Wow, what an excellent conference! A game changer. I have to thank my friends over at Village Green Energy for hooking me up with a free pass. I’ve been so passionate about this movement as long as I can remember… ever since 6th grade when I messed around with electromagenetic fields and plants. Early education for me was all about ecology and environment, and that followed with rigorous economics in college, which I didn’t quite understand about myself until now. Having not gone into banking with my degree and now seeing the state of the economy I was like shit… but David Suzuki put it so clearly… it’s (eco)nomics. I can’t believe I never recognized that. I automatically associated economics with the greedy, short-sighted mentality of Wall Street that focuses solely on the bottom line and exploiting the market for cash and egoic status. Yet you realize the bottom line is not the statement of cash flows or the balance sheet… it’s the fuckin planet. Ecology + Economics = Sustainability. This conference was absolutely buzzing! People were feeling alive and connecting and touching each other like I’ve never seen in my life. We all knew the green revolution is ready and about to change the world in a big way.

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When I started working in the wine business in the summer of 2007 I knew a few things about wine. First it was exponentially better to drink than the Natural Light my contemporaries were imbibing at the time. It provides a great way to meet women and convince them you’re more sophisticated than you actually are. And finally there was something I desired to learn about wine culturally, historically and socially; anyone can order a martini and look good doing so but in the world of wine you are constantly finding out new and interesting things. Yet for all the knowledge I thought I had gathered nothing was more humbling than going to work in a wine store, where the people above you spent most of their lives buying, selling and learning about wine. From my time with them I’ve learned a lot about spotting good wines.

First of all, labels mean absolutely nothing, so when you go to buy wine don’t even look at the front label ignore it, there is more useful information on the back like a good importer. In this era of opulence and visually stimulated purchasing, Louis Vutton and Cadillac, take a more refined and dare I say classier approach. I am reminded of the movie Tommy Boy with the late great Chris Farley. Tommy is selling Callahan Break Pads; one of his retailers says there isn’t a guarantee on Callahan’s box. Tommy says you can put a guarantee on shit and its still shit, same thing with wine – creative picture means the winery spent all the money on a design and not the juice. Like a guarantee vs. the actual product. There can and often will be a cute picture on the bottle but the juice, more times than not, is still absolute Swill (a colloquialism used to describe wine not worth drinking). Read the rest of this entry »

What is going on in the world? How is it that Bear Sterns can go from $20 a share to $2? Basically, my feeling is that the credit crunch of the past 6 months sends a serious message to us all, a message about value.

The problem with board members who rely on econometrics and statistics to forecast company growth and decide who the CEO should be is that they have become too focussed on the profit, and have completely forgotten value. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, who summed up the crisis we’re in quite well: beware the man who puts a price on everything whilst not knowing the value of anything. The sub-prime mortgage is a result of a bunch of spin-doctors who tried to put a price on things without caring about value. Read the rest of this entry »

It was announced today that the Champagne region of France is expanding to meet world demand and we’re pretty excited about it. Once thought of as a celebratory drink for only special occasions, Champagne and sparkling wine are quickly becoming the wine of choice for many around the world. Now it appears to be in demand for many other reasons.  It seems that the younger generations just like to drink champagne for any reason… tonights a party, a new episode of Lost is on, I made it home safe, I bet that would go great with my pb&j (ok maybe not quite that far).

For more reading see: Champagne – A New Year Tradition