Craft Wine? Craft Beer’s Innovation Edge (and What Wine Can Do About It)

March 29, 2016 By Mike Veseth in brands, extreme wine, wine, wine markets 15 Comments

battle People in the wine business tend to look at each other and see rivals like in the old Mad Magazine Spy vs Spy comic strip. In the battle for shelf space, consumer attention or critical praise, it usually seems like it is wine versus wine.

But hardly anyone lives by wine alone and these days the biggest competition is often less from other wineries (or wine regions) than from other products like craft beer, craft cider and craft spirits that have captured consumer imaginations. The battle for shelf space is real, but its not the only battle.

Keys to Craft Beer’s Success

Craft beer in particular has enjoyed great success in recent years and many of us see the unexpected fall in demand for wines priced at $8 per bottle and below here in the United States as one consequence of the craft beer boom.

Craft beer has many advantages. The margins can be great, for example, and you are not limited to one vintage per year. You can crank out new batches every week or so and it is possible and even desirable to experiment with seasonal recipes or riffs on classic styles from around the world.

Innovation is hot on the craft beer aisle, with literally dozens of different styles, blends and mixes that are constantly rotating in and out of the market. It is kind of fascinating. Wine comes in a world of assorted grapes and styles, too, but innovation tends to take the form of unusual wine brands or packaging, for example, more than experimental products.

Rocky Wine: Don’t try this at home!

Jamie Goode wrote about the time that Randall Grahm experimented with adding “minerality” to his wine by tossing some rocks to the barrels. There was an interesting effect, Grahm said. The stones added “far more complexity and greater persistence on the palate.” But the health department shut the operation down.

Winemakers are like brew-masters in that both groups are constantly experimenting and trying new things, although not all of them are as extreme as Randall Grahm’s rocky vintage. The brew industry seems to be more open to the commercialization of these products.

Maybe wine can bring more of these experiments to market in small or large lots to add another layer of complexity and interest? Well, what about the barrels themselves? Barrels come in many types and are used in a variety of ways in wine.There is a history of product and process innovation both with barrels (think Gaia in Piemonte) and without them (the current popularity of unoaked Chardonnay).

Barrels are a source of innovative inspiration in other parts of the beverage market. I have seen oak-aged ales and ciders and I have seen spirits that were aged in sherry barrels, for example. Working with barrels has always been a legitimate if sometimes controversial variation on wine tradition. Maybe we can do more with them?

Jacob’s Creek Experiments cab

Jacob’s Creek, the Australian winery that is part of the Pernod Ricard empire, has released two new wines that explore this notion. They are called Double Barrel Cabernet Sauvignon and Double Barrel Shiraz. The wines are first aged in traditional oak and then they get a relatively brief second aging in used spirits barrels — Irish whiskey for the Cab and Scotch whisky for the Shiraz.

The idea isn’t to make the wine taste like booze — if you want to taste whiskey (or whisky) the obvious thing to do is to taste whiskey (or whisky) — but as with oak barrels in general, you use them to see what subtle influences they bring to the finished product.

Sue and I were invited to participate in an experiment with these wines and so we received bottles of the two Double Barrel wines plus samples of each wine before the whiskey barrel treatment. We sampled the wines last week with Jacob’s Creek winemaker Ben Bryant via video link-up.

It was interesting to compare the “before” and “after” wines. The “after” Cab (made from grapes sourced from Coonawarra) was richer on the palate than the “before” wine — the biggest difference was more texture than flavor. The delicious Barossa Shiraz was more dramatically transformed and our clear favorite of the two (I think the Cab simply needs to age a bit longer and both wines were probably still a bit shaken up from shipping). I thought I could detect a subtle Scotch whisky influence in the Shiraz, but I suspect that was the power of suggestion. In any case it was an interesting experience. shiraz

“I thought this might be just a gimmick,” Sue remarked when we were finished with the tasting. But she concluded that the whiskey/whisky barrel aging did make the wines more interesting and different without fundamentally altering their identities. Something new — which is just what many (but not all) wine consumers are looking for.

The Next Big Thing?

So are whiskey barrels the next big thing in wine? Should you rush to try to corner the market on used Bourbon barrels just in case? (Too late — Fetzer makes a Bourbon barrel-aged Zinfandel called 1000 Stories.)

No. But these wines are an interesting addition to the menu, don’t you think? I see them as a thoughtful attempt to experiment within the tradition of wine much as the craft beer producers have been doing in their space.

