This week: Happy Ted Lasso day to all those who celebrate! While reseraching this weeks newsletter, I dove deep into something that really blew my mind. I’m away next week, and figured I’d write up an op-ed to go out based on the wheels segment. There is a lot going on in the world of car technology that we are unaware of. But before we dive into that, lets go full steam ahead.

Yes, I have covered this story, but we finally got the info. Louisville has spent the summer watching two of its own try to eat each other. In late July, Brown-Forman confirmed what had been rumor since spring: Sazerac, the privately held family company behind Buffalo Trace, had made an unsolicited run at buying Jack Daniel's parent company outright. The rejection came in a statement from Wolf Pen Branch, the group of Brown family members holding the majority of the company's Class A voting shares, who said Sazerac's proposal didn't align with their vision for the company's future [1]. It wasn't the first time Sazerac had asked. The original approach was a $32-per-share, all-cash offer valued around $15 billion, backed by Wells Fargo and Apollo Global Management [2], and when the board said no the first time, Sazerac skipped past them and wrote directly to shareholders asking them to reconsider [1].

The timing makes it stranger. Brown-Forman is mid-search for a new CEO after Lawson Whiting announced his retirement last month following nearly 30 years with the company [1], which means the board is fending off a $15 billion buyout while also trying to hire its next leader. Meanwhile Sazerac has been on an acquisition spree everywhere except the deal that would actually make headlines: a minority stake in Kendall Jenner's 818 Tequila, an investment in the sparkling margarita brand SipMargs, the purchase of the Dirty Shirley RTD line, and a Kentucky distilling property, on top of last year's Svedka and Western Son vodka acquisitions [1]. If you squint, it reads less like a company hunting for one trophy asset and more like a company building an empire in every direction it's allowed to.

There's a better story buried under the finance headlines, too. While the M&A drama plays out, Sazerac quietly launched its first Tennessee whiskey this summer under a new banner, AJ Bond Distillery. The name honors Master Distiller Allisa Henley and her late collaborator John Lunn, who spent two decades developing the whiskey together before Lunn's death in 2023, and the barrels have reportedly been aging since as early as 2017 [3]. Henley is one of a genuinely small number of female master distillers working in American whiskey right now, which makes AJ Bond worth a mention independent of who's trying to buy whom. If the Brown-Forman fight is Sazerac flexing its checkbook, AJ Bond is Sazerac actually making something.

And if all that corporate maneuvering has you eyeing your bar cart with suspicion, here's the palate cleanser, and it deserves more than a passing mention. The 2026 World Whiskies Awards named New Riff's Bottled-in-Bond Kentucky Straight Bourbon the World's Best Bourbon after two rounds of judging, and it also took Best Kentucky Bourbon outright [4]. The whiskey follows the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 to the letter, arguably America's first consumer protection law: the product of one distiller, one distillery, and one distilling season, aged a minimum of four years in a federally bonded warehouse, and bottled at exactly 100 proof with no chill filtration [5]. New Riff's mash bill runs high-rye at 65% corn, 30% rye, and 5% malted barley, well above the industry standard rye content, which gives the whiskey a spicier, more savory backbone than most bourbons built for broad appeal [5][6]. Judges described the profile as bright and layered: butterscotch, fresh oak, and vanilla up front, moving into rye spice, clove, cinnamon, and mint, with dark berry and red-black fruit underneath and a long white pepper finish [6]. A bartender at a new Tribeca spot recently pointed to it specifically as a bourbon that holds its own neat but also has the spine to stand up in a cocktail without disappearing [7].

What actually makes this newsworthy is the price. New Riff didn't win with a limited allocation or a secondary-market unicorn. This is the distillery's core, always-on expression, distributed in all 50 states, with a suggested retail price of $40 [4]. Distilled and aged in Newport, Kentucky since the distillery's founding in 2014, it beat out extended-age releases, secondary-cask finishes, and plenty of bottles running two, three, four times its price [8]. In a category that's increasingly built around scarcity and hype, the judges just handed the top prize to the bottle sitting on the shelf at your local shop.

Yes, I would buy it. Yes, I already have it.

New data landed at the end of July that quietly rewrites the story of who actually drives value in this hobby. EveryWatch's first-half 2026 report, built from data across 650 dealers and nearly 500 auction houses, put the global secondary watch market at $10.5 billion in transactions, up 37.2% from the same period a year earlier [9]. That's a big number on its own, but the more interesting story is buried in who's driving the growth curve, and it isn't who you'd expect.

Rolex, unsurprisingly, is still the gravitational center of the whole market. The brand accounted for 41% of total secondary-market value, roughly $4.29 billion, more than any other single manufacturer [9]. But independents, the small ateliers that don't have a marketing budget or a waiting list managed by an algorithm, are the fastest-growing segment by a wide margin. Independent brands collectively generated $633.8 million in secondary sales in the first half of the year, up 89% year over year, and that total actually exceeded the entire LVMH watch portfolio's secondary-market value of about $617 million over the same period [9]. Sit with that for a second: a scattered handful of small workshops, some run by a dozen people, outsold the combined secondary desk of one of the largest luxury conglomerates on earth.

F.P. Journe is the headline name inside that number. The Geneva-based brand's secondary sales nearly tripled to $201.6 million, placing it seventh among all watch brands by secondary-market value, ahead of plenty of household names most collectors would assume rank higher [9]. Geography tells its own story too. US and Canadian secondary sales grew almost 70% to $4.5 billion, while Asia was the only major region to post a decline, down 2.6% [9]. Where the buying power lives is shifting in real time, and it's shifting toward North American collectors with a taste for something their coworker can't identify on sight. One more number worth flagging for anyone watching liquidity: median time to sell crept up from 39 days to 43 days industry-wide, a small shift EveryWatch itself flagged as worth monitoring through the back half of the year [9].

