Good evening sir. Can I see your license, registration and insurance? You been drinking and posting on the interwebs?
PUI is a serious offence and can lead to shame, spelling correction, and edit/deletions in the morning.
[quote by Arv]
Especially if some spouses are looking at that list, and suddenly querying certain figures, when someone has been been hiding expenses.
There’s probably a few Ashley Madison moments going to happen in the next week.[/quote]
Arv I was thinking more of the hypothetical good guy/gal whose only crime was business naivete, not cheaters being outed Printing their names in this thread and saying they have too much money (and implying the rest, “and not enough common sense”) is sadistic if the target is a good person who right now is suffering in some life changing way Me? I deserve some ridicule, I clearly should have known better, certainly starting in September when the bells went off in.my head but I closed my eyes and hoped. Gambled knowing it was gambling to stay in at that point. I have no interest in DRC but the DRCRC offer could not be explained by any twist of the imagination, it was almost a parody from The Onion. But I did nothing. I lied to myself. After that point it was all my fault to stay in. But I am sure some of the big victims are really hurting and did not know enough to understand the warnings. I knew enough but was arrogant because of my previous 20 years with PC where everything always eventually turned out fine, calm down George, I’ve been through this before, it’s just PC being PC.
This person is one of the senior, founding partners of Accel, which is one of the well known VCs in Silicon Valley. Boatload of cash? You bet.
And? Is there a point here in naming and publicly discussing the nonwine lives of crime victims besides gossip? Not everyone who lost three figures deserves to be outed outside of a legal filing.
If you want to get mad at someone for disturbing their privacy, and revealing the sums they spent on wine … you can cast the first stone at Fox & Ortega Enterprises who made the BK filing voluntarily.
That is all out the public record and will get dragged around for quite some time, by many sources. Trying to quiet discussion of a public document is to fall into the same false trap believing that “telling the truth about PC brought down the gravy train for all of us”.
Arv I have no idea if you were ever in a lawsuit in my county being, for example, falsely sued for something you hadn’t done. I don’t know. I bet no one on this board knows one way or the other whether you’ve been sued or what for. But if so, and if I publish the suit here, and you did nothing morally wrong, it’s humiliating to you and makes me kind of an asshole for going out of my way to tell people in a permanently easily searchable post who otherwise never would have known you were accused of…well…you know. “Arv, you were innocent, right? I don’t know, from the lawsuit you sound kind of greedy and profligate. Too much money and not enough common sense. It’s public record and you’re free to defend yourself and I’m free legally to post it.” And my motives for publishing it here were…? The relevance is…? Calling the intentional republishing of names and amounts “discussion of a public document” is like calling a tabloid article that Brad and Angelina are getting divorced “discussion of the institution of marriage.” As to Brad and Angelina versus the Premier Cru creditors/crime victims, I’ll leave out my rant of who is or is not legally a public figure because my point isn’t legal or about libel, it’s about intention and character and assuming everyone who lost a lot of money somehow deserves to be hurt. A friend of mine just posted the whole filing on Facebook including names and amounts. I don’t understand his thinking, but it’s not the same as going out of your way to name people and amounts just to comment on those individuals. The only intended message I can think of is, look how stupid and/or greedy these specific rich people were. Or worse, I take pleasure in reading about rich people getting snookered. Why not search court filings to see who on this board has been abused and has sued for it and list them all by name? The thinking is weird to me. It’s something I can’t imagine doing.
No, Don, Larry is close and you are well out of your area of expertise and talking out of your hat. Is it not obvious to you that PC’s CUSTOMERS were the lenders who converted the ongoing losses to debt, as you would have it?
Here is how the PC business model, and Ponzi schemes in general, work: for a while, the business operates normally. Fox establishes a reputation for delivering the finest wines at the lowest cost. His most profitable lines become en primeur Bordeaux and pre-arrival Burgundy and Champagne, the most expensive and most highly sought-after wines n earth, and in the case of Bordeaux and Champagne, the luxury wines in the greatest supply and most susceptible to secondary-market availability. Maybe PC even had some true third-party credit capacity for a while (rather than the ultimate ability to borrow against its only hard asset, the new building). So far, so good.
