SLO County candy maker sold $18,000 in caramels to winery. But she never got paid
Erin Holden was thrilled when she made a deal to sell $18,700 worth of her homemade candies to Laetitia Vineyard and Winery last year.
But when the owner of Queen Bee Caramels in Atascadero still hadn’t been paid months after she delivered the order to the San Luis Obispo County vineyard, she started to get suspicious.
Then, the winery’s parent company went bankrupt.
“I had dreams of expanding the business,” Holden told The Tribune. “There were plans ... that I had made with the money that I had expected to earn.”
Holden is a cottage industry licensed caramel maker, making handmade candies out of her home kitchen using honey from beehives in her backyard.
When Laetitia’s parent company Vintage Wine Estates went bankrupt, Holden was left high and dry dealing with large law firms and lots of legal jargon. Months later, she is still trying to figure out how to get her money back.
Then, to add insult to injury, she received an IRS form taxing her for the sale that she was never paid for.
“It was a lot, a lot of work getting everything ready, and since I’m already out so much money, It’s not like I can hire a lawyer at this point,” Holden said.
Now, the Atascadero small business owner isn’t sure if she will ever get the money she is owed.
SLO County business owner hit by wine company bankruptcy
Holden has been a resident of San Luis Obispo County for 25 years since attending Cal Poly, where she earned an animal science degree in 2005.
Queen Bee Caramels started in 2021 as Holden’s post-pandemic passion project. Also a hobby beekeeper, she uses the honey from her personal beehives in her all recipes.
A nurse at French Hospital Medical Center by trade, Holden started out selling her homemade honey caramels out of her kitchen to friends and co-workers, before eventually incorporating as an official business. Now, four years later, Queen Bee Caramels can be found in wholesale retail stores across the county.
Holden was first contacted by Vintage Wine Estates in April 2023, when it owned Laetitia Vineyards. The wine company was interested in ordering candies to put in its wine club deliveries.
The business owner was in talks with Vintage for months and even sent them samples to try.
Finally, in November 2023, Vintage ordered 4,600 individual pillow-packs of four caramels each at $4 a pack. That evened out to 18,400 individual caramels — or 96 trays — costing a total of $18,700 in product and labor, Holden said. The extra $300 would’ve covered the cost of delivering to Vintage the company promised to pay.
The order was placed over email, and Vintage declined to give Holden a deposit.
“I supposed that probably should’ve been a red flag for me,” Holden said.
In an email on Nov. 14, 2023, Hanna Elias — a buyer for Laetitia at the time — told Holden: “Unfortunately, our company just instated a new policy where we do not do deposits. I realize this effects the small businesses that I usually prefer to order from.”
Vintage agreed over email to pay her within 15 days of receiving the order, but neither party signed a contract for the deal.
With a delivery due date of Feb. 16, 2024, Holden started preparing and packaging the thousands of caramels that January.
It was a few weeks into cooking caramels that she heard Laetitia had closed its doors.
Confused as to what she should do, she tried to contact the parent company but received disjointed communications. With blind faith, she carried on.
She completed and shipped the order by mid-February as planned, still without any clarity on exactly what was going on.
After that, “communication just dropped pretty quickly,” Holden said. “Just a lack of anybody returning my emails, nobody returning my phone calls.” She heard back from Vintage and Laetitia only once or twice in a span of four months, she said.
On April 8, 39 days after her payment was due, Vintage Wine Estate’s billing office finally responded to her multiple inquiries in an email exchange obtained by The Tribune: “During our current restructuring, we are managing our cash position very closely and payments are being delayed temporarily.”
“We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused,” the email read.
Then, in July, Vintage Wine Estates filed for bankruptcy.
By then, it was clear to Holden that the wine company wouldn’t be living up to its end of the deal.
She tried to take her case to small claims court, but in California, business can only file two cases claiming up to $6,250 total per year.
She considered hiring a lawyer but ultimately found it too expensive on top of her already incurred losses.
“I use the term ‘disgusting’ when I think about (it) — you’re ordering something you probably knew you weren’t gonna be able to pay for,” Holden said about the bankrupt wine company. “Like, back in late December ‘23, and you refused to give me a deposit, you probably knew things were going down.”
As Vintage liquidated its assets in the months that followed, Laetitia was sold off to a group of local winemakers and agricultural businessmen in September.
However, due to the nature of the bankruptcy sale, the new owners were protected from liability for any of Vintage’s unpaid costs.
In September, Holden decided to file a claim for the full $18,700 with Eqiq, a legal filing group that managed the bankruptcy claims against Vintage.
But it was merely one in a total of 1,666 claims Epiq filed against Vintage Wine Estates in California, ranging from just a few dollars to an over-$300-million debt owed to a bank. Also among the claims are $32,473 owed to the San Luis Obispo County Tax Collector’s office and two claims totaling $5,050 from SLO’s Finest catering business.