Winemakers have long experimented in the privacy of their cellars and labs. Barrel tasting with a winemaker never fails to uncover something out of the ordinary. It would be interesting to see more of these products reach the market for us to try and to provide wine with an even more dynamic presence.

I guess I am calling for the broader commercialization of what you might call “craft wine.” Fresh ideas, small lots, variations on the traditional themes but with some added flair. Not for everyone, that’s for sure, but the craft beer and spirits boom shows that there are many consumers who are interested in a more dynamic concept and some of them are being drawn away from wine.

Beer has made an effort to learn some of the secrets of wine’s strong appeal. I think those of us on planet wine should return the compliment. Done thoughtfully, innovations like Jacob’s Creek Double Barrel can help wine compete with beer for the palates and pocketbooks of today’s consumers — and do it without undermining the fundamental idea of wine.

Craft Beer Raises the Stakes: PicoBrew

There is even more competition coming from the craft beer world! Earlier on the same day as the Double Barrel tasting I attended a presentation by Bill Mitchell, the CEO of a start-up company called PicoBrew, and angel investor Karl Leaverton. gfc_pico_productimage_1

PicoBrew uses advanced technology to allow home brew-masters to create their own professional-quality craft beers, either using their own recipes or those provided by other users or famous craft breweries. Quality, precision and control are selling points, but so is convenience — the magic happens in a sleek web-enabled counter-top brewing appliance. Wow.

But making distinctive beer is only part of the attraction. PicoBrew uses the web and social media tools to allow home brewers to share their discoveries and their stories. Seems to me that the sort of person who would have a geeky interest in fine wine might fall in love with the advanced DIY possibilities of this product.

Beer has made big strides from the bad old days of the 1970s. Cider has surged and craft spirits are very hot. Wine, as I have written before, needs to up its game to compete in this dynamic market environment, but do it without sacrificing the fundamentals that make wine so special.

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Thanks to Jacobs Creek and Vanessa Dones at the thomas collective for inviting us to participate in this web wine tasting event.

Simply Irresistible? “Second-Cheapest” Restaurant Wine in Theory & Practice

March 22, 2016 By Mike Veseth in restaurant wine, wine, wine price 2 Comments

second Last week I wrote about the theory that you should always order the second-cheapest wine on a restaurant’s list. The second-cheapest wine rule as it is usually explained, is a naive application of game theory to the problem of ordering restaurant wine.

The premise is that the restaurant is trying to gouge its wine-drinking customers and that it does this by putting incredibly high mark-ups on the cheapest wine on the list. Diners are drawn to the cheapest wine because of the high general level of wine prices, the theory goes, and so the restaurant rakes in the dough when diners opt for the least expensive bottle.

So where does the second-cheapest wine theory come in? Well, since you are smart and know that the cheapest wine is a rip-off, you can “stick it to the man” by ordering the second-cheapest wine instead. Second-cheapest wine — the sweet spot in every wine list!

Game Theory in Circles

Now there is a lot that is problematic with this scenario, beginning with the premise (see below), but the game theory is bad, too. It implicitly assumes that restaurants are ignorant of the second-cheapest theory, which they obviously are not, and do not adopt a counter-strategy, which they probably would.

If an evil restaurant wine manager knows the theory and wants to rip you off, he or she can manipulate the situation by simply raising the mark-up on the second-cheapest wine, making it the worst deal of the list. It’s tit for tat, as they say in game theory (economics note: there really is a non-cooperative “prisoner dilemma” game theory strategy called “tit for tat.”)

Your logical response, I suppose, would be to shift to the third-cheapest wine since the second-cheapest is now a loser. But once the restaurant figures out your new strategy you will need to move up a notch again to avoid being ripped off. Play this out ad nauseum and you arrive at ultimate ridiculous rule-of-thumb: always buy the most expensive wine on the list. tumblr_lrp6a2atud1qmxjbzo1_400

And once the evil restaurant masterminds figure that out, your only recourse is obvious — buy the cheapest wine! (Or maybe just buy a beer.) That’s the problem with these rules of thumb — they sometimes lead you in circles until your head spins.

More Than One Way to Play That Game!

The real problem with the second-cheapest rule is the premise — that the restaurant is always out to gouge you. Megan Krigbaum at Punch published an empirical investigation of second-cheapest by-the-glass wines at New York restaurants a couple of days after my column went live last week and she found several sommeliers who play the game by a different set of rules.

