Has anyone garnished a winery debtor's credit card payments to Merchant Services or AMEX?

If so, please contact me or send a PM. Thank you.

If you have any such experience please contact me or send me a PM. Thank you.

A winery “purchased” some of our 2013 and 2014 grapes. They paid for half of the 2013 and none of the 2014 grapes. Attempts to resolve this over the years have failed. I have a judgment and have garnished the winery’s and owners bank accounts which is hit or miss. The winery continues to sell our wine thru their website. The consumers are paying with credit cards using Merchant Services or AM EX. Has anyone experience garnishing those credit card payments to Merchant Services or AM EX? If so, please contact me or send me a PM. Thank you.

Is a dog mentioned in the name of the winery?

The wnry in question is none of our friggin’ business. So don’t ask Steve to name names!! OK??
Tom

We wouldn’t want to hurt the feelings of a deadbeat !

Is there such a legal theory in the State of California - either in the statutory law or the Common Law case histories - which allows you to intercept 3rd party payments? [And how are you going to do that if it involves wire transfers, which are generally governed by federal law, rather than by state law?]

I don’t know what the Common Law case history is in California or the 9th Circus Court, but in North Carolina & the 4th Circuit Court, possession is at least 9/10ths of the law [and more like 99 & 44/100ths of the law].

So out here, it would definitely not be your wine, simply because you are not in possession of it.

Have you asked a state judge to order a county sheriff to simply seize enough of the winery’s [bottled] wine to make amends for the judgement?

You’d lose 30 to 50 points in reselling* it [unless maybe you could also convince the judge to order the sheriff to value the seized wine at WHOLESALE prices, rather than at retail prices], but that’s better than the 100 points you’re losing right now.

PS: If your lawyer hasn’t already asked the judge to issue such an order to the sheriff, then you need to sue your lawyer, as well.

*I’m envisioning you sending it to someone like HDH to resell it for you [since selling wine with someone else’s label on it could be legalistically problematic, unless you had a lot of time on your hands and felt like relabelling each of the seized bottles].

It’s always a bit tricky. People ask questions which have damning consequences, but expressing curiosity is impolite?

I sense you know more than you are letting on, and are trying to protect said winery.

You know, if you hired a really outstanding lawyer [such as the judge’s brother-in-law], then you might even be able to convince the judge to order the sheriff to seize the labels with the best [relative] resale value at auction AND to value those seized labels at wholesale prices [rather than at retail prices].

Of course the very best lawyer of all would be the judge’s daughter, who just graduated from law school, and this is her first big case, and daddy wants his Little Princess to bat 1000.

Conversely, your worst nightmare would be if the winery beat you to the punch, and had already hired the judge’s brother-in-law [or, God forbid, his daughter].

Nope, David…have no idea.
But you see this all the time on WB. Somebody has a bad experience with a Wnry or wine shop and then there’s this big hue & cry to out them. This case is such that it’s none of our business.
Tom

Well it’s one thing when a WB member has a bad experience with a winery or a wine shop as a. Ustomer… as a vendor is a whole different kettle of fish. Not suggesting that Stephen should name names. Just pointing out that it’s relatively infrequent, though not unheard of.

Maybe some lawyers can chime in, but you should be able to go back to court and get a lien on the winery. Then, if they still don’t pay, you should be able to force a sale of the winery in order to collect.

Also, you should be able to have the ABC strip their license to sell alcohol and/or buy grapes. I say should, because they apparently refused to follow the law/do their job with the Oakville Grocery case some years ago. The “and/or” is for the Sutton Cellars case, where they only took away his ability to buy grapes, but not to buy bulk wine or sell wine.

Of course, possession being 9/10ths of the law, the sheriff & his deputies can’t seize possession of a thing which isn’t there.

If this guy is sufficiently unscrupulous as to hide his money from the court, then he’d probably also be sufficiently unscrupulous as to physically hide [in various warehouses around town] his wine from the sheriff & his deputies.

And you certainly wouldn’t want to send the sheriff & his deputies out there three or four times, to an empty winery, with nothing to show for their efforts - they’d end up hating you more than they hated the winery owner.

So it would really help to have a spy on the inside, who could send a TXT message to the sheriff & his deputies when the winery was in the middle of a bottling run of a particularly choice vineyard, and they could show up just in time to seize it all.

I don’t anything about Crazyfornia “law” [or if it’s largely lawless out there in Crazyfornia nowadays], but I am aware of legalistic situations around here which could make it rather difficult to seize the entire winery [particularly if the winery were worth many orders of magnitude more than the bill for the grapes which had been “sold” to the winery].

Around here, the sheriff & his deputies would generally be looking to make “Like-Kind” seizures of [seizable] assets [rather than seizures of grossly disparate assets].

Wow, shortest response yet

First off, you’re a nutcase.

Per your other post, an active winery can’t exactly hide their assets from a sheriff. Even posting that idea is nuts.

Yes, the court and sheriff would first have want to go after something of similar value. It’s a reasonable process. Perhaps a destemmer or press during harvest…

The legal process of having to get a lien comes when all other options are fruitless, and has nothing to do with California (you imbecile). If you leave it at that, you can claim the money owned if and when the property is sold. You then have the option of going to court and making the case to force a sale. The debtor has notification to dispute this in court, then plenty of time to act. But, we occasionally see case, like across the country, you nutcase, where all that was ignored and someone does force a sale or nearly complete that process on things like a shopping center or corporate headquarters over a relatively small debt. The debtee/creditor is only entitled to the money owed, so the debtor would receive the rest.

Yep. It’s the Wild Wild West out here in Cali. Open carry, concealed carry, you name it. Everyone is sporting glocks and AKs. But we don’t shoot the deputy. Oh yeah, we do produce some pretty good wine from our wild and lawless vineyards.

Wes, you gotta love that most of Nathan’s post begin will pretty much admitting he knows nothing about the topic he is about to espouse upon. It has become a source of constant amusement for me.

This is a disappointing post from Wes. You’d think he could work in some commentary about a mountain lion and a 7 foot turkey into his post.

Sometimes winery owners can be pretty devious. One guy was slow to pay one year so we made him COD. He talked the trucker into delivering the barrels.
Then we sued him. In court he invited my associate to dinner, but lost anyway. Nothing happened so we got a lien on his home. A friend of mine who has a wine shop in San Mateo county was offered some of his wine…by his former lawyer. The lawyer never got paid so he got some wine. The same owner organized a dinner party for a famous wine industry personality…he stiffed the caterers!! Ten grand…If I could stick a mountain lion and a seven foot turkey on him it would only be fitting.