Wine and wellness

Things catch up with us.

With our health certainly it happens iteratively over time.

I’ve poo pooed the Drink with Moderation Movement and avoided the trendy Dry January palaver, blithely using wine as my connection to community and social fun since the late 90s.

Till very recently that is, when my doctor told me to dial it back.

No pointers toward specific ailments thankfully, but with acknowledgement that it is time rheumatically to be smarter and more conscious of the impact of alcohol on my body.

She suggesting firmly that I cut consumption and offer my body short periods of detoxification to recalibrate its own status quo.

I hated the conversation, but she knows my body and is simply right.

I read a slew of New Year’s posts on Dry January, watched the crowing of people on the social nets lionizing their abstinence, and decided—just not my way.

I stepped back and approached this from a wholistic health perspective, rethinking my physical and mental wellness, not correlating this to, for example, giving up gluten due to allergies.

Stopping for a month is not the goal.

The thing is that for me wine culture, the natural juice community round the globe is a piece of myself I hold very close.

I have many friendships that are born of it, connections with many producers that drive broad conversations that truly inspire me.

My place at the end of my local wine bar on Tuesday nights. A meeting on a cold winter day with a new business contact. The gestalt of it all is just who I am.

I’m rarely looking for the buzz, and almost never open a bottle of wine and drink it through at home.

I often however, do open three or four of them and sip them cross a week, letting my palate geekiness hone its skills. Appreciating how these wines and places and people and approaches come together.

After reading my friend Simon Woolf post on his response to the trendy abstinence movement, I found my own.

I’ve decided to simply change and relax, recalibrating like I now do with extreme skiing as my knees have gotten worse.

I’ve just personalized it, knowing my strengths and my weaknesses around this with three decisions:

-At my haunts (and when on the road), rule of thumb is now half pours.

Couple, three or so half-pours allows me to create a course of the evening from bubbly to whatever cross an evening. Half the alcohol, all the pleasure.

-At home its harder, so I’ve moved to designing the evening like a tasting—drinking a producer cross some vintage or approach, starting with a decision, ending with some notes to myself, often a note to the producer as well.

-Once a week, I simply don’t drink at all for two days straight, making these evenings work ones, dedicated to personal writing projects that can benefit from the more clear focus and added hours of productive play.

And sometimes all of these rules simply break. Buddies with bottles at the end of the bar go late into the night.

So be it!

This is not religion. This is not a test of my concentration or least of all some test of my discipline.

It’s wellness and is definitely–if we are lucky–a long game.

It’s about being smart and not beating yourself up when you fall short. Like I calibrate what I eat and how often. Then blow it away and go find the best pizza on a whim.

I don’t believe in the rigidness of schedule but very much in the importance of habits strung together over time.

Alcohol is obviously a toxin and if I was an alcoholic, I’d walk away from this.

If I didn’t truly love wine, its innate poetry as a social language and its importance to me as something that just makes me happy, I’d as well find a different poise.

I just really like this approach as it fits both my health needs and how I want to live.

It’s a freezing cold, early Sunday morning as I write this.

I’m doing some research and plan to drink half pours of Pet Nats from two tiny wine projects in Cal tonight. Heading out later to find them at my local shops, enjoying the planning, the chats with experts while shopping, and I’m quite certain the wine itself.

If this is not something you personally have to consider or care about, all good.

If you are doing a Dry January or something similar, just another view from a fellow wine lover.

In this case, rather than walk away from something important to me, I’ve simply double-downed to find a way that suits both sides of the equation.

The why of why it matters and the why of where the problem is.

So far, so good.

What can be done about the EU wine tariffs?

I take this one to heart.

As a personal call to combat political uncertainty and ennui, to engage positively in the democratic process by making myself heard, and to just do something purposeful that could impact a community I truly love being part of.

It is important to do things that matter regardless of the odds of reversing the tide. To me this is most unequivocally one of those times.

Over the last ten years, I’ve shared my friendships and admiration for artisanal producers, importers, distributors, wine shops, wine bars, restaurants and the scores of passionate and iconoclastic people that do the work to get wine to us.

These are the people that will be hurt dramatically by these tariffs, rearranging their lives and livelihoods, either by intent or as collateral damage.