The business grows and reaches critical mass. Larger and larger sums are passing through the coffers. Fox and Ortega enjoy generous helpings along the way. Fox comes to understand that PC is trusted by its customers, and that they will gladly fork out millions of dollars without receiving their wines in exchange in anything remotely resembling timely fashion, nor seriously question how PC sells at the prices that it does, because, well, it is PC, too big to fail, long history of successful deliveries of wine in perfect condition, the myth of 100% delivery eventually, only saps pay more, free storage, more for me if you idiots do not buy from PC, I am a rich, smart doctor/lawyer/CPA/entrepreneur who ALWAYS gets the best deal and beats the system, blah, blah, blah. Fox sees that he has a steady stream of interest-free cash to play with. For a while, the stars align for Fox sufficiently well. Exchange rates are OK, a part of the business is run traditionally, he has competent help to save him from his own recklessness and incompetence, wine can often be sourced and cover effected at favorable pricing, suppliers are willing to put up with PC’s slow pay since it always comes through in the end, the customers are constantly printing money on the front end. Larry may be wrong only in that Fox was selling dollars for a lot less than 90 cents, and did not bother to account for it. Without real lenders to require financials and hold his feet to the financial fire, he did no more than gamble with other peoples’ money, and lose badly. (If Fox has an accountant, maybe they can be roomies in the Fed country-club pen.)
Then the shit hits the fan. Bordeaux and Burgundy prices soar as Chinese and Russian oligarchs enter the game. Everybody gets greedy. Sources of supply and trade credit lines dry up for PC. Climate change gives, but also takes away. The youngsters decide to drink beer and cocktails instead. A string of mediocre Bordeaux vintages. Global financial collapse in 2008. A completely foolish move to buy the new store, when the only rational move was to go to an internet-only model. The customer cash flow slows. Customers lose confidence and begin to demand delivery or their money back. The Ponzi scheme begins as Fox greases the squeeky wheels at whatever cost, and at the expense of the last folks to the party. Fox gooses cash flow by offering even better prices on wines that he does not have and cannot get. Enough cash comes in to keep customers and creditors at bay a while longer.
Then came this thread and others like it, as well as concerted efforts on the part of a wide range of ITB folks, the other lawyers around here, fearful customers with connections and inside information and others. For the first time, PC was exposed for the fraud that it had become. And then Chapter 7 and the drama to follow.
I must, however, ask a question, Don: if you were the smartest guy in the room and onto PC’s game 10 or more years ago, why did we not hear your voice until now? “Falling on deaf ears”, while true for a while, is disingenuous. Your pursuit of the Rudy matter suffered the same disability. You surely invested enormous time and effort in the Rudy affair, for which so many people have expressed their appreciation and gratitude, and you could not be expected to devote anything approaching the same time and effort to this, but you might have spared at least one pithy post as you watched this thread develop. Pardon me if I view the belated appearance of you and Maureen here, as well-intentioned as it may be, as too little, too late and more than a bit self-promotional. We all know what happened now, which only some details to come. We do not need theories after the fact, especially if they are wrong.
On an unrelated note, I did want to give Kevin Shin a shout-out for his critical and central role here as well. Kevin, a total non-participant in the collective process of discovering the truth about PC, waited until the filing to tell us that he and his friends knew it all along, and had even more or less correctly guessed the order of magnitude of loss at $50 million. (And, of course, posted the same self-important, self-serving message on every known public forum, as is his custom.) This seems to be the accurate retro periscope that Mr. Kaufman alluded to earlier. Way to go, Kevin!