Since filing, Holden said communication with Epiq has been disjointed and infrequent. She still doesn’t fully know the status of her claim, how much she will be paid back and when, if ever.
Moreover, Holden was told that an injunction was placed on Vintage Wine Estates after it filed for bankruptcy that prohibited her from reaching out directly to the company while she had an open claim against them.
The injunction is meant to facilitate a fair process for bankrupt debtors by blocking creditors attempting to claim their credit directly from the bankrupt entity. Holden was told she could face fines and damages if she attempt to contact Vintage, she said.
Finally, in January of this year, Holden received some news from Epiq.
She was sent a first reimbursement offer — but it wasn’t anywhere close to the full cost of her claim.
In complicated legal jargon, the offer document explained that if Holden was to accept, she would receive a percentage of whatever was left over from a $1 million fund pool after all liquidation trust expenses, administrative expenses, tax claims and priority claims were paid off. The leftover funds would be distributed proportionally between all Class 4 general unsecured claim holders, which included Holden.
When all was said and done, her slice of the pie came out to a mere sliver.
According to the bankruptcy court disclosure documents, Holden will receive between 5% and 8% of her claim in the first round of recoveries. At best, she will get $1,496, and at worst $935.
“I spent more than that getting the order ready,” which was closer to $6,000 in ingredients and materials, let alone the time, labor and delivery costs, Holden said.
Hypothetically, she could continue to receive payments in the coming months or years as additional funds are recovered, but there is no guarantee that will happen, and even if more money becomes available in the future, any payments she receives would likely be smaller and smaller.
That is because as time goes on, the pool of available funds becomes diluted by additional classes of claimants that get added to the distribution mix, increasing the number of claims that must be filled by the same amount of money.
Holden accepted her offer in January but has yet to receive her first payment.
She did, however, receive a 1099 IRS form taxing her for the sale.
“The other thing that’s really disgusting is that Vintage Wine Estates has said they paid me, and so I got my tax form saying, ‘Please make sure you claim this on your taxes this year,’” Holden said. She plans to dispute the tax with the IRS.
Vintage Wine Estates dissolved this week as a result of the bankruptcy becoming final, a representative at Epiq told The Tribune. As of Monday, the company no longer exists.
Through all of this, Holden has managed to keep her small business afloat, but the experience has been harrowing.
While she hasn’t gone under, she is still down nearly $19,000, and isn’t optimistic she will ever get it back.
“There’s definitely been a little bit of loss of sleep in the past 10 months over it,” Holden said.
She is still operating out of her home kitchen, selling caramels to individual customers and wholesale retail businesses.
Her No. 1 seller is the honey sea salt caramel, but she also produces more unique flavors like honey bourbon, churro caramels for the Paso General Store and even matcha, a new flavor for the San Luis Obispo Asian Market, Holden said. A bag of around 10 caramels costs between $10 and $12, she said.
Her caramels can also be found at the SLO General Store, Club Bubbly and SLO Olive in San Luis Obispo; Farron Elizabeth, Perry’s Parcel and Gift, Rumor Goods and Creston House in Atascadero; and upcoming local events like Atascadero’s Central Coast Craft Beer Festival and Paso Robles’ Art in the Park.
She also fills private orders, which you can place online by contacting Queen Bee Caramels on Facebook or Instagram or by emailing queenbeecaramels@yahoo.com
The Stapleton Group, the trustee firm handling Vintage Wine Estate’s bankruptcy liquidation, denied to comment for the story.
Response from Laetitia’s new owners
In October, a group of local winemakers bought Laetitia from the crumbling Vintage Wine Estates. The new owners are Eric Hickey, Ejnar Knudsen and Jeff Nicholson.
Because Holden was told by Epiq she would be fined for reaching out while an active creditor, she has had no communication with the new owners.
Though they are not legally liable for the burden of Vintage’s bankruptcy, Holden wonders what they would do if they knew her story.
“I’d like to know if the new owners of Laetitia even know about me, because I’m not entirely sure they do know,” Holden said. “While they are protected, I would like them to realize what’s happened, and maybe consider at least helping me break even on what I spent on it.”
The Tribune reached out to Laetitia, under its new ownership, for this story.
“We, as the new owners of Laetitia, are committed to our community,” Laetita co-owner, general manager and winemaker Hickey told The Tribune in a written statement.
“My partners and I are empathetic to local businesses who were caught up in the legal proceedings of the Vintage Wine Estates bankruptcy,” Hickey said. “While we did not assume those liabilities, we have resumed business with many vendors. We hope to do the same with Queen Bee Caramels, especially as we look to strengthen our guest experience.”
The first five months of business has been spent clearing up deferred maintenance, focusing on the business, building their team and revitalizing their company culture, Hickey said.
“We understand the challenges of privately owned, small businesses and look forward to supporting our fellow local business owners,” Hickey said.
This story was originally published March 8, 2025 at 1:58 PM.
