Amedeo/Wineflite Gone, Owners Sought

When Ray Walker first mentioned using Amedeo for fulfillment of orders, there was internal strife at Amedeo including a former partner that vanished after telling local contacts he had terminal cancer.

Wine Executive News

“Prominent New York sommelier Michael Greenlee has gone missing from Napa Valley along with his failed wine brand, defunct direct shipping company,and former business partner. Left behind are an unpaid court judgment brought by a former winery client along with a series of unanswered questions, evasive and contradictory statements, claims to a company that does not exist and the conundrum of what really happened to his enterprises and why.”


The business was shuttered August 1, 2015. New Hampshire had already started seizing wine shipped by Amedeo and associated entities, for failure to comply with state tax laws. Another Napa winery sued and won a judgement against the owners, Michael Greenlee and Keiko Niccolini. Exise tax holds were placed on their winery and import licenses. Now Greenlee and Niccolini can’t be physically located but I’m not sure how hard anybody is really looking.

Amadeo cost me a 3L of Gewurzt they shipped to my old office after my move to OR. They had already successfully shipped me wine to my new address so I stupidly assumed they would handle the large format in the same way, but they didn’t.

The owners aren’t missing; they’re merely queueing up at a Western Union in Beaune.

i dunno, maybe start looking at the Rubin Museum of Art?

(assuming it’s the same Keiko Niccolini)

That’s the one we were looking for. Bravo, sir.

All I see is something about the Hindu god Ganesh, where is the linkage to Nicolini?

You can tell the relative influence of failed enterprises when you look at this thread compared to the PC one, even though this dynamic duo seems to have been horrible business people in the way that John Fox was. I remember some wineries dealing with Amedeo having issues and I thought “why use them?” out of the hundreds(?) of other choices there in California.

it’s Niccolini’s IG page, and she tagged RMA in it this afternoon. guessing she is/was there?

Yes it is. The daughter of Julian Niccolini, owner of Four Seasons Restaurant.

They had a very good front man who helped build business before he disappeared.

In case anybody wants to read it. It is a PDF, with ads.
Greenlee.pdf (1.89 MB)

Until last week Mr. Greenlee wasn’t too hard to track down either:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hvmyxGN3qnsJ:https://twitter.com/mgwino+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

His twitter feed is now private, but that’s the google cache as of March 27, with links to instagram photos that are gone as well.

Curious stuff, indeed…

Not like PC and some others. I don’t think Amedeo was running any kind of scheme. I don’t know of anybody who was out $$$$, other than the one judgement for missing wine. I would be more prone to say mismanagement. Some of Mr. Greenlee’s statements do raise more questions. The disappearance of his “former partner” adds to mystery. The former partner did predict the shuttering of Amedeo but as yet, not for the reasons he alluded to. The former partner did owe money to people when he disappeared.