MGPI looks like another dead whiskey stock — down 75% in two years, trading at a “liquidation” multiple, and tossed in the penalty box for an inventory glut the market assumes will never clear. Under the hood, it’s the opposite story: cash flow is up, the balance sheet is a fortress, competitors are going bankrupt, and MGPI has nearly $470M in liquidity to buy stills, barrels, and brands at fire-sale prices. This deep dive walks through why the brown-goods crash is a textbook inventory cycle, how three growth engines (Penelope, El Mayor, and Ingredients) are being valued at roughly zero, and why our conservative work points to 50–200%+ upside with limited downside if things go wrong. If you like capital-cycle setups where sentiment has totally detached from math, this is one of them.

As an Oregon-based hedge fund, we often get the opportunity to more closely investigate local companies that are otherwise too small to register on most firms’ radars.  Willamette Valley Vineyards (WVVI) is one of those companies.  As one of the largest corporate vineyards in the state and a big player in a currently-ailing industry (the kids just don’t drink how they used to), it has shown up on our equity value screen programs more than a few times.

Unfortunately, just appearing in a value search does not make a value company.  It is as much our job as managers to identify value traps as it is to pick out the potential true bargains.  The low valuation of current trading seems to be justified.  Let’s dig into why.

We at the Woodworth Contrarian Fund specialize in finding buying opportunities when the market is selling. This means buying early and selling early - if you wait for the last drop of blood, they’re already dead, so to speak.  Now with Q2 2026 Earnings in the rear view mirror, we think that this company is a classic contrarian value opportunity.