Hurrah, hurray
The first of May
Sostevinobile
Returns this day
The first of May
Sostevinobile
Returns this day
It won’t be a profound revelation to admit that this blog has been Missing In Action for the better part of 2013. Much as Your West Coast Oenophile has tried to maintain pace with the onslaught of trade events and viticultural excursions I undertake, the overwhelming demands of updating this chronicle have been impeded by a series of unpropitious events, the most severe of which being a TKO to my bicycle helmet from an industrial truck zipping insouciantly along San Francisco’s Market St. The damage I sustained was both physical and (briefly) neurological, with bouts of aphasia and intermittent memory “skips” now dissipated, and only the prolonged diminution of my prodigious IQ to the perfunctory level needed to espouse a Princeton nubile the lone remnant of this unrepentant assault. Chalk it up to an unrealized metaphor: my pronounced aversion to that culinary abomination known as scrambled eggs may likely have been the overriding impetus to protect my cerebral mass from artlessly depicting the same.
Facing the prospect of imminent demise while hurtling toward the unbuffered pavement does give pause to reflection. Most significantly, this accident has steeled my resolve to bring the opening of Sostevinobile to fruition through any means at my disposal. Aut gratiā aut fortunā, as we used to chant in Latin class. Even if the fortunā hasn’t exactly been shining on me, as of late.
And what of this blog? The grand scheme, of course, will be to divvy up duties here among the Sostevinobile staff, once we’ve established full-scale operations. For now, however, I need to refocus these entries not simply on the wines I source for the various programs we will be offering: by-the-glass, reserve bottle, retail, etc., but on all issues relevant to this endeavor.
As is fit. After all, my forays on behalf of these wine bar developments do not simply consist of a quest to discover new vintages but to understand how these wines will fit the tastes and needs of our eventual clientele.
And who will this clientele be? And what must Sostevinobile do, not merely to attract but also to retain them? Just before my accident, I attended a group show at Alter Space in San Francisco—in an eerie coincidence, I stumbled upon this gallery when several blocks in SOMA were shut down following a pedestrian traffic fatality, forcing me to veer homeward along an alternative route. Remembering is Everything featured six artists’ recollection of what they conjured from a video the curators had created as a catalyst to their interpretation. And while the mixed media exhibition assembled together film, painting, collage—even creative taxidermy—what stood out most was a stark display, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, an unadorned, portable monaural turntable playing a scratched Roy Orbison 45.
While artist David Kasprzak’s intent here may have been to evoke the notion that “a community is capable of transforming the present
state of the world to prevent an apocalypse,” he could not have known
that his art would have presaged the crowd on hand for this opening.
Most of the attendees this evening hailed from the post-millennial generation that has yet to be emblemized with pithy marketing argot—recently-minted grads of this current decade confronting the inexorable reality that four years of education and unbridled freedom has garnered them a foreseeable future without entitlement and an awkward retreat to the cocoon of their adolescence.
state of the world to prevent an apocalypse,” he could not have known
that his art would have presaged the crowd on hand for this opening.
Most of the attendees this evening hailed from the post-millennial generation that has yet to be emblemized with pithy marketing argot—recently-minted grads of this current decade confronting the inexorable reality that four years of education and unbridled freedom has garnered them a foreseeable future without entitlement and an awkward retreat to the cocoon of their adolescence.
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My cursory perusal of this jejune crowd found them not necessarily naïve but outwardly guileless, devoid of extreme facial piercings or provocative tattooing, simply apparelled, almost wholly monochromatic (Caucasian), and seemingly unfazed by the overarching issues of the day. Apart from omnipresent cell phones in one hand and plastic cups in the other, the gathering could just have well been transposed from a setting fifty years earlier amid the media-conjured view of a strifeless America, impervious to the simmering tensions the looming civil rights struggle and nascent conflict in Vietnam would soon engender, an innocent era in which sex could be measured in bases, Coca Cola and hot dogs reigned supreme, and rock & roll music and staying out past curfew constituted the furthest extremes of rebellion. Viewed through such a prism, one must recognize the drearily puerile coiffure Michelle Obama recently adopted not as harbinger of future trends but as confirmation of this emerging generation’s atavistic drift, fostered by the forlorn economy over which her husband lacklusterly presides. |
So whither Sostevinobile and today’s 20-somethings? Though my superficial assessment of this emerging generation may smack of patronization, I am hardly pessimistic about its prospects. After all, the wine poured at Alter Space easily rated a notch or two above the ubiquitous Two Buck Chuck that, along with cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, seems obligatory at most art studios. And that alone qualifies as portent of great promise…
Perhaps I oughtn’t continue to be such an ardent critic of The Punahou Kid, now that he has embarked on his second term in office. For a while, it even seemed he had taken on the aura of the Presidency (that is, until he caved on the Keystone XL Pipeline), to the point that I had actually extolled his leadership in another forum to which I sometimes contribute. <
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Regardless of who deserves the credit, by my unscientific reckoning, the economy is 2013 improving dramatically for the first time since he assumed office and I undertook efforts to launch the wine bar/retail establishment that these pages sustain. Not that I have never placed any credence in the pronouncements, dire or optimistic of Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and their ilk, nor any of the so-called economic pundits one encounters in academia, the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, nor even the talking heads who fill the airwaves each afternoon with their affectations of erudition. As I have previously cited, my strongest economic bellwether is the date upon which I receive my first coin minted in the current year.