You are whining and babbling incoherently, George, and have been for some time. Just stop, and bear your loss gracefully, as others are. You are your own victim at this point, and PC’s, and there is nobody else to blame, try as you might…
Oh I know that Bill. No one on Wineberserkers caused me in any way to hesitate to do the right thing at any time. That was all me, based on what I thought was instructive PCru “knowledge” from past experiences. I apologize if I said or implied anyone actually caused me not to act. In fact it’s possible that if it weren’t for this thread, I would right now and for weeks to come still be sitting here thinking everything at PC is fine but gee lately they’re hard to reach, maybe I should take a trip to the store. Seriously. None of my personal experiences with PC would have alerted me that things were any different than four years ago. Even the stopping of offer emails wouldn’t have been proof to me of a crisis, happened years ago, they got my email address mixed up and I went two years without getting a PC offer email. I never saw the newspaper articles except in this thread, even though I read the Merc three or so times a week cover to cover. Without this thread, the only thing different I would have noticed was how high end the offers were becoming and how, finally in September, the prices were impossible on the DRC’s, which I don’t buy. No one outside of this thread ever told me PC was in a new kind of trouble. If I said or implied otherwise I apologize.
If you had the 2 options: to read advice from persons whose prose appears not to your liking OR throw money out the window, you would prefer the latter?
IIRC it was mr Klapp who in an ancient post descibed th PC setup as a scam in a way leaving absolutely no doubt (at least to me).
The unworldly prices in their mailoffers only confirmed this 120%
I guess you’re right. I guess I felt I had hard information --20 years of past experiences with PC’s ups and downs yet I got almost all my wine eventually until 2014 and during those 20 years I heard no evidence of scamming, just disorganization-- so I devalued any post that did not have so much hard information that it overruled my past experiences. If I had started with Premier Cru in 2013, for example, I would have listened more to Bill and others regardless of tone. If I had no experience with PC and read Bill’s posts I would have never bought a single bottle on prearrival from PC after that. But I thought I knew a lot about PC’s patterns and that the warners were making guesses from the sidelines. I resented what I thought were guesses and the tone of the guesses. I was wrong.
My posts are not meant to be just about me. I’ve received PM’s from people who have thought and bought the same way I did and ended up in the same place as I, and I am certain there are several people who are hurting a lot more than I am, regardless of dollar amount, who are reading this thread, and that is to whom I think I’m writing. I am certain there are many people feeling severe pain and having to change their lives, not just bemoaning a balance sheet adjustment. But I’ll stop now.
Gonna pull my insurance rider out of the file today (or some point this week) and read it carefully. Anyone already do this? If you have a ‘stand alone’ wine insurance policy, does it only cover wine you actually own and store somewhere or does it cover wine purchased but not delivered. Yeah, every policy different, etc. How about this? Anyone out there have a policy that covers wine purchased and not yet delivered?
Whole lotta changed tunes - from “shut up, there’s nothing wrong with PC” to “shut up, I was just going on their previous track record”. Man, it sucks when you’re an ostrich who’s head is yanked out from the sand on the banks of DeNile after a few years and you aren’t even given sunglasses.
…
Shut up, the sand was nice and cool and dark and quiet.
This seems to me the largest stone left unturned at this point. There cannot possibly be one answer, unfortunately, as some states allow wine to be covered under homeowner’s insurance and some do not, this could fall under theft or other casualty coverage rather than focusing upon what was stolen being covered, and many here have separate wine insurance policies, which typically offers pretty broad coverage. This thread can provide an important service by finishing up the credit card claim learning and experience, while comparing notes on what insurance coverage of various types might do to help, if anything…
This was discussed at length upthread. I never called my insurance provider because my cc company said they would stand behind me, but i took a good look at my policy (which is standalone coverage for my wine under the Chubb masterpiece policy) and I think that I could make a tenable argument that it is covered. PC’s website says (or said at the time) that title to the wine passed to the buyer on confirmation of an order. And the policy covers any loss of my wine, anywhere in the world, with limited enumerated exceptions, none of which applied. But i believe others tried this and were unsuccessful in the Carolina wine company debacle.
There are numerous parallels between the Premier Cru story and the Rudy K. story, not least in terms of how some people perceive the status of the people who ultimately became the victims.
Bruce
Many retailers note that title to the wine passes to the buyer upon shipping; does this difference in store policy (when title passes to the buyer) make enough of a difference that in-store but not shipped wines at PC wouldn’t be considered part of store inventory during bankruptcy proceedings?
Store policy does not dictate when title of a certain product passes to the buyer.
Title passes to the buyer when the law says it passes to the buyer and each state is different.