For The People Who Actually Make the Damn Wine

Labor Day isn’t about press releases. It’s not about shelf talkers. And it sure as hell isn’t about the people who just sell wine for a profit and a Linkedin profile.

About six months ago, I was scrolling through Instagram and saw this post. A distributor — one of the biggest in the country — was trashing some ex–tech exec who bought land in Napa, hired a world-class winemaker, and started selling $300 bottles. Her critique? That he was “pretending” to make wine. That he hadn’t “earned” the right to charge that kind of money.

And I had to laugh.

Because here’s the thing: distributors don’t grow grapes. They don’t clean tanks. They don’t bleed through harvest. They don’t make anything. They move paper. They move pallets. They move margins. Yet somehow, they’ve convinced themselves — and most of the industry — that they’re the arbiters of who gets to “make wine the right way.”

This is the rot at the core of the industry: once the grapes are picked, everyone downstream starts acting like they own the vineyard. Distributors. Retailers. Even some sommeliers. Tastemakers, kingmakers, gatekeepers. But at the end of the day? Most of them are just salespeople with corkscrews. Real estate agents selling you a house they didn’t build.

Meanwhile, the people who do build the house? They’re invisible.

The winemakers pulling samples at midnight. The cellar rats with purple-stained boots. The crews showing up at 4 a.m. so your glass can sparkle at 7 p.m. These are the people who actually make the juice. The ones whose hands bleed, whose backs ache, whose livelihoods depend on getting it right when the weather doesn’t cooperate and the fruit won’t wait.

Even if there’s money behind it, even if there’s a partner with deep pockets making it possible, the sweat is real. The work is real. The product is real.

So this Labor Day, we’re not raising a glass to the distributors. Not to the marketers. Not to the critics.

We’re raising a glass to the people who make it. Even if they make it under NDA. The ones who’ve earned every stain on their hands and every hour of sleep they lost during harvest.

Because without them, there’s no story to tell.

Everyone else? They’re just selling it.

Drink Different. Or Die Bored.
Cheers, Bruno.