It was clear sitting at a wine bar recently that few knew of this, fewer understand its severity, and almost none what they could do to help. This post is meant to remedy the lack of awareness and provide some action links to my readers.

Here are the details (thanks to Christy Frank):

The Digital Services Tax

  • Originates around tax disputes concerning the major tech platforms, subjecting a 100% tariff on sparkling wine and food products from France.
  • Hearing on Jan 7th in front of International Trade Commission with rebuttal comments by the 14th, then most likely the tariff starts immediately.

The Civil Aircraft Dispute

  • Airbus and Boeing in dispute about government subsidies to Airbus impacting the free market competition with the US Tariffs ostensibly a leveling impact.
  • Round 1 in effect now, with 25% tariff on some wines and food stuffs from the EU.
  • Round  2 is proposed with 100% tariffs on wine (other food stuffs as well) from all EU countries. Comments are in process now till Jan 13th.

If Round 2 goes forward, this will reconfigure the very community we collectively have built almost immediately.

Small wine businesses up and down the supply chain will most certainly close, people will lose jobs, our community will be decimated and reshaped into something very different. Whether the tariffs last a month or six, jobs will be lost and markets will never be the same.

Today the majority of wines in our retail outlets are from the EU, and not something that can be immediately substituted, nor something the market will accept.

Do note as well that these tariffs are levied egregiously on the US importer alone so when wine lands, a 100% tariff is immediately levied on the importer not the producers in Europe. Hundreds of containers will simply be sent back, causing an ugly financial ripple on both sides. My guess is that these artisanal producers will simply go to Asia to find markets and never return.

The wine trade at large is testifying in DC this week as it is their livelihoods that is being threatened. Members of every shop and importer I know will be there.

What about the rest of us?

You can write and/or call your elected officials telling them how the upcoming tariffs will have a dramatic impact.

On us as consumers. On the fabric of our special community. On the hundreds of small businesses and the thousands of middle class workers and entrepreneurs.

If you are (as I am) upset with the administration using tariffs this way, vote in the next election and voice your opinion.

If you are (I most certainly am) upset at the immediacy and impact, you can write and call (see below). This is how Democracy works so make your voice heard.

I did.

Actions you can take:

  • Click here to email Your Congress Member.
  • Click here to leave a Comment on the USTR Docket.
  • Learn how to engage your congressional representative and help push for a congressional hearing. Click here.
  • Click here for sample letters.

Other helpful links:

  • Christy Franks great post on all the details, with links.
  • Save American Wine Jobs action items excerpted above.
  • Jenny & Francois passionate post on the reality for their company and the wine community.
  • David Lillie newsletter on the tariffs from Chambers Street Wines.

Please do give this some thought and note the timeliness of this request. We need to act now and en mass to make a difference.

This is just the right thing to do.

As well, a responsibility as members of the community to lend a voice and take action for things we care about.

This is most certainly one that matters to all of us.

_______________

See these new pieces in the New York Times.

Jenny Lefcourt’s op ed.

Eric Asimov The Pour.

And this one from  Forbes is a great resource of articles being published.

Downtownwineguy: A new start for 2020

I fell in love with wine in the early ‘90s living in the Bay Area.

Spending countless hours in the kitchens, barns, and cellars of those early artisanal winemakers in Napa and Sonoma. Hanging around drinking wine and relishing in the human touch of these people who brimmed over with their love of vines and the lore of making wine.

Getting to know them as friends, learning to love each one’s wine as a reflection of their unique piece of land, way before there was a concept of ‘natural wine.’

They were true iconoclasts and dreamers, entrepreneurial viticulturists working against the market grain of industrialized agriculture on the fringes of the established wine world.

It tapped into something in the me of my early 20’s. The kid who knew nothing  about wine at all. The me that was living off the grid in North Central British Columbia. Running bees in the N. Okanagan Valley, subsistent farming, and working as a craftsperson myself, building dulcimers and mandolins.

I’d been a literature major, a hippie, a lover of the Black Mountain poets, evolving into a tech entrepreneur in the emerging gaming world, finding friendship with poets and artists, with these business people from all walks of life whose inner flames had turned them to artisans and farmers. The backbone of sorts of the then-nascent maker revolution.

