Of Floss and Vines

The Napa and Sonoma valleys are home to the highest concentration of retired dentists and orthodontists found anywhere in the world*.

Tooth-care professionals from all over the country, after decades surrounded by cavities and canines, flock to these rolling hills and verdant valleys to spend their hard-earned retirement on a new kind of filling - that of barrels and bottles. Root canals give way to rootstock, plaque gives way to Phylloxera, and these orally-oriented oenophiles hurl themselves into growing grapes and making wine.

But why?

The question has dogged me since I first uncovered this pattern, traveling the Silverado Trail during my undergrad FRENLANG 60D: French Viticulture (read: wine tasting) class field trip. One winery after another, owned and operated by a periodontist-turned-vintner. Having just learned to taste the rich cabs and tropical chardonnays of the region, but yet to have tasted the day-to-day grind of the working world, I was perplexed.

I finally have a hypothesis to this crushing conundrum.

With apologies to any aspiring dentists: You don't get into dental work because you love teeth. You get into dental work because it’s a well-paying, high-barrier-to-entry, recession-proof, automation-proof job. It’s honest work. It’s stable work. It’s practical.

Wine is impractical.

Making wine is an insane endeavor. It requires growing millions of delicate tiny grapes on wildly expensive dirt, purposefully pruning and throwing away a huge portion of the crop, painstakingly hand-harvesting, and sorting, and crushing, and fermenting, and filling a thousand-dollar wooden barrel, and bottling, only to let those bottles sit in your basement for a few years in the hopes they might get a little better.

Even enjoying wine feels like a small act of rebellion. In an age of multitasking and attention-hungry notifications and instant gratification and SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS, taking the time to sit and savor and contemplate something complicated and subtle and old, even for a second, is an escape.

The Dentists have it right, almost.

After spending a career in a field that makes sense, one must crave a slightly nonsensical next chapter. To trade headgear for Healdsburg, molars for merlot, must be to rediscover some dormant, youthful, vigorous freedom.

But the Dentists fail on one point, that so many of us fail on, that I so deeply fear I will fail on as well:

We wait too long to do the things we love.

Perhaps leaping into the wine industry isn’t a crazy an endeavor as it seems. Perhaps there’s a way to find that perfect blend of the rational and irrational, of dispassion and passion, of business and pleasure, that will balance and harmonize and bring out the greatest parts of each. I hope just maybe I can find such a path in this class - if not even to take myself, but at least to know it can exist.

* [Citation Required], but seriously there are a ton of them.

Why I'm taking this class - Tyler Ernst

I'm relatively new to wine. My family didn't drink it growing up, and the Franzia and Carlo Rossi I had in college didn't exactly ignite a passion for the beverage. However, I did leave college with a best friend, Corinne Rich, who had grown up in Santa Rosa and had an actual appreciation for wine. We used to joke about starting a wine company together one day - she'd do the winemaking, and I'd do the soulless business stuff in the background.

Five years and many bottles of wine later, that joke became a reality. We founded Birdhorse Wines in June, together with Corinne's girlfriend, Katie Rouse. You can learn more here if you're interested, and I'd of course love it if you'd join our mailing list and follow us on Instagram. We've got three tons of grapes fermenting and will be selling (hopefully!) Verdelho, Carignan, Valdiguié, and a rose starting in April/May. Corinne and Katie have made some excellent product, so I figured I should take this class in order to better educate myself about the industry and to learn some experience-based lessons rather than continue to shoot from the hip as I've been doing so far on the business side.

I'm excited to share more about Birdhorse as the class goes on and to take some lessons immediately into the real world.

Wine and Family

 Wine (and whisky) is how my family bonds. 

I can’t remember exactly when the family wine drinking started. In middle school, my parents had a “wine circle” with their friends. Once I turned 18, I started getting poured a glass, and certain wines became synonymous with major life milestones. For me, getting into college is synonymous with Chateau d’yQuem, and for my sister, her first job offer is a 1997 Chateau Margaux. And while we both got introduced to wine through some “great achievement,” over the years, we have all started drinking together regularly. 

With my sister on the East Coast, me on the West Coast, and my parents out in Asia, we no longer have as many chances to sit in the same room and converse. So, now when we are all in the same city, which wines we will eat with dinner becomes a grand ordeal. All of us visit the neighborhood liquor store (K&L) and load a shopping cart of wine. My dad and sister argue over how many bottles of wine to bring to a restaurant; I now know the corkage policy of too many restaurants. And at dinner, my parents fight over who drank the remnants of my mom’s wine when she left the table to use the restroom. Anyone who has ever had dinner with us will have experienced this chaos firsthand; to this date, nobody has been able to drive back after a family dinner with the Kims. 

