What? Locals Overwhelmingly LIKE the Wine Industry

      Doesn't Everyone Hate The Wine Business?

While Napa is the current poster child for the debate, whether Sonoma, Santa Barbara, Oregon, Virginia, Paso Robles, or the San Joaquin Valley - the wine business has received it's share of public scrutiny the past few years in local press. While "wine country" is viewed by many as an idyllic place to live or retire .... certainly so if you read listings from local real estate agents, that view isn't shared by a non-homogenous mix of anti-winery folks in what is now being labeled in an on-going story of the greedy and detached winery owners and growers versus their communities.

Oversupply and a Bubble Forming. Now What?

Somewhere early in the year 2000 my mother-in-law was moving things out of a vacation home in Mariposa CA. I volunteered my help. So together with Anthony; a young and fit assistant from the Starving Students Movers we started lumping furniture. During a coffee break where we enjoyed delicious Starbucks Latte, Anthony started sharing his stock investment strategy. Wait...what? Investment strategy? (Disclaimer: I'm invested in Starbucks at this moment.)

Anthony couldn't have been much more than 21 and it turns out he really was a student - a student taking a videotape course in "How To Retire BeforeYou're Thirty" and was day trading. He explained his trading philosophy: high growth Internet stocks. He had amassed a small fortune already and he did it all with credit cards and margin debt.

I started to wonder if I was missing out and perhaps being too cautious with my own investments. After a little more thought on my drive home, I called my broker and cashed completely out of the market. With the Tech Crash hitting just weeks later, I had discovered a new technical indicator that would define my investing strategy from then on. I called it, "the Starving Students Bubble Indicator (SSBI):

"When a Starving Student gives you stock tips, get the hell out of the market because it’s overbought."

Do You Like Drinking Day-Old Wine?

My mom used to go to the Day-Old Hostess bread store. She would get apple pies and Ho-Ho's and freeze them for our school lunches. They were really good....maybe not that healthy but Hostess advertising said they were healthy snacks back then - wholesome goodness I think was the pitch line, and even day-old Hostess snacks never were stale. Of course now we know it was due to the overuse of preservatives which by themselves can cause a corpse to never decompose.

There is no Day-Old Wine Store for good reason. With Twinkies and Snowballs, freezing made the product usable on my schedule. With wine once its opened, you either drink the whole thing or risk letting the remnant oxidize. Personally, I hate oxidized wine but there's a dilemma. Do I drink a really nice bottle with dinner and have some left that might not be consumed? Or, do I drink a lesser bottle and not be as concerned if I have to dump it? Of course I can just drink the whole bottle, but the calorie thing is becoming a real problem these days .... maybe it was the Twinkies. Either way I blame it on my mother pushing me into addiction. Twinkies are a gateway drug you know.

I can't tell you how much day-old wine I've had to dump over the years. I'd hate to think about what that cost me; maybe thousands of dollars given my drinking habits stemming from my traumatic childhood. While I've not found a solution to my Twinkie addiction, I have found the solution to my dilemma of wasted wine. If you like this solution as well, there is a deal for you at the end of this blog - only for SVB on Wine readers.

 

Do You Know the Location of the First Successful Winery in the US?

This week we're moving off the normal marketing, economy, and business issues and asking a basic question anyone working in the US wine business should know:"Where was the first successful commercial winery in the United States?" Do you know? I confess I didn't know for sure. I remember thinking Jefferson was a really important figure in American wine and he worked at establishing a commercial presence in Virginia early on, so maybe Virginia was first? Surely with the native vines in existence, there must have been a successful wine businesses established before the time of Jefferson?

I had this debate over a bottle of wine with someone smarter than I last week. The discussion of "firsts," depending on where you live and who is telling the story can change dramatically, so the interwebs - which everyone knows is the possessor of all that is true - can sometime provide false information. The reality is the real beginning of the US Wine business has been butchered in history books and folk-lore. There is however a definitive rendering of the subject.

