Modern Day Bootlegging?

And why you should stop buying from the big guys

It started quietly, like most power plays do. 

A few headlines here and there, a federal complaint buried between sports scores and stock tickers. One of the biggest distributors in the country — the kind of company that reportedly moves one out of every three bottles you’ll ever drink — was accused of unfair pricing. Big chains got sweetheart deals. Independent shops paid full price for the same wine.

Favoring the giants. Squeezing the small.

You’ve probably seen it without noticing. You walk into your local store, grab a bottle that looks familiar, and wonder why it costs a few bucks more than at the supermarket. That’s not the shop’s fault. That’s the system working exactly as designed. Whoever moves the most pallets wins. Everyone else plays catch-up.

And here’s the irony: these distributors don’t make wine. They don’t walk vineyards or taste from barrels. They move boxes, not bottles with soul. Yet somehow they became the gatekeepers of taste, deciding what ends up on your table and what never leaves a winemaker’s cellar.

That’s the illusion — the fancy label, the gold crest, the recycled story about “family heritage.” All crafted in an office, not a vineyard. It’s wine stripped of meaning, polished into a product. You’re not paying for what’s inside the bottle; you’re paying for how well it fits on a shelf.

At Bruno, we see that every day. We talk to winemakers who produce incredible juice — the kind of stuff you’d kill to drink — but can’t even get a distributor meeting because they don’t have the “scale.” So we said screw it. We work with them directly. We buy the barrels they love most, the ones they’d keep for themselves if they could. We don’t chase volume. We chase quality that actually deserves a glass.

When a few companies control what the world drinks, everything starts tasting the same. That’s the kind of homogeneity we refuse to swallow. We’d rather hunt, dig, and fight for wines that surprise you, that taste like something real.

Let the suits worry about lawsuits.
We’ll keep worrying about what’s in your glass.

Drink Different. Or Die Bored.

Cheers,
Bruno