AnuvaBlog

Subprime wine does not exist. Neither does derivative wine or bundled mortgage backed wines. Wine will always come from grapes, be subject to human perception, and therefore be venerated and cherished throughout society. What prompts me to say this is that I have been hearing a lot lately about the economy (obviously), and have run across two very interesting articles, one on Jaime Goode’s blog, and the other on WineBusiness.com.

I find the juxtaposition of the two, one day after the other to be fascinating. The latter speaks of the 15th consecutive year of growth in domestic US consumption of wine and how that charge is being led by the millenial generation (mine).

The former speaks about the need for innovation and leadership in the wine industry and how managers who use performance metrics or look at the past in order to make decisions about the future either will suffer from slow reactions or simply have the wrong data to make predictions.

As a millenial generation wine industry entrepreneur, I find Goode’s stern warning to be something that needs to be heard by not only the wine industry, but by every other industry in general. Especially finance. My recent readings about the banking industry’s practices with respect to risk calculation and their own internal management of accounts is shocking. Who knew that those who guarded the gate to money lending would be the very ones to miscalculate when it came to their own businesses.

What is good news about the wine industry is that unlike finance, we deal with a physical product for which there is no substitute. We cannot downsize a bottle of wine. We cannot create a derivative of it–it its most general sense.

This is the beauty of wine: it bring us together physically and virtually and gives us something to talk about and also to talk over.