If you haven't ever read A History of Wine in America, I highly recommend spending the time to do so. I've even linked a free Google e-book to the above title so you have no excuse. The book sheds a bright spot light on the subject and will have you the envy at your next party where you win the attractive table centre piece for getting the right answer. That said, I know many of you are Cliff Notes kind of people and wont spend time in the book, so if you want the shortcut to the answer, read on.

 

What Does the End of QE Mean for Wine?

Everyone likes Fridays. This Friday is a little more special so I decided to post a non-Sunday blog for the first time. Why the deviation? Because Friday is the day we receive the most hours of sunlight in 24 hours .... and then its all downhill after that.

While that sounds a little gloomy phrased up that way, consider that its coming from someone who has been following and predicting the movements in the economy and wine business the past few years. Its been enough to make anyone gloomy especially since I've been consistently right. (Editors note: Please don't wake me and remind me of a forecast that was wrong. Thank you.)

Anyway, something happened yesterday that is making me put on economic sunglasses to protect my eyes: The Fed announced the economy is looking pretty darned good, inflation is in check, and unemployment is coming down to manageable levels. Add to that the US Credit Rating was raised back to AAA about 10 days ago and that is down right exciting right? What did the markets do? The Dow dropped 200+ points and the 10 year Treasury Bill rose 13 basis points. In fact the 10 year, which is the benchmark used for vineyard and acquisition financing has increased about 40 basis points since May. So what gives? If this is good news why is the market off and what does that mean for the wine business?

The Dance of Grape Pricing

 



ABC. It's Easy As 1-2-3

 

The vines flowering this time of year remind me of seventh grade. Maybe its the Aqua-Net hairspray smell the flowers produce but that's when we had our first crack at dancing after school which made institutionally official, our life-long quest to read the minds of the opposite sex. Filing into the sour milk scented cafeteria one sweltering afternoon, the boys took up their station on one wall while the girls occupied the opposite wall. The girls giggled and pointed at us prepubescent pimply-faced males while we in turn stared blankly back across the barren dance floor. "ABC. It's easy as 1-2-3" from The Jackson 5 cranked at volume eleven in the background, so we started to move to the music right where we stood thus signaling in our Cro-Magnon genetic way that we could dance. Well, we could if we wanted to. We just didn't want to. The girls of course had been practicing their dance moves since 3rd grade in front of their full-length closet mirrors. Us boys? We were playing baseball, football, kick-the-can, capture the flag, and tiddlywinks, oblivious to girls - unless you count the observation of cooties.
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If you want to skip my meandering memories from 12 year olds first dance experience, you can skip down To The Point Now.
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Draghi and Grape Pricing

Price and Returns of CA Grape Crop

Total Value of CA Grape Crop

Mario Draghi was in the news this past week concurrent with the Preliminary Grape Crush Report. Both are related. A weak Euro and oversupply are not the best combination. Thankfully, we are not presently oversupplied nor is the Euro weak, but where is it headed?

What Does Harley-Davidson share with wine?

What are the key ingredients for success in business? In my mind its defining effective strategy, having a sense for timing in execution, cohesion in a business culture, focused effort, and a bit of luck. But in the end, there is really one thing that separates successful and unsuccessful businesses: Leadership.

There are several successful leadership styles but there is a character trait most successful leaders share. They have the ability to constantly critique their own success and failures and adapt early. They are people who challenge the status quo routinely, constantly seeking improvement rather than living by rules of thumb and falling into routines and ruts.

You are a smart enough person if you run a business or manage a unit within a company. But if you can't back away from day-to-day duties and get a grasp of the environment changing around you and then strategize for the long run, you might be in the wine business for the short run.

I was reminded of that when I saw [an article] this past week about AMF Bowling seeking bankruptcy protection for a second time within the same decade. I honestly hadn't tracked the company of late, but had in the past as a young banker.