We talked about organic viticulture and natural fermentation, with bits of Kerouac and Ferlinghetti thrown in. Musing on and inspired by a new world, where individual acts in aggregate cross a community of like-minded people can turn a tide.

When I started blogging about wine in 2009, I was already deeply entrenched in the wine community, learning about the natural wine category from my friends David Little and Jamie Woolf of Chambers Street Wine in downtown New York who were very much reimagining retail for natural and artisanal wine.

I became intrigued by the idea that the social web and personal publishing were making the unscalable nature of artisanal wine fiscally possible. Enabling tiny producers and neighborhood wine shops to collectively build global markets for a large number of individual brands.

So where are we today?

Natural wine, from the beginning, has always had an outsized influence on how people think about wine even though it’s been proportionately but a tiny part of the market. Today the term is everywhere, acting like a mass market category, though like many bottom’s up movements, breaking and splintering as it gets broader.

Weakening in the center as it expands into confusion and even co-opted deceit at the market edges.

There are many new conversations we need to have:

-Does natural as a category matter any longer or does it swallow its tail and spit out Raw, Craft, and Artisanal, restarting yet again?

-Who are the North Stars of this new market that tie it together as examples to producers, and the agricultural poets for consumers in this new fragmented community?

-Does the wine world start to interact in meaningful ways with other conservation and activist’s movements that are sweeping the globe?

I intend to surface these discussions, but this new decade, with a new market reality requires a different approach, less haphazard and more focused.

The goal is to segment my various networks and audiences, letting them join in the middle rather than sort themselves out at the top.

@downtownwineguy is my new moniker and handle for my work in wine. With some thoughts to rebirthing pieces of my theLocalSip community as well.

Digging into my history in the artisanal and natural segments, bringing in points of view I’ve developed in the environmental and tech worlds but specifically for the wine consumer.

Speaking to those who search for answers and engagement within this context.

And honestly, @downtownwineguy feels just like me.

Holding court at the end of the bar on Tuesday nights at Racines and haunting the aisles of Chambers Street Wines when in town. It’s who I am.

I have a bunch of new communications ideas that I’ll be rolling in but wanted to get this out to start the new year. Decade!

So here’s to health and reinvention and rebirth in 2020!

Here’s to this really wonderful, anachronistic, still so dreamy and iconoclastic community of people I’ve had the good fortune to call my friends.

Happy New Year to all!

Can we tokenize the wine world?

This question is really close to my heart.

It combines two of my core passions–building community and brands on top of emerging technology platforms, and how we as a culture support artisanal endeavors, especially the natural side of the wine world.

The web has been critical for creating community around the hundreds of small winemakers from every corner of the globe, building a market for them in thousands of retail shops and wine bars. But as a way to sell wine online, it is still very much unrealized and unproven.

But the blockchain may be different, with a bolder and deeper promise.

We are still very early, and most of the few projects in process, are around replumbing the supply chain in an attempt to verify and guarantee a bottle’s origin and provide a transparent view of the source and characteristics of how that bottle is made.

These are interesting as proof points, but pale in comparison to larger, more seminal challenges for the segment, like the rapid industrialization of unique vineyard land or economic issues for small producers who sell into the three-tier distribution system in the states.

I have a thesis, more of a vision, that when you look for native uses of the blockchain and crypto economics within the artisanal and natural wine world, there is a real possibility of tokenizing the process and the supply chain itself, inclusive of community participation.

Building a circular economy that provides capitalization for the vineyards through fractional ownership of the land, tying the community to tangible assets like a bottle of wine, and a way to wire these pieces together in a decentralized marketplace. Self-defining and supporting, with ownership, with utility, with loyalty systems, with currencies trading on exchanges.

With as well, a bridge that connects not just community to one small producer, but interlocking communities as a market connecting through a platform that crosses many producers, cross different locations across a broad range of supporting consumers and micro-investors.

My premise is that there is way to rethink the incentives of the artisanal markets themselves, for wine and other adjacent agricultural luxury goods, that is natural to the possibilities and promise of crypto economies.

I’ve found just one live wine project that touches my thesis, the OpenVino ICO, a model to support the Costa Flores Winery in Argentina.

