C&C's €20 million (£15.75 million) take-over of Findlater is a handy indication of the state of our so-called "tiger economy". Who would have thought a decade ago that wine importers would change hands for such great sums. But the Irish drank a lot less back then and the most common tipple was the £2.99 Piat d'Or.
Findlater fits well into C&C's wine business, but C&C's venture-capital owners no doubt have bigger things in mind for the company they took over privately with its management two years ago for almost £600 million.
In about a week, C&C should find out if it is on the final shortlist for the British soft drinks group Britvic.
Britvic is currently jointly owned by Bass, Allied Domecq, Whitbread and Pepsico, and is a very nice money-generator with profits last year of £46 million sterling (€75.5 million) on sales of £539 million.
The final take-out price is highly unlikely to be less than £400 million sterling.
In lodging a bid for Britvic, C&C and its main investor BC Partners seem confident of being able to put together a financial package if their bid is successful. But such a take-over will need some innovative financial engineering given that C&C had €768 million debt as of last September.
Market sentiment has supposedly shifted back towards old-economy growth-oriented companies - a category into which C&C snugly fits. Maybe that flotation - long-fingered last December - is not that far off after all.
