WineCare in the NYT

originally posted by David Gissen:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Jay Miller:
And another thing, how is the fact that the initial cause was Sandy even relevant? The lawsuit is not about Sandy but about the company's behavior post-Sandy. It has no effect one way or another on anyone who lost homes, etc.

It's as though I'm listening to the following conversation:

Person 1: My wallet was stolen, I'm going to the police.
Person 2: How dare you go to the police about a stolen wallet, my car was stolen!
Person 3: How dare you go to the police about something as petty as a stolen car, my house was burned down!
Person 4: You insensitive bastard, how dare you complain about arson when my family was murdered!

IMO, Person 1 has every right to go to the police about his or her wallet. Especially if the crimes experienced by Persons 2, 3 and 4 happened 7 months ago.
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This sums it up exactly right. I suppose that there is somebody, somewhere in the world who is the least fortunate, most miserable person in existence. That doesn't mean that nobody else is entitled to vindicate their rights, or, for that matter, complain about anything, until that person is happy.
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I find myself disagreeing with the conclusions from these analogies. If my neighbor's apartment building was on fire and my wine cellar was on fire, I would certainly hope the fire dept would put out the apartment building fire first! From my understanding the courts, et al have limited resources and time in handling all of the various claims related to Sandy (there are still people without access to homes due to the floods). A wine cellar is low on the list for them. I'm fine with that. I'd rather someone get back home sooner. Tell the cellar-dudes to go to Chambers Street and buy some Morgon or Muscadet. It just might tide them over and change their life.
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If you're going to play that game, you may as well say that legitimate claims related to lost and mishandled property (even if such property is a luxury good) should have a higher-priority claim on the court system than, say, the tens of thousands of victimless drug crimes it finds the resources to adjudicate. But we don't play that game, and while courts like to remark that there are scarce judicial resources, there's really nothing scarce about them.

Incidentally, though, nobody is actually arguing that the court shouldn't pay attention to these claims because they're not high enough on the priority list. The only arguments I've heard were (1) the Loesberg argument that the claims might be legitimate but he still can't muster up very much personal sympathy for the affected parties, and (2) the court's apparent view that it is going to let the perceived lesser importance of these claims relative to those who lost their houses determine its rulings on the merits. Neither one of these arguments has anything to do with whether limited court resources can or should be used to deal with this issue. The court IS dealing with this issue. The only question is what kind of relief it decides to issue, if any. If you want to be apathetic about that on the "someone, somewhere has it worse" theory, that's your right, but I should hope all of us would agree that that doesn't have anything to do with the legal merits of anyone's claims.

But it is a little disappointing to see the subtext in some of these posts that all these people who stored at WineCare had it coming because they're probably storing shitty wine. FYI, there was plenty of Morgon and Muscadet in the stash that I was lucky enough to have moved out of there in the nick of time.
 
I didn't say the claims "might" be legitimate. I said they were legitimate.

The argument about triage came from Jay's analogy (imperfect as I think it is) because the police and the courts in fact do do triage in determining what comes higher on their list of crimes to solve and prosecute. We may disagree with their criteria of triage, but they do it.

The reason the analogy is imperfect is that this will be a civil suit. There is no system of triage I know of. Sitting on a jury, I would, with the facts before me, award at the very least compensation to the wine owners. I would then go home and laugh at them. Since I'm not on a jury, I can go straight to the laughter part.
 
Jonathan, would you laugh at business owners (I believe Minetta Tavern was mentioned) who were storing their inventory there?
 
originally posted by Yixin:
Jonathan, would you laugh at business owners (I believe Minetta Tavern was mentioned) who were storing their inventory there?
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Please, everybody, go back and read the Times story that started this thread. It may be inaccurate, but the people in it were not Jay's and Keith's small collectors of carefully chosen wines (about whom I would feel as I would feel about myself, pained to lose a collection but remembering that I had lost a luxury, not a livelihood). nor people with business stock there. I hope the latter would be insured, but obviously restaurants whose ability to function was impaired or destroyed changes one's response. It it also changes the nature of the argument. If your and Keith's and Jay's point is that the story is not an accurate reflection of the general conditions of the people involved in the case, I assent on the basis of ignorance. But that, at least, was not really the argument they were making (which is to say, they mentioned that fact, but their analogy operates to justify the larger class of luxury collectors).
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg: If your and Keith's and Jay's point is that the story is not an accurate reflection of the general conditions of the people involved in the case...
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I would think that is a standard assumption when reading articles like these. NYT reporting is just as much 'entertainment' as any paper, and doesn't exactly scream out 'representative sample'. (That said, it's my main newspaper)
 
Well, we do have our reputation as the Wine Taliban to live up (down?) to.