The core premise is that at each harvest there is an ICO, issuing a token for every bottle that will be produced. That token is tradable on issuance and can be exchanged for the bottle on which it is pegged three years after harvest, when bottled and sellable.

Mike Barrow, the founder and winemaker, has taken a big swing at creating a market experiment. While there are a ton of unanswerable questions complicated by distribution scenarios, he just did it, and for that I really applaud him.  And as well, thank him for his time chatting with me.

I believe as well, that there is a broader and culturally-significant play that will bridge the scalability and market-making potential of crypto and the blockchain, with real world, non-fungible agricultural products that are smaller scale by nature and reliant on increasingly scarce plots of land across the globe.

That there is a large-scale economic and cultural win around a mix of fractional ownership of the land itself, with tokens pegged to a real world products. And an annuity tied to the actual annual value of the products themselves.

This is truly virgin tokenomics and an unproven thesis about a different world that is nascent at best.

To a structure where the network strength is not tied to one product community but to a segment itself with interlocking communities that drives the value as a whole.

This gets me up early and inspired.

For the wine world certainly that I love.

As well, for an array of other agriculturally unique industries that need community economies to keep them viable, protect special pieces of land and indigenous varieties, ageless social structures and make a generational transfer of knowledge not only possible, but economic.

There is just something wonderfully visceral and appealing about taking the power of this technology, the unstoppable momentum that communities of belief can drive, to create a self-supporting economy that we all can participate in.

Something we can hold in our hands, uncork, drink and enjoy with friends, and potentially change the status quo of this important part of our world at the same time.


Please share projects in the wine and agricultural luxury product markets that I should know about.

If you are an expert that can help put some detail into this dream or a passionate enthusiast with a creative idea, share in the comments below, in our Telegram channel CryptoVino or contact me directly.

Selling part of my wine cellar

 

I learned to love wine in the early ’90s in the Bay Area.

Spending countless hours in the kitchens, barns and cellars of winemakers in Napa and Sonoma. I was then as now, interested in the human touch with people who brimmed over with their love of the vines and lore of making wine.

I got to know Cathy Corison, Art and Bunnie Finkelstein of Judd’s Hill and many of the incredible early winemakers and iconoclasts of the regions just North of San Francisco.

I had never heard of nor thought about natural approaches to winemaking back then and my understanding of the craft of wine was sparse at best.

Roll the clock forward a number of years.

More than a decade into blogging about wine, a deep passion for the natural wine movement, a global community and readership of wine enthusiasts, winemakers, wine professionals and many in the tech and art worlds who simply trust my passions on wine through my stories.

And quite a number of mostly large-format bottles I collected back in the beginning, that I don’t think about nor drink any longer. Sitting in cold storage since their vintage dates.

It is time to pass on that which others may appreciate more than I. Likewise this sale.

My friend Jamie Wolff, one of the co-owners of Chambers Street Wines, has agreed to handle this for me. Just as my readers trust me, I trust Jamie to handle the curate the wine carefully and be fair in pricing.

These bottles should end in the hands of those as excited about them today, as I was back then.

And yes, I have kept special bottles that despite the rigors of wine cooler space, I couldn’t bear to part with.

Most special is a mag of Cab with a birthday ditty written on it by my friend, the late Art Finklestein of Judd’s Hill. A fine human being, a gifted poet, a talented winemaker who did much for early Napa.

I’ve decided not to wax too poetic about this, though the image of a much younger me, traipsing around the back dirt roads in the wine country, hanging out at winemakers kitchen tables, chatting, eating cheese and tasting at 10am on a misty Napa morning makes me smile and fall into a deep, lovely moment.

If this is wine you love, this story and my care of these bottles is my present to you.

I pass it on to you with the sincerest affection for the specialness of what wine can bring to an occasion and friendship, and what these bottles meant to me back when I purchased them.

It’s healthy to embrace our changing tastes and find ways to pass on to others, something they will love and make their own.

If that is you, Please Enjoy!

I plan to use the proceeds from the sale to support small natural wine projects just finding their market.

Wine list and prices are available here.  There are a few bottles from another cellar so please feel free to ask them the source of the bottle you are interested in.