These restaurants want to get their diners to try interesting wines that will bring them back again and again and so they price them on the low side to induce otherwise cautious diners to sample them. Sometimes they even intentionally make them the second-cheapest wine because they think some of their customers won’t be able to resist the bait and will be rewarded with a very pleasant surprise.

Does this prove that the second-cheapest rule is valid — always buy the second-cheapest wine? Well, it shows that sometimes it will get you a nice wine at a restaurant that wants you to have a great experience and come back for more. And, to be honest, you probably don’t need a rule-of-thumb to have a great wine experience at a restaurant like that!

An Alternative Strategy

I have a one-word rule of thumb when it comes to restaurant wine: communicate. When in doubt, start a conversation. Talk about what you’d like to eat, like to drink, prefer to pay and challenge your server or sommelier to help find the right wine.

Some people don’t like to do this because they fear it shows their ignorance. They are the same people who won’t ask for directions when they get lost, I suppose.

The conversation strategy doesn’t always work — sometimes it will get you an up-sell pitch or expose a server’s lack of wine knowledge — but it strikes me as a better opening gambit than any price-based rule.

What’s the best way to talk with a sommelier? Read this article by Carson Demmond in the current issue of Food & Wine for some ideas.

Restaurant Wine Wars and The Curse of the Second-Cheapest Wine

March 15, 2016 By Mike Veseth in restaurant wine, wine, wine price 10 Comments

Edmund Osterland, M.S. Wine & the Bottom Line. Washington DC: National Restaurant Association, 1980.

Yes, that is a $100 bill that the corkscrew is drawing carefully from a bottle of wine in the illustration. It is the cover of a book that Master Sommelier Edmund Osterland wrote back in 1980 for the National Restaurant Association.

It was billed as a restaurant training manual, but it is really best seen as a manifesto written by someone who loves wine and who wants to see restaurants sell more wine and their customers drink more wine. Even today more than 35 years later it makes informative reading.

The message, as if you couldn’t guess, is that there are big bucks in restaurant wine if you do it right. But how?

Restaurant Wars

I found Osterland’s guide when I was writing my most recent book Money, Taste and Wine: It’s Complicated and Osterland’s manifesto became the inspiration for a chapter called “Restaurant Wars.” That title in turn was inspired by the Bravo network television series Top Chef.

There are many tense moments on Top Chef, a “reality” show where groups of talented culinary professionals compete in various elimination trials in order for one of them to emerge as the king of the kitchen hill. Perhaps the most stressful Top Chef episode of each season is a team competition called Restaurant Wars.

Randomly chosen teams of the surviving chefs must work together to open a pop-up restaurant for one night. They have to choose the restaurant’s name, the menu, decorate the space, purchase all of the glasses, dishes, and serving gear, train the wait staff and work the house. Oh, and they must purchase and prepare the food as well. The diners and judges compare the two teams’ results and pick a winner.

No one on the wining team can be eliminated, but someone on the losing team must go home, dreams in tatters. The trick to surviving the Restaurant Wars is not to be on the losing team and that means working together with the very people who you fear are trying to throw you under the bus. Easier said than done, which is why this is the episode that viewers love and the would-be Top Chefs hate.

Restaurant Wine Wars

Top Chef‘s Restaurant Wars have something in common with the wine experience in some restaurants. War is Hell we are told and Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Ariely says that restaurant wine is hellish combat. “The first thing to realize when picking from a wine list is that you are in a battlefield. This is a battle for your wallet—a fight between the restaurant, whose interest is to get as much of your money as possible right now, and your savings account.”

And it’s not an even playing field, either, Ariely says. “The restaurant’s owners have much more data than you do about how people make their wine decisions, and they also get to set up the menu in a way that gives them the upper hand.”

Osterland’s book was written to try to shift the combat from a wallet war to one where diner and restaurant work together to defeat the common enemies that keep them from having that enjoyable and profitable wine experience that both clearly desire. The fact that many still think of it as a fight over the bill all these years later shows that, while much has changed in the restaurant wine scene since 1980, much work remains.

Some of the advice could have been written yesterday. “Better informed, and with well-defined tastes, these “new “ consumers of the 1980s will also be very definitely interested in GETTING VALUE FOR THEIR MONEY.” The caps are in the original, which suggests that Osterland thought he needed to shout to get his readers’ attention. “Because they will be vastly more knowledgeable about wine, they will know the approximate costs of varying wines … [t]hey will want to shop for the better values.”That paragraph has a contemporary ring to it, don’t you think?

“For the first time you will experience customers who enter your restaurant and ask to see the wine list before the menu. … YOU MUST MAKE WINE A MAJOR PROFIT CENTER.” Okay, okay – you don’t have to yell. But how?

