My first word was "wine."
My parents always had wine on the Shabbat dinner table. When I was an infant, my father would put a drop on his finger and let me taste. I guess I liked the flavor, because as a toddler, I would point at wine glasses and demand a sip. (This was fine at home, but apparently embarrassing for my parents when they took me out to restaurants. People look askance at two-year-olds requesting alcohol.)
I lost my taste for wine in my early teens but found it again in college. As a graduation present, my father took me on a month-long trip to Italy. In the course of our wine tastings, I feel in love with greco di tufo. I realized the problem: I'd been drinking the wines my parents and friends liked, and I hadn't had a chance to discover my own tastes. Over the past few years, I've taken every opportunity I can to do serious tastings and learn about wine.
In the process, I've realized that there's a lot more to wine than how it tastes. Why do people assume it's "classier" to drink wine than other alcoholic beverages? How should I make purchasing decisions in the sea of bottles and labels at a wine shop? Why is a bottle of Moet Chandon priced at $65, when a $20 bottle of Gloria Ferrer tastes as good? Why have the local (Willamette Valley) wines of my childhood started to appear on high-end restaurant wine lists around the country?
Dynamics of the Global Wine Industry is a chance to get answers, while also tasting wines. As soon as MBA2 friends recommended the course to me, I knew I wanted to take it.
I don't currently have any plans to enter the wine industry, but learning about it will be fascinating in its own right, and will also help me understand other businesses. My career goal is to manage an opera company. I imagine that knowledge of wine will be helpful at donor events! More seriously, the way wine successfully sells as both "everyday delicious beverage" and "ultra-high-end luxury" is something the performing arts could learn from. I hope to glean insights about positioning and promoting experience goods over the next few months.
I'm looking forward to a delicious quarter.
I'm very interested in the societal implications and perceptions surrounding wine as well (e.g., why it's 'classier' to drink wine than other alcoholic beverages) -- and I wonder how much of this perception today ties back to the power that wine represented in history (for instance, in Bottlenotes, Alyssa talked about wine's potent role in religions such as Christianity through the ages).
ReplyDeleteWhat determines the price of wine: part-branding, part-economics, part-regulatory dynamics, part-perception....it's an amalgamation of these factors.
ReplyDeleteI had a similar upbringing, but found (in my experience) that there was a stark contrast between how wine was viewed in the Jewish culture I grew up in. It was always present for every holiday (albeit not usually the kind I wanted to drink), but many chose specifically to swap it with pure grape juice (I think I did that once as a child but now can't even imagine choosing that route!)
ReplyDeleteThe contrast I'm talking about is that the culture itself definitely values wine (it's a requirement for some holidays and intricately linked with the stories i.e. Passover, Purim), but simultaneously, about 1/5 of Jews have a genetic mutation that makes them unable to process alcohol efficiently. " Those with the variant tend to drink less frequently, consume less alcohol overall or have more unpleasant reactions to drink." (see more here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/3299335/Gene-helps-Jews-resist-alcoholism.html)