Weaver fired up Instagram to once again comment on the flailing Tennessee liquor firm’s ongoing federal receivership to her 305,000 followers. Er, make that not-ongoing. “As of moments ago, the receivership of Uncle Nearest is done,” said the self-avowed #PeoplesCEO. Next up: Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Maybe? It’s complicated.

“Some evil bastard is going to turn this into a bar exam question at some point,” joked Kevin McGee, a longtime beverage-alcohol attorney who’s been closely following the case, in a phone interview Tuesday evening. The situation has only gotten messier since.

Welcome to The Fingers Weekender, a Sunday digest exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers featuring the independent journalism about drinking in America you love, optimized for hungover scrolling. In today’s edition:

• George Clooney’s new NA beer is… IDK;

• SCOTUS’ next look at DtC wine shipping is still TBD;

• Jay-Z’s secret loan to Uncle Nearest is MIA;

• Amex’s sponsorship of Noma is DOA;

And much more. As ever, if someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.

During the heigh of the craft beer boom, contract brewing was much maligned as antithetical to the local, anti-commodity mores of “the movement.” Not no’ mo’: as the segment plateaued, true believers became more preoccupied with sustaining growth, and as it entered its present period of gradual decline, there’s a whole lotta extra capacity out there that makes contracting either a necessity (for the firms that own the under-utilized stainless steel) or an opportunity (for the firms that have a chance to get out from under that overhead, or never took it on.) Anyway, per a press release Tuesday:

This means that it is closing its San Diego-area plant, laying off 30 workers, and contracting out all its volume. Oh, were you not able to suss that out yourself? How un-evolved of you.

If you see beverage-alcohol corporatespeak in the wild that deserves to be the next Fingers Buzzword, submit it for consideration to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

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You may have heard that the United States’ multi-billion-dollar brown-liquor business is on the rocks these days. It’s true. Domestic demand has slowed, with the canned cocktail boom offering much more of a boost to vodka and tequila than it has to whiskey. Distilleries are idling production or closing entirely. Trump’s destructive trade war has badly damaged American bourbon’s “brand” abroad. Et cetera, et cetera. All of those headwinds are bearing down on Uncle Nearest, Inc., too. But for the embattled Tennessee firm, valued at over a billion dollars by Forbes less than two years ago, macroeconomics are just the tip of the ice cube.

In August 2025, over objections from cofounder and self-proclaimed #PeoplesCEO Fawn Weaver and her cofounder husband Keith, a federal judge placed Uncle Nearest in a court-ordered receivership meant to sort out why it had defaulted on over $100 million in loans from its bank—and, ideally, to repay them. Since then, the litigation has spiraled into an entirely different dimension, with the Weavers complaining to the court—and Fawn’s Instagram audience—that Philip Young, the court’s receiver, is running the company into the ground. As he’s dug into the distressed distillery’s financials (or in some cases, lack thereof), Young has methodically constructed a much different narrative: one of mismanaged and missing books, improperly commingled assets, and a “unicorn” business on the verge of collapse.

Joining The Fingers Podcast today to help us make sense of it all are BevNET spirits editor Ferron Salniker and Kevin McGee, a longtime attorney with over two decades of beverage-alcohol industry experience. The day we recorded this interview, frontwoman Fawn appeared on Shark Tank as a guest judge touting her preference to scale businesses at an “irresponsible” pace; just a few days later, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported that Jay-Z—yes, the Jay-Z—was the until-now-secret source of a $20-million loan that was a flashpoint issue in the company’s federal hearing in February. It’s brown-liquor drama by the dram, and it’s pouring fast.

The transcript excerpts below have been edited for length and clarity. This interview was recorded March 4th, 2026.

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💡 A few highlights from the episode

On the fundamentally different realities presented by the Weavers and Uncle Nearest’s’s receiver…

Salniker: A lot of it just seems like two different viewpoints on some of the same information that we're getting. So you know the receiver, a lot of what I read are his reports, because that has been what’s kind of allowed us to see the back end of this business. His reports have painted a picture of a company in worse shape than what the bank said, including millions more in unsecured debt, unfiled tax returns, an ability to make payroll…

Infante: There was a while where he couldn’t even find a cap table!

McGee: Apparently they still don’t have a complete, consonant cap table.

Salniker: Can you imagine that being your job? So a lot of his work has been him reporting on how he's trying to rebuild financial records. He has said they were losing, I think it was one million dollars a month. He’s painted this very grim picture. Meanwhile, the Weavers, the founders, have basically argued almost the opposite: that they’re cash flow positive, except for the receiver's fees, that his claims are unsupported. They’re very focused on the receivership having tanked sales. They also disagree about the value of the company's assets, and they claim that the business is worth much more than what he claims. There’s a lot of back and forth about those things. There's back and forth about even the Nielsen numbers, which should be somewhat cut and dry.

On the extremely high valuation the Weavers have claimed for Uncle Nearest…

Welcome to The Fingers Weekender, a Sunday digest exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers featuring the independent journalism about drinking in America you love, optimized for hungover scrolling. In today’s edition:

• Molson Coors’ former marketing whiz wound up where?;

• A grand jury said Southern Glazer’s execs have to do what?;

• Uncle Nearest’s cofounders alleged a “fraud on the court” by who?;

• GLP-1s can cut substance-related deaths by how much?;

And much more. As ever, if someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.

Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated periodically with new information. If you have tips about what’s going on at RNDC and Reyes, please get in touch by emailing me (dave@dinfontay.com) or texting me on Signal (dinfontay.11). Anonymity available.—Dave.

This morning, I broke the news at VinePair that Reyes Beverage Group will purchase Republic National Distributing Company’s business in an additional five states in a major expansion of an already-substantial deal for six states and Washington, D.C.¹ As part of today’s updated arrangement, RBG no longer plans to buy Illinois from the struggling wine-and-spirits wholesaler. As of this morning, the current RNDC operations slated to trade hands are:

• Florida

• Hawaii

• Maryland

• South Carolina

• Virginia

• Washington, D.C.

• Arizona

• Colorado

• Louisiana

• Oklahoma

• Texas

That’s per a memo from Marc Sachs, RNDC CEO, which Fingers obtained from an employee within the company who requested anonymity to speak without fear of retaliation. Read it in full below.

The deal, which is slated to close in May 2026, represents a major enlargement of the formidable wine and spirits footprint for RBG, which is already the country’s biggest beer wholesaler. For RNDC, its significance skews existential, especially because Texas is the firm’s longtime stronghold.

“Wow,” another source, a longtime former RNDC employee who requested anonymity so as not to jeopardize ongoing relationships at the company, told me, reacting to the fact that RNDC had hocked its Lone Star operation. “This tells me they are open to selling everything.”

RNDC did not respond to a request for comment. RBG confirmed the details of my scoop at VinePair in a press release sent shortly after publication.