(Now where did I put my cache of stones?)
Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
Buncha self-hating wine geeks, that's what I think.
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Actually, I only wrote my comment so I could have an easy, self-righteous moment that made me feel good about myself. I'm going back to posting about acidity levels in Savennieres.
 
Sadly, this does not look like it is ending well. According to a WB thread WineCare filed Chapter 7 and their law firm resigned:

"Schulte has filed an application with the court to withdraw as debtor's counsel in WineCare's chapter 11 case. The basis for Schulte's application is "irreconcilable views concerning the direction of WineCare's chapter 11 case," and Schutle can no longer represent WineCare due to these fundamental disagreements."

They could end up auctioning all of the wine to pay liabilities and legal fees.
 
originally posted by Robert Dentice:
Sadly, this does not look like it is ending well. According to a WB thread WineCare filed Chapter 7 and their law firm resigned:

"Schulte has filed an application with the court to withdraw as debtor's counsel in WineCare's chapter 11 case. The basis for Schulte's application is "irreconcilable views concerning the direction of WineCare's chapter 11 case," and Schutle can no longer represent WineCare due to these fundamental disagreements."

They could end up auctioning all of the wine to pay liabilities and legal fees.
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Wow, what a shitshow. How sad. How I hope I never end up in that situation.

I would think the customers might be inclined to informal means of redress.
 
originally posted by Robert Dentice:
S
They could end up auctioning all of the wine to pay liabilities and legal fees.
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It's been 35 years since I took my UCC course and I haven't looked at that area since, but I don't think that this is possible under the law. What is your basis for saying this, Robert?
 
originally posted by Claude Kolm:
originally posted by Robert Dentice:
S
They could end up auctioning all of the wine to pay liabilities and legal fees.
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It's been 35 years since I took my UCC course and I haven't looked at that area since, but I don't think that this is possible under the law. What is your basis for saying this, Robert?
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Claude -To be clear I am not a lawyer. I only said they could end up auctioning all of the wine based on my familiarity with similar situations and what has been said on the WB thread. Here is what we do know the business has filed for chapter 7 and will be in the hands of the bankruptcy trustee. There is no money to run the business and at least a couple million in liabilities. How will the bankruptcy trustee figure out how to return the wine and pay the creditors? I doubt the wine would get returned if the creditors are not paid? Jay Hack is strongly recommending that all of the people with wine there get together and work as a group to put together a fund to help the trustee. What I do know about bankruptcy situations like this is that anything can happen.
 
originally posted by Claude Kolm:
originally posted by Robert Dentice:
S
They could end up auctioning all of the wine to pay liabilities and legal fees.
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It's been 35 years since I took my UCC course and I haven't looked at that area since, but I don't think that this is possible under the law. What is your basis for saying this, Robert?
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Discussion on the other thread is not so much concerning auctioning off the wine but the concern that since there is no money what gets prioritized, spending money to

Return wine
Store wine
Pay creditors
Pay lawyers

The concern is that 1 and 2 will be deemed much less important
 
One way the wine could end up being auctioned off is where the customer isn't current on rent. Apparently the court has ordered that customers need to continue to pay and at some date the court will want these claims settled. Customers who haven't paid would have liens placed on their wines so the wine can be sold to satisfy the claim. The preceding is speculation on my part but if I owned wine stored there this is a scenario I would worry about.
The trustee has very little money on hand and apparently no prospects of raising funds given a lack of assets. It's unfortunate the operators lease the space, if they owned the building there would be assets to liquidate.

Have customers received any letters from the court?
 
I know that it's small potatoes, but I do hope that publication of this horrific clusterfuck of a situation will give pause to those people whining about their PC pre-orders not being fulfilled.

Mark Lipton
 
Yes, as Jay and Tom point out, customers can get screwed if they do not continue to pay rent and they may have to wait quite a while to get their wine out from the storage unless they can come up with a way to convince the court to remove it (which undoubtedly will involve some expense to the customers). But that is very different from saying that the wine stored on the premises become assets of the premises lessor as soon as the lessor runs into financial difficulty.
 
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