Constellation Brands acquires Gary Vaynerchuk’s Empathy Wines

Constellation Brands acquires Gary Vaynerchuk’s Empathy Wines

Box from Empathy Wines

Empathy Wines

Constellation Brands announced plans on Wednesday to acquire Empathy Wines, a direct-to-consumer vintner co-founded by entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk.

Terms were not disclosed.

Empathy, founded in 2019, has sold about 15,000 cases of its signature California-sourced wine and has amassed more than 2,000 subscribed customers, who purchase the product exclusively online.

The acquisition comes at a time when many states are slowing or reversing their reopening plans as coronavirus cases climb. Restrictions on bars and indoor dining may be extended, providing a boon for alcohol e-commerce.

"The DTC (direct-to-consumer) market was growing at more than two times the rate of the general market in wine consumption pre-Covid," said Robert Hanson, president of wine and spirits for Constellations Brands, which has a wide array of wines in its portfolio, including Robert Mondavi, Ruffino, Simi and The Dreaming Tree. "Everything that's occurred since has just been an acceleration of that."

Vaynerchuk has long been an innovator in the e-commerce space. He started working at his family's retail wine business, bagging ice, at age 14. He used the business as a springboard to building the Wine Library into an e-commerce platform in the late-'90s. During his tenure, the company grew from doing $3 million in annual sales