Constellation Brands may soon sell off its wine portfolio, according to a March 4 report from Wine Business. Though the beverage giant refused to comment on the claims, multiple signs suggest there’s likely some truth behind the rumors. It’s reported that the Rochester, N.Y.-based company is in negotiations to sell its full lineup of wine brands, splitting them between Delicato Family Wines and Duckhorn, which was recently acquired by private equity firm Butterfly Equity.
While Constellation is known for its work with popular California wineries including Robert Mondavi, Woodbridge, Meiomi, The Prisoner, and New Zealand’s Kim Crawford, the company has recently found more success with its beer brands — particularly, the Mexican import Modelo, which it acquired in 2013. The lager has seen massive growth over the past few years, with its flagship expression, Modelo Especial, surpassing Bud Light as America’s top-selling beer in June 2023.
Last year, Constellation reported that its wine sales were down 16.4 percent by volume, netting $431.4 million in sales (a 14 percent decrease in value from 2023). Over the same period, the company’s beer shipments were up 3 percent, earning $2.03 billion in sales. The stark contrast between the wine industry’s struggles and the success of Constellation’s beer brands suggest a shift in focus would be favorable to the company.
“I think we saw this coming a while back,” Mike Fisher, co-founder and partner of Global Wine Partners, told VinePair. “Of course Constellation has been struggling, as most everyone in the wine business has, with declining sales. The biggest signal for me was that last year they took a major writedown of their wine and spirits portfolio… I think they’re seeing a declining business and want to get out.”
This would be a massive pivot for Constellation, as it currently stands as the third largest wine supplier in the U.S., but there are a number of additional factors to consider. Last month, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway invested $1.24 billion in the beverage conglomerate, raising Constellation’s stock price and suggesting that Buffett has faith in the future of booze — despite how shaky the industry currently appears.
The looming threat of tariffs set forth by the Trump administration might also be a consideration for Constellation, as the company’s highest earning brand is imported from Mexico.
“Imagine trying to explain this situation to somebody who was working at Constellation back in 2013, when it lucked into domestic control of Grupo Modelo’s brands as part of the Department of Justice’s consent-decree for Anheuser-Busch InBev’s acquisition of the Mexican brewing giant. ‘That’s right: we’re a beer company now! Oh, also, Donald Trump is president. Yeah, for the second time, actually.’ Which would be the more earth-shaking revelation?
Of course, back here in 2025, knowing how the intervening 12 years have shaped both Constellation and the American beverage-alcohol business, the idea that the firm might be seeking an exit from its once-lucrative wine portfolio is slightly less seismic stuff. Rumors have swirled for years that it was angling to offload its supermarket heavyweights in an attempt to improve its price mix as the national taste migrated away from plonk. That would track with its previous sales to Gallo and The Wine Group earlier this decade, and with the broader trend, particularly acute among global bev-alc firms that straddle two or all three categories, of trying to “premiumize” their wine offerings to make the grape juice worth the squeeze.
Other conglomerates have offloaded more premium wine brands simply to tighten their respective foci on the products and categories that are working, like The Brown-Forman Corporation’s sale of Sonoma-Cutrer Vineyards to The Duckhorn Portfolio in late 2023, or Pernod Ricard’s deal to hand its Pacific Rim brands to Accolade Wines in July 2024. These are both useful frameworks, I think, for grasping Constellation’s own (reported) wine sell-off. The business has gotten harder, and specialized firms like Delicato and Duckhorn can navigate the chop with agility that Constellation simply can’t by virtue of its sheer size. You could imagine the seller accepting equity in the buyer(s) as part of any such deal, like the 21-percent stake in Duckhorn that B-F took a couple years back. The fact that Constellation vet Robert Hanson recently took the chief executive role at Duckhorn could augur well for that sort of deal term.
Still, if Constellation did hock the whole shebang, as reports suggest it intends to, it raises the question of what kind of business it becomes. Artisanal liquor purveyor in the front, Mexican lager chungus in the back? Off the top of my head, I can think of zero bev-alc conglomerates with that kind of profile. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work, but it’s a hell of a time for Constellation to test it out, what with all the company’s beer and most of its spirits brands directly exposed to Trump’s on-again/off-again trade war with Mexico, whiskey-mania and tequila trade-ups waning, and American customer confidence tanking. Of course, if the wine deals happen, and Constellation eschews equity in favor of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, it paves itself a much longer runway to sort through all of the above.” —Dave Infante, VinePair columnist and contributing editor
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