Bluffer’s Guide to the Second-Cheapest

Osterland called for improved wine knowledge among diners and restaurant staff and a lot of progress has been made here on both sides but much work remains. A WSET survey of British diners, for example, found that almost 20 percent of respondents said they generally bluffed their way through the process of ordering wine. They pretend to study the wine list, they said, and then carefully pick out the second-cheapest bottle.

This “second-cheapest wine” rule of thumb is not limited to just the British, of course, but I was amused when it showed up during a recent trip to London. Our waiter was obviously a bit impatient with the time we were taking ordering wine and so he just cut to the chase. “Why don’t you just order this one,” he advised. “It’s the second-cheapest.” Of course!

Why are diners so timid that they fall back on amateur bluffs and second hand rules of thumb? Wine can be complicated and intimidating, of course, but there is also the price issue to consider.

Perhaps the most radical part of Osterland’s manifesto was his plea for lower wine mark-ups, which he saw as a way to sell that elusive and profitable second bottle of wine to a party that might otherwise nurse the first bottle all night (or not buy any wine at all).

A General Principle?

More bottles, more regular diners, more money. That was Osterland’s message then and it is a message to consider today. Are restaurants leaving money on the table because diners don’t put more wine bottles there due to high prices?

There may be specific cases where the second-cheapest wine rule works, I suppose, but it fails as a general principle. Are lower restaurant wine prices a good general rule, as Osterland proposed? Or are there specific conditions necessary for success? More to follow.

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Read this article to understand why you shouldn’t order the second cheapest wine, then look at this video to understand why people do.

Book Review: Riesling Rediscovered

March 8, 2016 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, globalization, Riesling, wine 10 Comments

John Winthrop Haeger, Riesling Rediscovered: Bold, Bright, and Dry. University of California Press, 2016.

John Winthrop Haeger’s new book is a worthy addition to a growing bookshelf on Riesling wines, including Stuart Pigott’s recent Riesling: Best White Wine on Earth. It is a thorough, rigorous and quite fascinating analysis of Riesling’s world, focusing on dry Riesling production in the Northern Hemisphere.

How Riesling Is Like Bach

Dry Riesling reminds me of J.S. Bach. Both Bach and Riesling are clean and precise without sacrificing a certain deep emotional engagement. And both invite serious study. If you enjoy Riesling (or Bach?) and have a nerdy interest in where it comes from, how it is made, and who is making it, this book is for you.

Riesling Rediscovered is split into two sections, but not Old World and New World as you might expect. The second half is a detailed examination of some of the main Riesling vineyards and producers in Germany, Austria, France (Alsace), Italy (Alto Adige), Canada (Ontario and British Columbia), and the United States (Washington, Oregon, and California).

These profiles, the result of extensive on-site research, are unusually detailed and informative — perfect for the reader who wants to drill down into a particular region or maker’s story.

The book’s first half provides a rather elegant examination of the Riesling experience, with chapter-length analyses of history, sweet and dry wine styles, production methods, the importance of clones, and Riesling habitats in the Old World and the New.

The Sweet and the Dry

At the center of the book are several interesting issues. The first involves style. When you say Riesling to people they will often respond quickly that it is sweet and indeed for many decades Riesling was known and even treasured for its sweetness. Spectacular sweet Rieslings were at one point the most valuable and sought after wines in the world.

And then things began to change, even in Germany and Austria. Now it is the case that most Riesling wines around the world are dry and sweet Riesling is the exception. The rediscovery of Riesling as an elegant dry wine is one of the book’s important points.

Riesling’s reputation for sweetness, however, has been slower to change than the wines themselves, which is a problem for those who would like to see this wine’s domain expand. Consumers are too often surprised that what they pour from the bottle doesn’t match their expectations — either “too sweet” if they expect a dry wine or “too sour” if they expect something sweet.

The United States is a special case in this regard. The U.S. is not just the largest wine market in the world by total sales, it is also an important actor in Riesling. The U.S. is the second largest Riesling producer by volume after Germany, for example, and it is also home to the largest-selling Riesling wine in the world.

That would be Chateau Ste Michelle’s Columbia Valley Riesling from Washington State, which may also be one of the world’s great Riesling bargains. I have sometimes purchased this wine for less than $6 per bottle, a ridiculously low price given the quality.