I’m in this class because although I have tasted a variety of wines (mostly French), I have no idea why I like the taste of certain ones more than others. I’m curious about the price points (some of which seem ludicrous!), and across different countries, how I can find wines with similar flavor profiles. After many difficulties trying to ship certain wines from stores across the U.S. (New Jersey / New York), I’ve also become curious about licensing and distribution regulation. 

I’d love to come away from this class with relevant, practical knowledge to take back to my family. I want to be able to source and procure wines that we would all enjoy and be able to select wines I would enjoy from a wine list. Who knows, maybe with some luck, I will end up in the wine / alcohol industry, too!  

Why I Am Taking This Class? -Sawyer Clark

This is a simple questions with a three-part answer. All three of which relate to my family.

The first reason I am taking this course is that I grew up in a farming family in the Willamette Valley (Oregon, USA) and have seen an explosion in the number of vineyards near my childhood home. My parents and brother still live and work in agriculture in Oregon and regularly communicate the impact wine has had on the area. I used to think that vineyards are typically started by retirees who want a second career making a very niche, high-end wine. However, what I have seen in the Willamette Valley is traditional fruit, vegetable, and grass seed farmers planting large vineyards to supply commodity-type grapes for massive scale wine production (think Costco).

The second reason is that my sister manages the wine club for a winery in Lodi, California (about 2 hours east of Stanford). Her job has her doing lots of customer communication and direct sales in the tasting room as well as online. It also takes her around the U.S. to sell wine to wholesale buyers. The thing she likes most about the role is the wholesale selling. She has become very interested in wine as an industry and talking with her about wine has grown in me a desire to gain a better understanding of the drink from field to retail store.

Finally, I married into a wine family.  My wife is from northern California and her family loves wine. Through them I have learned to appreciate the drink I once thought people only consumed as a status symbol. Spending time with them over the past 8 years has exposed me to many different kinds of wine and helped me understand some of the art behind the drink.

In a spirit of full disclosure, I have a terrible palette for tasting wine. I hope that through this course I learn to appreciate the subtleties in wine, but it is honestly very difficult for me to taste them, let alone appreciate them.

Wine with dinner

Since I can remember, wine has been an important part of my family dinners. When all of my siblings, who have scattered around the US, come home for the holidays, I know that I can look forward to an amazing home cooked meal and an incredible bottle of wine – chosen to highlight the type of food that we’re having. I hope to be the person who can bring the next amazing bottle of wine to our holiday dinners. 

Besides learning more about what to look for when choosing a bottle of wine, I’m real excited for the lessons that I can learn about the wine industry and how to apply those to my chosen field in the future. My background is in supply chain / operations and I’m fascinated by how complex logistics and production is for perishable goods. Wine production – from the selection of agricultural fields, to the building of small and large scale production facilities to its distribution – will be a thought provoking industry to learn from.

Additionally, I’m looking forward to extracting learnings from the 3-tier system in the wine industry and applying them to the broader consumer products segment. Although I’m unlikely to begin a career specifically in the wine industry after the GSB, I’m interested in consumer products and retail and can’t wait to use the global wine industry as a proxy for thinking about complex market structures for consumer products.

Really though - who could pass up a class with so much potential, where we also get to try wine? I’m looking forward to a great quarter!

wine /wīn/

A sleepy New England summer. Sweet, bright, ever so slightly musty. Viscous streams of purplish maroon congealing down my legs. This is a different kind of war -- the kind with the blood of grapes. One of my childhood friends hails from a family of amateur winemakers, and we are twelve and  stomping and dancing away, stuffed in barrels we were barely able to jump into.

Although my twelve-year-old self did not taste the fruits of my labor, wine captured my imagination from a young age, and I am incredibly excited to learn more about the production process of wine through this course. 

Now, as a research assistant at the Stanford Food Design Research team at the d.school, I am also ever more aware of wine's extraordinary grasp on the future of the food and beverage industry. Through this course, I hope to learn about how wine will intersect with the future of restaurants, which is the primary topic of my research at the d.school.

Having worked in marketing, sales, and video strategy for food and beverage-related brands, I am also deeply interested in wine branding and marketing strategies, and I am excited to explore these further in this course. For instance, Inniskillin's international marketing and strict pricing strategies fascinated me; I am looking forward to continuing to delve into what makes and breaks luxury wine brands.

I do not know if I will end up in the wine industry, but I am eager to learn about wine from a business perspective (which I believe will help develop my own sense of what goes into creating and expanding robust businesses) and from the vantage point of an interested consumer. Through this course, I want to better understand and appreciate wine.

An early oenophile

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.