Numlock News: May 22, 2024 • Seltzer, Canada, The Long Drink

May 22, 2024

By Dave Infante

Today’s guest writer is Dave Infante, who writes the rambunctious and insightful newsletter

all about drinking in America. That’s right, baby: Today’s Numlock News is more of a Numlock Booze!

Bud Light Justice

If we’ve learned anything about the Supreme Court over the past year or two, it’s that our Agéd/Robéd Ones are no strangers to the millennial concept of the side hustle. Clarence Thomas is a talented procurer of RVs, for example. Samuel Alito’s other gig, it turns out, is day-trading. Less than a day after the right-wing rage-farming account libs of TikTok amplified the transphobic backlash against Anheuser-Busch InBev last August, records show that the conservative justice sold between $1,000 to $15,000 of that brewer’s stock and bought stock in its rival, Molson Coors. The move poses ethical questions about Alito’s impartiality on cases involving trans health care.

Chris Geidner, Law Dork

Long Drink

Finland’s beloved gin-based sipper, the long drink, has been a hit with the American drinking public, with The Finnish Long Drink (that’s a brand name) racking up a staggering 91.9 percent increase in year-over-year retail dollar sales through mid-April, per NielsenIQ scan data. That type of growth, in such a crowded and regulated market no less, has caught the eye of a handful of savvy celebrity backers, including Miles Teller, DJ Kygo and Rickie Fowler. Now, HOV himself is getting gin-volved: Jay-Z’s Marcy Venture Partners announced a “significant investment” in the brand last week.

Ferron Salniker, Brewbound

Ain’t No Laws…

The hard seltzer boom of yesteryear has fizzled into a more sobering reality lately, as most of the big players in the once-hot segment have posted serious losses in both volume and dollars. That includes Truly, Boston Beer Company’s entrant and the longtime No. 2. It does not, in fact, include the segment’s No. 1 brand, though: White Claw is still posting modest growth and now controls over 60 percent of the multibillion-dollar segment in the U.S.

Dave Infante, VinePair

Wine Glut

You don’t often hear people complaining about having too much wine, but at a commercial level, it’s actually a big problem for countries that traffic in the stuff. Wine consumption is down globally and storage capacity is maxed out, impelling government interventions to steady already wobbly domestic and export markets. In Navarra, a wine region in northern Spain, the minister of rural development has announced €10 million in funding to try to stanch wine oversupply in the short term. Roughly half of that will be spent to buy wine from vintners to distill for industrial alcohol applications, and the rest will be used to “green-harvest” wine grapes off the vines in the hopes of preventing unneeded fruit from this year’s crop attracting pests and disease that might harm the vineyards long-term.

Oliver Styles, Wine-Searcher

Total Wine

The wealthy cofounder of alcohol mega-retailer Total Wine, David Trone, is already a congressman for Maryland, but he’s had designs on the upper chamber ever since the state’s senior senator announced his plans to retire last May. The Democrat spent $62 million of his own money to fund his primary campaign, and many assumed Senator Sauvignon Blanc was a done deal. Not so: A county executive with comparably little name recognition and way less dough whupped the magnate by a double-digit margin in last week’s vote.

Luke Goldstein, The American Prospect

LCB-Oh No

One of the biggest alcohol buyers in the world is the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, which, as you may have surmised, is the board that controls Ontario’s liquor trade and the hundreds of retail locations through which it flows in Canada’s most populous province. This powerful authority is none too popular with multinational liquor concerns these days due to the fines it keeps issuing over alleged contract violations regarding pricing. Now, Spirits Canada, a trade group whose constituents collectively sell some 70 percent of Ontario’s booze, is signaling that member firms like Diageo and Pernod Ricard are prepared to pull out of the market entirely if the LCBO keeps treating them like deadbeats in arrears rather than collaborative partners in the trade.

Josh Rubin, Toronto Star

Cash for Cannabis

With the vice industry all abuzz with the Biden administration’s latest progress toward recasting marijuana to be more like Tylenol with codeine and less like heroin in the eyes of Uncle Sam, one of the biggest players in Canada’s weed business, Tilray Brands, announced plans to sell stock valued at up to $250 million to underwrite new acquisitions. Tilray has become a bit of a meme stock à la GameStop, and it has not let the lack of federal recreational legalization in the United States (which recasting it is not) stop it from getting acquainted with the American substance user, acquiring a bunch of American craft breweries and distilleries in the last few years.

Jade Martinez-Pogue, Law360

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