Wine drinkers in the United States made the move away from sweet and fortified wines surprisingly late, but today by and large they prefer dry wines (the recent Moscato and Sweet Red phenomena notwithstanding). When it comes to Riesling, however, they talk dry but like to drink on the sweet (or “off dry”) side. Chateau Ste Michelle’s off-dry Columbia Valley wine vastly outsells its Dry Riesling twin.

And so the U.S. is the odd one out in world Riesling, according to Haeger — the last line of resistance in the movement from sweet to dry.The rediscovery of Riesling as a dry wine is still gaining momentum here.

Elephant in the Room?

I enjoyed Riesling Rediscovered quite a lot and learned something new on every page. I look forward to diving into the details again and again in the years ahead. But as big and tightly packed as this book is, the world of Riesling is bigger still. It obviously isn’t possible analyze every important vineyard or producer in the world (the vast Wine Atlas of Germany, which appeared in 2014, shows how complicated this is for just a single country).

But the biggest omission — the elephant in the room — is the entire Southern Hemisphere. Any list of the most important dry Rieslings would surely include wines from Australia, for example, along with some from New Zealand, Argentina, Chile and South Africa. Australia does not even appear in Haeger’s index. Pewsey Vale Museum Reserve “The Contours,” one of my desert island wines, is nowhere to be found.

The reason is purely practical, Haeger explains — no disrespect intended! The world of Riesling is gloriously big and growing. Any single study has to draw the line somewhere and Haeger needed to do so here to finish this book in just five years. Haeger chooses depth over geographical breadth and that’s understandable. But I hope he has a second volume in the works!

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Riesling and Bach? Am I nuts? Well, here’s what I mean.

Five Things I Think I Learned at the Napa Valley Wine Writers’ Symposium

March 1, 2016 By Mike Veseth in Economic impact, wine, wine education, wine markets 9 Comments

wine-words1 Sue and I are back from the Professional Wine Writers’ Symposium at the Meadowood Resort in the Napa Valley and it is time to reflect upon the experience. Herewith some notes and a list of five things that I think I learned about the wine writing business.

Anatomy of an Amazing Experience

The wine writers’ symposium has been going on for about a dozen years and it is an amazing experience. The idea is that you bring together a faculty of experience professional wine writers to teach, coach, mentor and help network a group of rising star wine writer participants. (This year’s “student” group was so well qualified that the student and faculty roles sometimes reversed — a good thing.)

The setting is fabulous. Classes and accommodations are at the Meadowood Resort, which is also one of the sponsors along with the Napa Valley Vintners association and the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone Napa Valley campus. Bill Harlan of Harlan Estate wine fame co-founded Meadowood and actively supports this initiative. The CIA’s sponsorship derives from its wine education program for budding hospitality professionals.

People come to the symposium to learn to be more effective wine writers and especially to find ways to be more successful on the professional side of things — career development and income generation being important factors. Sue (who was a career and writing coach) and I (one of the speakers) came to learn more about how the wine writing business fits into the wine industry generally and of course to meet all the talented participants.

Reflecting upon four days of intense activity at Meadowood, the CIA Greystone and a tasting at the historic Charles Krug winery, I have come up with a list of five lessons we took away from this experience.

Lesson One: An Industry in Transition

The wine writing business (Jamie Goode would correct me here — the wine communicating business) is an industry in transition. Ironically, although wine is more popular and integrated into popular culture than ever, the number of traditional media outlets for wine writing has declined. There are fewer newspaper wine writing jobs, for example, and fewer newspapers, too.

There is more wine content available to consumers than ever before, but much of it is on the web and provided for free by both professional and amateur authors. Some of the amateurs are highly qualified, of course, but their freely provided content makes earning an income in this field more difficult.

The internet and the move to mobile communications are disruptive technologies generally and the wine writing business is no exception. That said, disruption creates both challenges and opportunities and the key lies in choosing a strategic response.

Lesson Two: How Wine Writers Are Like Actors

Wine writers are a little like actors from an economic point of view.The most commonly repeated line among aspiring actors, it is said, is something like “My name is Robert and I will be your waiter tonight.” Day jobs may suck, but having a secure source of income is very useful. Being an actor is hard. Making a living acting is even harder. Ditto wine writing.

A small number of wine writers do very well indeed! They work very hard and earn good incomes, achieve a certain level recognition and even celebrity. Most wine writers, however, work very hard and scramble to scrape together a living with multiple jobs and non-wine writing projects — the economic equivalent of an actor’s waiter gig.