Some of this is cultural rather than purely financial, and the mechanism matters as much as the money. Independent brands like J.N. Shapiro, Simon Brette, and Akrivia built devoted followings on Instagram and YouTube long before they had any real retail presence, and when a visible figure like Timothée Chalamet chooses a niche Danish-Swiss brand like Urban Jurgensen for red-carpet appearances, the entire market takes notice [10]. Independents used to be a conversation for people who already knew everything, gatekept by dealer relationships and forum threads. Now they're breaking through on the same channels that make anything else go viral, and the secondary-market data is just catching up to what the algorithm already knew. If you've been on the fence about looking past the usual five brands everyone already owns, this is the year the numbers finally back you up.

Final Thoughts:

Keeping this one intentionally brief, because the real dive is coming next week: a proper op-ed on the dark side of connected cars, the hacking, the monitoring, and what your dashboard actually knows about you. For now, three things worth a passing mention.

First, the theft side. A $8 million luxury car theft ring got taken down in New Jersey this summer, and the mechanics are worth a couple sentences even in a light section. Over 90 vehicles, mostly Porsches, BMWs, and Range Rovers, were stolen across New York and New Jersey between June 2025 and June 2026, stored in a warehouse in Irvington, and shipped out through the Port of Newark to buyers in Ghana and Nigeria, with 63 people ultimately charged with racketeering [11]. A separate federal case out of Washington, D.C. showed a different flavor of the same problem: thieves used OBD2 devices plugged directly into a car's diagnostic port to reprogram the vehicle into accepting a blank key fob, no relay attack or hallway key-signal required [12]. Even north of the border, the problem has gotten personal for the people who write the laws: four people were arrested outside the Ontario premier's own home, accused of casing his vehicle with theft devices before an actual break-in [13]. That's the thread we'll pull properly next week.

Second, and this is the one that'll set up next week's piece: the surveillance side is starting to draw real regulatory teeth, not just consumer complaints. Australia's privacy regulator has opened a formal investigation into automakers over in-cabin biometric and geolocation data harvested through what the investigation calls "bundled consent," meaning a driver can agree to near-total data harvesting just by signing a sales contract or activating a remote-start app [14]. The penalties under discussion aren't symbolic either: up to $50 million or 30% of a company's adjusted turnover for the most serious breaches [14]. Theft rings and data harvesting, together, properly, next week.

For now, better use of your attention: Monterey Car Week is happening next week. The event runs August 7 through 16 this year, and Sunday's Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance marks its 75th anniversary [15]. RM Sotheby's, Gooding Christie's, Mecum, and Bonhams all run their flagship sales August 12 through 15 [16], and if last year is any indication of what to expect, it'll be worth checking the leaderboard once results post. Ferrari took all 10 of the top 10 sales at last year's event, totaling roughly $800 million combined [17]. It's also worth noting for the watch crowd: the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion at Laguna Seca, several days of pre-war-through-modern race cars actually being driven in anger rather than posed on a lawn, is one of the week's marquee events [18]. It makes Car Week the rare occasion where all three of this newsletter's subjects share a zip code for ten straight days.

Outro: I’ll catch you all in two weeks! Thanks for hanging around as always, and look out for my op-ed next Wednesday. It’ll be a little on the darker side, but it is what it is. We must all be aware. And with that, Believe. For those who know…

[1] "Brown-Forman turns down 'unsolicited' Sazerac offer," The Spirits Business, July 27, 2026. 

[2] "Jack Daniel's Maker Brown-Forman Reportedly Turns Down $15 Billion Sazerac Bid," Benzinga via Yahoo Finance, May 15, 2026. 

[3] "Sazerac's AJ Bond Distillery: A Tennessee Whiskey Ten Years in the Making," The Bourbon Road, April 14, 2026. 

[4] "This $40 Bottle Is the World's Best Bourbon, According to the 2026 World Whiskies Awards," AOL/Food & Wine, 2026.

[5] "The World's Best Bourbon Isn't Rare—It's This $40 Bottle From New Riff," Forbes, April 17, 2026.

[6] "A Closer Look At the Best Bourbons at the 2026 World Whiskies Awards," The Whiskey Wash, March 31, 2026. 

[7] "The Best New Bourbons To Try In 2026," AOL, 2026. 

[8] "World's Best Bourbon 2026: New Riff and 15 Stars Win," The Whiskey Wash, February 18, 2026. 

[9] "Secondary Watch Market Surges: Independents Outpace Luxury," JCK Online (EveryWatch H1 2026 report), July 30, 2026. 

[10] "Why Independent Watchmaking Is Booming in 2026," Rotate Watches, April 24, 2026. 

[11] "Car theft ring: 63 people charged after police bust major operation in Irvington, NJ," ABC7 New York, June 30, 2026. 

[12] "International Car Theft Ring Busted," U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Columbia, April 22, 2026. 

[13] "4 arrested outside Doug Ford's home accused of planning to steal his vehicle," Global News, June 2025. 

[14] "Is Your Car Spying on You? The 2026 Privacy Probe into Connected Vehicles," American SPCC, June 25, 2026. 

[15] "Monterey Car Week 2026: Schedule & 75th Pebble Beach Concours," CarEvents.com, 2026. 

[16] "The Collector's Guide to Monterey Car Week 2026," Motorious, 2026. 

[17] Monterey Car Week 2025 auction summary, agent4stars, 2025. 

[18] "Plan to See Monterey Car Week 2026 in Monterey California," SeeMonterey.com, 2026.