My methodology may seem empirical, though no less insightful than the economics of Lyndon LaRouche or the prescient philosophy of Ayn Rand. It stands to reason that the more vibrant the economy, the faster the influx of newly-minted money to accommodate the attendant demands of businesses. Over the past few years, the utter stagnation meant I did not see the first new coin of 2011 until June and of 2012 in mid-July. This year, I discovered a brilliant, untarnished 2013 Lincoln penny in my change March 11, a vastly significant statistical acceleration. Does this portend a slackening of the parsimony of the centimillionaires upon whose precarious whims the flow of investment capital relies? Will the lethargy that has predominated private equity markets in the 2010s finally subside and offer new life to the launch of Sostevinobile? Stay tuned…
A couple of years back, I was invited to join an exclusive wine tasting klatch, the Mercurey Club. This loosely-assembled meetup provides camaraderie for a select group of high-profile technologists who find the joys of œnological
discovery a refreshing contrast to the monolithic culture of app development and other Internet forays.
Each of these sporadic gatherings at a member’s abode feature sumptuous catering and designated viticultural focus toward which attendees contribute a favorite bottle or two. Even when the theme falls outside my forte of West Coast wines, I feel almost as much pressure to distinguish myself here as I do at Cliff Lede’s annual bottle party during Premier Napa or the wonderful Acme Fine Wines anniversary parties David Stevens and Karen Williams would throw at the Tucker Farm Center.
Culling a mid-range Uruguayan Tannat, for instance, provided an easy contrast to the preponderance of Argentine Malbecs and Chilean Carménères at the South American gathering. But this spring’s Anything but Chardonnay or Pinot from the Russian River Valley proved far more daunting.
Not for lack of awareness of what I might have chosen. A random list of possible selections included: a 2011 Mourvèdre from Suncé; Zeitgeist Cellars’ 2012 Trousseau Gris Russian River Valley; Acorn’s 2010 Dolcetto Alegría Vineyards; Windsor Oaks’ 2010 Rosato of Sangiovese, to name but a few options. But I vacillated on attending until it was too late to make a trip up to Sonoma and so I had to scour the local wine shops in San Francisco for a suitable selection.
And therein lies the rub. I combed the shelves of at least six of San Francisco’s more notable local wine specialists, only to find a broad spectrum of Pinots and Chards, interspersed with a fair amount of Zinfandel, but virtually nothing deviating from this triumvirate of Russian River varietals.
I wound up selecting a bottle of 2010 Pinot Gris from Balletto, a fine wine at a modest price, to be sure, but just not as esoteric as what my circle of wine enthusiasts has come to expect from me. And even though I subsequently learned that I might have sourced such delights as J Stephen Wine’s 2011 Ribolla Gialla or the 2011 Woodenhead French Colombard from K&L Wine Merchants (their wine selections are meticulously organized and identified), I was still left with a sense that an overwhelming majority of the wines produced in California, particularly outside the orthodoxies of Bordelaise and Burgundian varietals (plus Zinfandel), enjoy little retail exposure beyond their tasting rooms and wine clubs.
I rarely discuss the proposed retail arm of Sostevinobile, even in my investment pitches. But this experience invigorated me in the belief that our showcase needs to amplify the exposure our wine-by-the-glass program will give to 400 or so wines annually with off-premise sales in our wine store adjunct of some 1,500-2,000 different selections from the roster of sustainable wine labels I have assembled (and continue to expand) throughout the years I have been building this program.
As of this writing, I believe I’ve vetted nearly 3,100 wine labels throughout Washington, Oregon, and California. I cannot begin to calculate how many different wines that figure incorporates. But Sostevinobile isn’t merely about delivering words and promises. All my efforts will be for naught if I do not make access to these splendid vintages a reality for our clientele.