I recall sitting at my office in the early 1980's, reading an analyst report on the company that was covered in the WSJ. In it, the analyst reasoned that with the personal computer taking flight, and given all the accompanying enhanced productivity gains we would see, soon we would all flock to leisure activities to fill up our newly discovered copious free time. As a result, we'd see companies like AMF and Voit take off.

Part II: Planting Decisions Are Different This Time

Changing Patterns: You're Mad if you Don't React.

The wine industry is made of family owned companies. Family owned companies seldom last past the 3rd generation in part because the family and business conditions that support the start of a business evolve over the years. Watching the clip above from MADMEN, you see the founder ask the question, "Why can't I just build on what I have?" The answer is a reminder that your customers needs and wants evolve, and you have to recognize and predict those pattern changes. 

To survive and adapt, a leader has to get out from behind the day to day world of running the business and ask tough questions about change. Today whether you are first or 4th generation, it's time to review the horizon because while the business continues to rebound, its not and wont continue in the same way it did in past recoveries as we discussed in Part I: The Long Term Future of US Wine Sales last week.

Just what specifically will be different in this recovery for the wine business? Its too long of a topic to discuss on a Blog so much of this I'll reserve for the State of the Industry Report due out in January of 2013. But for now lets just start with one segment: planting .... and maybe a little on pricing because they are related.

Can You Succeed in the Wine Business Without CRM & SM?

You are a with-it kind of person so you probably recognize the acronyms in the title stand for Social Media and Customer Relationship Management. You are so together, you probably have your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts with more than 500 of your closest friends and colleagues connected. You have a Klout score. You have a smart phone and check in with Foursquare at every occasion. You’ve even started tweeting twice a day about such fascinating things as, "Happy #FF" and "Isn't it a beautiful #DAY all my peeps." And the result of your social dalliance with SM on growing your sales is?..... Absolutely Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero. What is going on? Where are all those Millennials who are supposed to be Tweeting up a storm and rushing to your door. If you do Social Media, they will come! ...... won't they?

Is it Politically Correct to make a Profit?

What is the long-term outlook for the US wine business? Having been around the business for more than 30 years now, I can remember different phases in our industry's evolution and I'm constantly thinking about just what was happening to shifting demand and why, because those patterns can predict the direction we're heading next. I remember when there were 13 states that had reciprocal shipping laws and wineries shipped only to about 30 of them.  I remember when drinking was bad for you. In fact when SVB began in the wine business in the early 90s, we were just moving out of a time of a structural change that led to declining demand both in gallons consumed and per capita consumption as you can see in Figure 1 above.

Is California Wine At a Pricing Inflection Point?

 

 "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt"

It's not easy deciding on a presidential candidate. The debate between Mitt Romney and George W Bush didn't help me. ......but that's not important.

What IS important is the Gomberg-Fredrikson Report for May shows cumulative bulk imports accounted for 19.3 million case equivalents shipped into the US in 2012; a whopping 167% increase. That's the equivalent harvest of 27,000 acres of US winegrapes calculated at 12 tons per acre.

Is There Really a Grape Shortage?

Women's Syncronized Swimming Team Drowns Trying
To Signal Help with their Legs

I thought I'd tip my lid to the upcoming Olympics in London and in this weeks edition of SVB on Wine, share a story and a revelation about market bubbles and tie that into an observation about year-end grape supply and grape market dynamics.

Let The Games Begin!

You Might Have to Wait Until 2013 to Close your Vineyard Purchase

As a native Californian, we were forced in grade school to make the pilgrimage to Sutters Mill in Coloma to see where John Sutter and James W Marshall discovered some yellow flakes in the mill tailings; starting the California Gold Rush. It was a long bus ride to look at a stream and an old log mill that we couldn't even climb on. There weren't even snack bars there. And if that wasn't a big enough rip-off, I didn't see any gold there.

As we know from history, there were some who hit it big in the Gold Rush. But the ones who probably did the best weren't the ones who dug for gold. They were the ones like Levi Strauss who sold the miners their provisions as the costs of essentials like flour and dried beans skyrocketed. It was a seller's market. What does that have to do with the wine business?