Sociology of Wine

Flying used to drain my energy. Whether on a short or long flight, I could not sleep. I could not rest. I felt crammed. I got stressed. I was inconvenienced by airport security. All of this went on for many years. Then, I decided not to wait to be comfortable until I was in a [...]

I recently spoke to a group of Product Marketing students at KU Leuven, the famous and ancient university in Belgium. Despite my warnings that they were taller, smarter, and funnier than me and that there was no reason to think that I should give them advice, rather the reverse, they actually listened to me for [...]

Since I wrote Leadership From Below in 2008, there has been a steady flow of management books about bottom-up leadership. In The Leader Who Had No Title (2010), speaker Robin Sharma has put together a modern fable on success in business and in life. There are no revolutionary insights in this book, but its speaks [...]

Taking forward the debate on Murray’s End of Management foray in WSJ recently, the new model is, in my view, not exactly Murray’s model.  Instead, it is simply a hybrid of bureaucracy and entrepreneurship. Let’s call it entreprenocracy. A few weeks ago, I went to a wedding at Oriel College in Oxford, UK. We had a wonderful time [...]

MacroWikinomics, the sequel to the bestselling book Wikinomics is out this week. Should we rejoice? Sadly, no. Sure, the book has raving pre-publication commentary. The topic is cool: the prospect that each and every one of us is changing the world. But unlike the more methodical vision of Bill Drayton’s Ashoka, where “everyone a changemaker” [...]

“Good wine, great value” — that’s been Chile’s wine reputation for many years. And while this isn’t a bad thing by any means, it is a bit of a self-limiting category. “Great wines” might be a more desirable label, or maybe “great values, great wines.”  But things are changing in Chile. Is it time to […]

Most Lucky Fellow “Everybody should be so lucky as Mike Veseth — his lifelong intellectual passion is also his job, ” according to a recently published interview with Seattle Times book editor Mary Ann Gwinn that was highlighted by this front page “teaser” (see above). ” Lit Life” is a reference to Mary Ann’s regular […]

This is the final post in my series on Tight, Fat and Uncorked, the three trends I see shaping the wine industry. This week I want to think about how the future of wine might unfold depending upon which of these three forces is most powerful. Wine markets are getting “tight” as demand for many grape [...]

The wines of Tyler winery get a thumbs up from me for the brilliance of the name alone–but also for what’s inside the bottle. I tasted a few of them recently at a trade tasting and was impressed with the lean, taut wines from a land known all too often for buxom chardonnay and pinot [...]

The arrest of Rudy Kurniawan on March 8 coincided with the top in the fine wine market this year. Even though Kurniawan–whose guilt or innocence on wine counterfeiting charges remains to be tried in federal court–was apprehended, wine fraud remains an easy crime: combine sky-high prices with an old collectible whose authenticity may be difficult […]

Two Buck Chuck turns ten this year. We were reminded that Fred Franzia’s Bronco Wine Co. owns 40,000 acres of vines in the San Joaquin Valley, debt-free, which helps keep the wine price so low. How big is a 40,000 acre vineyard? It’s about 50 times the size of Central Park, and, in fact, about [...]