Even the most successful contemporary wine writers pursue multiple disciplines, however, generating content for newspapers, television, the web and organizing sponsored tastings, wine classes, consumer programs and much more. Jancis Robinson used to jokingly refer to her wide-ranging set of activities as “the empire” although an economist would recognize it as a diversified business model built around a core expertise.

Hong Kong-based Jeannie Cho Lee MW’s “empire,” for example, includes books, university teaching, her food and wine website AsianPalate.com, a job advising Singapore Airlines on their wine selections, a television series, magazine articles and much, much more.

Support yourself with a single type of work (magazine editor? wine book author?)? Yes, it is done — Eric Asimov, the chief wine critic of the New York Times is an example — but that’s the exception not the rule. Need to create that diversified empire. And then hope for some luck, too.

Lesson Three: No Single Path

There is no single sure path to success in wine writing. Some of the top people in the field are Masters of Wine or Master Sommeliers, for example, but others like Asimov are self-taught. That said, I noticed that a great many of the talented “students” were seeking WSET credentials. The detailed wine knowledge is important, of course, but this is also a way to signal potential clients of serious commitment, which is useful in a crowded and competitive marketplace.

It seems to me that many of the successful writers leveraged specific assets effectively. Jamie Goode was a successful science editor, for example, and the scientific foundation of his writing clearly differentiates his product. Decanter contributor Jane Anson’s deep knowledge of Bordeaux gives her a comparative advantage.

The day of the generalist (I am thinking of our fantastic keynote speaker Hugh Johnson, who seems to know everything about wine) seems to be passing or perhaps has passed as a business model.

Specialization is important, whether by market segment, winemaking region, or wine issue area. But, as noted above, the ability to make connections and to communicate across several platforms is also critical to success.

Lesson Four: Passion is Not Enough

The writers we met who seem to have the greatest success share drive and passion, but they are also strategic in the way that they invest their time and other resources, entrepreneurial in seeking out and making their own opportunities, and multidisciplinary. They leverage their core comparative advantage effectively to make themselves valuable to clients and readers, not simply to be more visible to the public.

Let me repeat part of that. They think about their clients and audiences and what they can do to create value for them. Then, of course, they have to persuade their clients of the return on investment and convince them to share some of those returns with them.

More work is needed to measure the value created by high quality wine communications and to distinguish it from freely available web content, for example. The statistics we heard about low and stagnant “dollars per word” freelance writing rates suggest that professional wine writing has low value, that its value is not widely appreciated, or perhaps that professional writers are in a weak negotiating position when it comes to writing fees. (Alder Yarrow argued that this is due to an over-supply of wine writers.)

Lesson Five: The Value is There

Ironically, even as the average return to professional wine writing has declined, its importance to the industry has actually increased as the wine industry becomes more competitive with other sectors that compete for sales and attention.

Wine writers tell wine’s story and story-telling is a valuable skill. Consumers do not just sniff with their noses and slurp over their tongues. Lots of things smell good or taste good. The key, it seems to me, is to engage the imagination and take wine enthusiasts on a journey and the people we met at Meadowood and others like them are skilled and valuable guides.

Or at least that’s the lesson I take form the substantial investment made by the symposium sponsors. Napa Valley Vintners, Meadowood and the CIA will get some direct publicity from the symposium itself (this column, for example) but the real payoff comes down the road as all the participants become more effective in their work and better able to tell the Napa Valley story and the story of wine more generally.

The sponsors actually kicked up the investment a notch this year. In the past most “students” paid symposium expenses while a small number received fellowships to offset cost. This year a new “all fellowship” model was rolled out, with fewer “students,” high admission standards, and full-tuition fellowships. Plans are coming together to build an endowment to sustain the full fellowship model into the future. I like the forward thinking behind this.

There was a lot to absorb at this conference and I am only scratching the surface here, but these are some of the things I think I learned at Meadowood.

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Thanks the symposium’s organizers for inviting us to take part and to the sponsors for their generous support of the program. Thanks, as well, to all the Napa Valley wineries who donated the wines we used in classes and the meals and receptions. Shout-outs to so many including especially Jim Gordon, Julia Allenby, and Antonia Allegra.

Sue and I also want to thank Cain Winery for inviting us to an intimate dinner they hosted at Terra Restaurant in St Helena where we had a glorious meal and tasted Cain Five wines from 1986, 87, 97, 98, 2006, 07, 10, 11 and 2012. It was an awesome experience. Thank you!

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Say, when is someone going to write a song about wine writing? Try substituting “wine communicator” into the song at the appropriate place and see if it works. Cheers.