Au Vodka, the Swansea company behind the gold bottles stacked in supermarket fridges across Wales, is in advanced talks to be sold to an American drinks giant in a deal worth as much as £500m.
The prospective buyer is Sazerac, the Kentucky family firm that owns Buffalo Trace bourbon, Fireball and Southern Comfort.
Founders Charlie Morgan and Jackson Quinn are each expected to clear more than £100m once future payments are counted, according to Sky News, which first reported the talks on Saturday.
Nothing has reportedly been signed as yet.
A source close to Sazerac said the company “admired” Au Vodka and its founders, but that discussions were ongoing and had yet to be finalised.
A Llansamlet HQ with a crazy golf course, and no word on what happens to it
Whoever ends up owning the brand also inherits one of Swansea’s stranger buildings.
Au Vodka moved into a new headquarters at 1 Crucible Park, on the Central Business Park estate at Swansea Vale, in early 2025, having outgrown a unit on Cwmdu Industrial Estate. The company says the building cost £5m and doubled its space to 30,000 sq ft, with a café, a shop, a tasting lab, a content studio and a nine-hole crazy golf course inside.
The site is open to the public and runs tours. Snoop Dogg, who owns a minority stake in Swansea City, played a set there in February that ran well past its billed half hour during his visit to the city.
Neither company has commented publicly on what would happen to the building, the tours or the jobs in Llansamlet if a sale goes through. It is also unclear whether Morgan and Quinn would stay on.
From a 2,000-bottle run to turnover of almost £83m
Au Vodka Ltd was registered at Companies House in March 2015 and still lists Central Business Park as its registered office.
It started with a one-off run of 2,000 gold bottles sold to bars around the city. By late 2021 the company said it had gone from a two-man team to 40 full-time staff at its Swansea base.
Accounts filed for the year to the end of April 2025 show turnover up 27.3% to almost £83m, with pre-tax profit up 31.3% to £6.7m.
The growth came from cans rather than bottles. Volumes of the ready-to-drink range climbed 65.8% to more than 1.1 million nine-litre cases, and in November the brand overtook Gordon’s to become the UK’s bestselling ready-to-drink product in shops.
Administrative costs rose sharply over the same period, up £12.1m to £25.6m. The workforce has grown with the sales: accounts show an average of 34 staff in the year to April 2022, 50 the following year and 66 in the year to April 2024.
The ballboy, the red card and the brand built afterwards
Morgan was 17 and working as a ballboy at the Liberty Stadium in January 2013 when he held onto the ball during Swansea City’s League Cup semi-final against Chelsea.
Eden Hazard tried to kick it out from under him, caught him, and was sent off. The pair met again in 2024 to laugh about it over a drink.
Morgan and Quinn, school friends, started Au Vodka two years later. In 2017 they sold a fifth of the company to the DJ and broadcaster Charlie Sloth, who put the bottles in front of musicians and influencers, and in 2023 they sold a minority stake to private equity firm Metric Capital.
Sazerac’s second ready-to-drink deal in two years
Sazerac completed its purchase of BuzzBallz, the Texas maker of premixed cocktails in spherical cans, in 2024. Buying Au would hand it Britain’s biggest ready-to-drink vodka producer as well.
The appeal runs in both directions. Au launched in the United States in August 2022 and opened an office in Atlanta.
In its most recent accounts Morgan said the year’s strategy had centred on investing in the brand’s US presence. Sazerac, meanwhile, is reported to be looking for a bigger foothold in Britain.
Sazerac has also been linked with a bid for the much larger Brown-Forman, owner of Jack Daniel’s.
The investment bank PJT Partners is understood to be handling the sale for Au Vodka, while accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers is advising Morgan and Quinn personally. The legal work is split between two firms: DLA Piper for Au Vodka and Dorsey for Sazerac.
Any sale would come less than a year after the Advertising Standards Authority banned three of the company’s social media posts for breaching alcohol marketing rules.
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