Support Animals and the New Napa Hillside Initiative

This past weekend I went to Trader Joe's to get supplies for making pizza. When I entered the store, I noticed an old yellow Labrador mix wearing a vest that said "Service Dog," the kind anyone without any proof can buy from Amazon.

Rover was wandering around with a middle-aged woman who outwardly didn't seem disabled in the least. I felt a tinge of guilt with being politically insensitive to even wonder inwardly about the animal's legitimacy, so I just moved on to the pepperoni.

Soon thereafter I noticed a Standard Poodle, also with "Service Dog" emblazoned on his vest and once again, the owner didn't show any outward disability. I'm still not used to the frequency with which I see animals in restaurants, grocery stores and other public places. But again trying to be politically correct, I put the questions out of mind and paid attention to the mozzarella.

      Unintended Consequences

Then an interesting thing happened right while I was fondling the pizza dough. The two dogs decided to get into a full-fledged dog fight with snarling, snapping, foaming jowls and biting ...  right there, in middle of Trader Joe's, right between the pizza dough and prosciutto! Right next to the baking potatoes.

Both owners jerked at their dog's collars and screamed, "NO [insert dog's name here]!" At the same moment one of the dogs yelped and limped away; the clear loser in this month's Trader Joe's Service Dog Battles.

Vegas had the Standard Poodle with a bite over/under at 3. Had I known, I would have put money on the old Lab to kick the poodle's ass, but ... shouldn't there be regulations about this bad behavior?

      Measure C and Dogfights

These weren't trained service animals, but that only became clear AFTER they became territorial over the baking potatoes. The animals owners were abusing ADA regulations for their own ends. Obviously the name on the animals vest doesn't make the animal a trained service animal.

It reminds me of the current dogfight we have on our hands in the upcoming Napa elections where a ballot measure has an appealing name that would lead a person to believe there is an imminent threat to the County's water supply from agriculture. But just like the vests on the dogs in Trader Joe's, the title of this initiative doesn't reflect the true intent and if passed, most in the County will only discover the real bite after this dog of an initiative is approved.

The Scourge of Tourism Circa 1972

Is tourism a problem? It depends who you ask, but it's impact has been feared and debated for a very long time as an issue. Even way back in 1972 when many of us were still living life in black and white, and cable was part of your corduroys instead of your TV, tourism's impact in the Napa Valley was being reviewed and questioned. 

Some things have have remained the same today but the narrator in the above news piece offered an interesting view into tasting rooms of the day when he said tourism was "important to PR, and to a lesser extent, sales." 

You see, tasting rooms back in the day weren't put in place to sell wine. That's what distributors did. Tasting rooms were nice-to-haves. My how those days have changed!

Today tasting rooms and tourism are linked to the survival of family wineries. Direct sales represent 60% of an average winery's sales, and tourism is the lifeblood of the family winery. Without tourism and direct sales, I'd make an educated guess that 60% of the wine business as we know it would fail.

Bovine Excrement & Global Warming

 

I will get to the topic at hand but first, a moment of silence .......... <that's enough> because last Friday Jonathan Winters passed away. In his honor, I've pinned a video of he and Dean Martin to the blog to remember his greatness, and give a little chuckle to all those who spent the weekend bleary-eyed doing taxes. For you Millennials who don't recognize the other guy in the video, that is Dean Martin who was of course the founder of Men's Warehouse.

Jonathan Winters was a brilliant comedian of a thousand voices. Only 27 actually took up residence inside his head at any one time according to staffers at Bellevue. No matter which personality was home, the man was truly a gift to humanity. He could ad lib on almost any subject. I wish he were here to help explain in his own special way what exactly happened to the 16th Amendment. That's the one that makes us all go crazy to meet the filing deadline. I'm sure he'd have quite a bit to say about that. For you Boomers who weren't born yet, the 16th Amendment is the one that says in it's entirety:

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."

That's it. That's the whole Amendment. I'd love to hear Jonathan explain how we moved from those 30 words to the present 6,000 pages and 500 million words. It's so complex we spend $6BN annually processing our returns. Ninety percent of the populace today have to use a tax professional or tax software to process their returns.

And now to the point of the blog, it would have really been great if Jonathan Winters could explain Climate Change. Like the tax code, understanding Climate Change requires us to listen to others who know more than us. We have to try and decipher the meaning of the technical writings so we can plan and avoid any negative forecast impact. But like all things, wisdom begins with understanding. The problem is understanding gets really difficult for us when we start listening to unqualified on-line writers who give us their interpretations of technical reports, whether its the tax code or Climate Change.

How Much Value is there in Wine Tourism?

Many in business view another competitor moving into your territory as an affront to all that is fair and decent. Its the moral equivalent of "I was here first." Sometimes that kind of in-your-face competition is truly a net sum zero game. For example, there was a small drive-thru coffee station in the shopping center I frequent, but one day Peat's Coffee moved in. They survived about a year but now the drive-thru is closed. There are plenty of examples just like that but other times, competitors and related businesses cooperating together can have a positive impact on business conditions and instead of waring, can come together and win together.