No sooner had speculators lined up the runners and riders for the apparently inevitable – although not necessarily – race to buy Beam Global Spirits & Wine, than news of another acquisition in the spirits sector surfaced last week. The battleground for this one is Turkey, with rumours circulating that private equity firm TPG Capital is looking to sell off its Turkish spirits firm, Mey Içki.

Both potential transactions had one name in common – Diageo. Considering its position at the top of the spirits tree, it can be of little surprise that the company is linked to every possible buy that crops up.

Now, you, oh seasoned drinks executive, will not need telling that to buy in entirely to speculation such as this would be folly, so I'll save my breath. More specifically, however, the Mey Içki situation has quite some way to go before the rumours could become reality.

Until the small matter of an ongoing six-year disagreement over import duty is resolved in the country, I feel we can safely put a sale of Mey Içki – the country's largest producer of raki, wine, vodka and gin, no less – on the back-burner for the time being. Diageo, or anyone else, for that matter, can hold on to their US$2.5bn – according to those speculators – for a little while longer.

We're less than two weeks away from our Christmas break here at just-drinks, and we're racing to get all five parts of our annual review of the global drinks industry out before we hunker down with family, food, drink and television programmes of questionable quality. Two weeks ago, we gave you water. Last week, we gave you soft drinks. Brace yourself for beer later this week, before we offload spirits and wine in your direction next week.

Come Christmas, you'll be thoroughly stuffed.

Until next time...

Olly Wehring
Managing Editor
Web: http://www.just-drinks.com
Email: editor@just-drinks.com
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