It’s hardly news that 2025 has been quite the year, if not the turning point, for many, many wineries, vineyards, and folks whose livelihood depends on the wine industry. And it has been particularly difficult for ancillary operators like Your West Coast Oenophile, who has struggled this past year to rechannel Sostevinobile into an event production venture, focused on new channels to promote and sell wine.

Over the past year, I worked diligently to stage Festa Italiana di Santa Rosa, an Italian food & wine festival showcasing wines from Risorgimento’s prospective roster of over 1,000 Italian varietal producers in California and along the West Coast, and NAPA with ALTITUDE, a revival and expansion of the former showcase for wines produced from grapes grown along the mountain slopes on both sides of Napa Valley.

Let me just say that the results were more than disheartening, primarily because the vast majority of wineries I recruited failed to follow through on their verbal commitments to participate. Sure, there may have been mitigating reasons for many, particularly the abysmal wine economy, but here’s the conundrum. The only means out of this slump is to find alternatives to the tried and (no longer) true vehicles for marketing wine to the trade and to consumers, which is exactly what my events were designed for. But if wineries won’t make the necessary commitments and expenditures, they are relegating themselves to the status quo. 

Back in the early 1980s, I cut my teeth in the wine realm as an M&A advisor—heady stuff for a 20-something, but I had connections with East Coast financiers and a major liquor producer who wanted to expand into wines. It was a long, tedious process—Bad Bunny’s halftime extravaganza failed to depict just how slow business magnates in Puerto Rico move—that ultimately did not bear fruition, but rebounded with buyers I sourced on my own.

My principal clients landed up in the storied bidding war for Château St. Jean, then a boutique jewel focused on vineyard-designate Chardonnays. They ultimately lost out to Japan’s Suntory, but, in the meantime, I packaged an unassailably perfect deal to acquire Sonoma Vineyards  (now Rodney Strong), along with its Windsor Vineyards, which had a monopoly on private label wines, and Piper Sonoma, the California arm of Champagne house Piper Heidseck, all for $26 million dollars less than they were willing to pay for St. Jean. And yet they let the deal expire and allowed its distributors to foreclose on Sonoma Vineyards.

This recalcitrance proved too much, compelling me to quit my formal involvement with the wine industry and engage in other pursuits. But the passion never left me and eventually I worked my wa back into full-time involvement, consulting, building a data base of over 5.600 labels on the West Coast, producing events, founding two trade associations, and trying to build a wine emporium in San Francisco.The work was more grueling than might appear, my direct wine income rather paltry—supplemented by my reluctant return to an unstructured M&A practice outside of the wine realm—but it was a joy to connect with and engage industry folks.

Or so I thought until my efforts to produce the aforementioned Grand Tastings in 2025 proved futile. I know I shouldn’t take these disappointments so personally, but I do. So much so, I’ve taken the past three months to reassess whether I should even continue striving for my niche within the wine realm. And frankly I’ve was on the brink of hanging up my lanyard until I found renewed enthusiam for the business in, of all places, San José, at the Northern California debut of Festival of the Undiscovered Grape. For a man who has cataloged over 93 different Italian varietals grown here, and perhaps as many as 250 grapes beyond the ubiquitous Big Eight (Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Blanc, Syrah and Zinfandel), this event was truly revelatory. Not just for the diversity of the wines being poured—after all, I helped source many of the esoteric bottlings for the former 7% Solution Tasting on which this event was predicated—but the thoroughness and attention to detail throughout the entire presentation.

And it renewed my faith in the bonds I’d formed over the past 17 years with so many of the wineries. Enough so that I am throwing myself back headlong into the mother of all winery events, Première Napa, starting tomorrow. In other words, this blog is back! Sostevinobile is back! And coöpting a line from a pernicious advertising campaign for cigarettes—yes, this used to be legal— Your West Coast Oenophile would rather fight than switch!