$67M Purchase Kicks Off Wine REIT

SAN RAFAEL, CA-Vintage Wine Trust Inc. recently completed a $159.4 million private offering of common stock, launching the wine REIT industry. The day after the offering, it closed a $73 million sale-leaseback with Robert Mondavi Corp. for its 1,200-acre Huichica Hills vineyard at the southern end of the Napa valley. The lease is backed by New York-based Constallation Brands, which acquired Robert Mondavi Corp. in December.VWT chief financial officer Tamara Fischer tells GlobeSt.com the company paid cash for its first purchase while it finalizes a credit facility, which will allow it to acquire approximately $425 million worth of properties. The company also currently has another $73 million worth of assets under non-binding LOIs and plans to be fully invested and levered within the next 12 months, she says. One of the LOIs is for Mondavi’s 1,200-acre Terra Ventosa vineyard on the central coast near Monterey, according to Napa Valley news reports.In the next eight months, Fischer says the company will be an SEC registrant. If all goes according to plan with respect to capitaldeployment, Fischer says management would contemplate an IPO to raise incremental capital. Vintage Wine Trust has been about 2.5 years in the making. Richard Shell, the former publisher of Wine Business Monthly from 1998-2003 and now COO of the wine REIT, began working with “a couple of guys from Australia” in 2003 on the concept, trying to determine whether the REIT format would work in the wine industry, Fischer says. Along the way, Freidman Billings Ramsay developed interest in the project and Shell brought to the table Joe Ciatti, owner of the Joseph W. Ciatti Co., one of nation’s largest bulk wine brokerage companies. Ultimately, Ciatti became the company’s chairman and CEO and FBR underwrote the offering.Other key personnl include Andy Bledsoe, vice president of asset management and director of viveyard operations. For the past 15 years, Bledsoe has served in various positions at Robert Mondavi, most recently as vice president of winegrowing, responsible for all of Mondavi’s vineyards.Fischer says the initial gain for investors will come from external growth through acquisitions. Total return will depend on the company’s ability to successfully lever the assets it acquires at a decent spread, which it expects will be about 300 basis points. All of its leases have 2% annual escalations, so on a very flat line basis the company is looking at about a 2% rate of internal growth, and hopefully closer to 4% on a leveraged basis. More importantly, she says, the CAD (cash available for distribution) yield, a key measure in the REIT industry, is expected to be in the 10% range.For the seller, a sale-leaseback frees up capital. While a bank may loan a landowner 60% of a vineyard’s value at a 6% interest rate, a REIT gives it 100% of the equity and charges rent equal to 8% or 9%. For the owner who can complete a sale-leaseback to a REIT and then turn around and put that equity into another investment–maybe another winery with a bunch of vineyards–that can return more than its rent–maybe through another sale-leaseback–it can be a no-cost way to fuel expansion.Other Wine REITs are in the works. Vic Motto of the winery consulting firm Motto, Kryla and Fisher told the Napa Valley Register earlier this month that investors have committed $200 million to Global Wine Partners, a private REIT that will focus on mid-to-high-end wineries on the North Coast. Vintage Wine Trust is focused on lower-end wineries in the central valley, he told the newspaper.