According to The Wall Street Journal, Brown-Forman is selling the bulk of its California operations, including Fetzer (and presumably Bonterra). It will retain its crown jewel, Sonoma-Cutrer, whose wines sell at higher prices. The Journal report notes that B-F wine revenues dropped 15% from the previous year.

It appears that many of the experiments with corporate ownership may be coming to a close; while focusing on Foster’s, Tim Ferguson over at Forbes summarized the reasons for this last month, with asset intensiveness and large inventories being the key items. The inherent conflict between the long-term nature of investments in vineyards and the short-term outlook that seems to govern share prices these days should make it clear that wine production is a business difficult to square with public stock trading.

Constellation Brands–perhaps the biggest player in the wine business–acquired Ravenswood in 2001, BRL Hardy in 2003 and Robert Mondavi in 2004. Although it immediately spit out bits of those companies–Arrowood and Byron, both part of the Mondavi deal, were resold almost instantly–other pieces have taken longer to digest.

The past several years have seen the company closing wineries and selling vineyards in Australia and California, including such properties as Goundrey in Western Australia, Leasingham in Clare Valley and Stonehaven in Padthaway. The latest news is that it intends to sell the Blackstone winery in Sonoma. What Constellation has been keeping, for the most part, are the brands. It continues to produce Leasingham wines, but in McLaren Vale; it will continue making Blackstone’s Sonoma Reserve wines, but at its Ravenswood facility.

Diageo has also moved to consolidate production of some of its brands. Rosenblum wines are no longer made at the iconic winery in Alameda that Kent Rosenblum made famous. These are all understandable moves from a business point of view: consolidation and economies of scale are key to reducing costs, increasing profitability and sustaining share prices.

And that’s not to say that these companies can’t be beneficent brand stewards. Beaulieu Vineyard (Diageo), Beringer (Fosters) and Robert Mondavi Winery (Constellation) all have been beautifully maintained and renovated under current corporate ownership. These flagship brands all presumably add enough to the bottom lines to warrant being kept intact.

But what doesn’t factor into financial projections are the intangibles lost when vital links to the brand history are irrevocably broken. The brand story becomes mythology rather than reality when there is no winery to visit, when the only links to a region are percentages on fact sheets, when founding winemakers inevitably move on from corporate life. In short, the brand becomes an empty label on a bottle of wine that could be from anywhere.