Miles Per Gallon

The last 6 months are a blur, brought sharply into focus for a moment, before retracting into a gaussian image searching for clarity. A brief road-trip across the Western USA bought time. An explorer at heart, we hit the road with no plans, deciding where to sleep each night, stumbling across rare gems as well as places I see no reason to ever visit again. Rattlesnake sausages, Tarantino movie locations, incredible vistas, Guy Fieri Diners, Space X rockets, and random people in random places created a brief stillness of the mind.

Momentary bliss unceremoniously punctuated by admin. Back to school. I walked into class and recognized no one. I scanned the room. There’s so much going on. Large brown boxes stacked against the wall. Chattering students excited about what’s to come. The class is packed. Front row. Bad idea. I wasn’t fully prepped for the case (won’t happen again!). Crazy week. I hope Professor Rapp doesn’t cold call me. Spotted a seat in the back right corner. Hear we go.

Professor Rapp kicked off with a bang. Kind of like listening to a podcast at 1.5x speed. It was a refreshing change of pace. Still keeping an eye out for that cold call. Interesting case. I remember my first taste of Ice Wine. My brother brought home a bottle of Ice Wine from his European Contiki. I thought it just tasted like ordinary sweet white wine, perhaps crisper, according to 14 year old me. My brother wasn’t impressed.

My younger self did pose interesting questions. What was this supposedly unique premium wine? What should I be appreciating? It wouldn’t be until another 10 years before I’d really start to appreciate any form of wine. As reprobate undergrad students we often sourced ‘papsak’ (Afrikaans for ‘soft bag’), a silver bag of cheap, boxed wine, easily found in retailers back home, and which we heartily consumed. Thankfully, family and friends saved me, slowly introducing me to some of South Africa’s great cab sav, pinotage, shiraz, and merlot wines.

Gabriel Glas, Ice Wine knock-offs, and general discussions around authenticity stirred a few thoughts around old vs. new, traditional vs. modern, established methods vs. new age innovation. I typically defer to old school, comfortable in the romantic, albeit self-righteous, notions of pedigree attained through years of knowledge refined and passed on from one generation to the next. But we’re in Silicon Valley. We’re all about disrupting the status quo, and using technology to do so. If we can 3D print grapes identical to those used in the Ice Wine process, is that wine any less authentic? Should we pay more just because the grapes froze naturally? There is less magic in the sterility of a lab produced frozen grape. Emotions and the human connection are still important. But they are being tested.

Annoyingly patriotic as you may come to find, I was perturbed to see South Africa outside the top 10 per capita wine consumption countries. Furthermore, although a long-term growth trend, the last two years of actual/ forecast data indicates a slight downturn in production too. While the slight downturn in production can be attributed to, amongst other things, lower plantings due to an extended drought in Cape Town, it was South Africa’s per capita consumption that warranted a deeper analysis.

Azumio, an app that tracks health and other data, recently released data analyzing the habits of 717,000 men and women across 111 countries, whose steps were studied for an average of 95 days. This data suggests that on average Americans take 5,000 steps per day compared to South Africans who take 4,000 steps. Using population sizes and annual wine consumption figures, this equates to average annual miles per gallon of 311 miles/g and 401 miles/g for the USA and South Africa respectively. As human beings, South Africans have better wine consumption. Never been prouder.

July 2017 seems but a distant memory of a younger less mature version 30 point 0. Travel, experiencing the uncertainty of life, and making friends with the unknown breeds a perspective that is simultaneously casual, liberating, and enabling. Shocks to the system shake things up, force you to take stock, and unceremoniously shove you off in a new direction. Never swim against the current. But never accept that its destination is yours. And so as my December road trip ends, my journey into wine continues, excited to explore the next 10 odd weeks with you all! 

Wine and Dine, Refined

Wine has been a part of my life since childhood, when my parents would slip me sips of Merlot and Chardonnay at the dinner table. Though I found the taste sharp and often unpleasant (we were far from being connoisseurs of Romanée-Conti), the opportunity to drink an "adult beverage" filled me with pride and closeness to my parents. Plus, sappy romantic comedies like A Good Year showed me that wine had the power to unlock the doors of love. What a great enabler! Since then, wine has always held a special place in my heart.

As I got older, the art of wine tasting in college and through movies like Sideways ensnared me under its mystical spell. The sommeliers were modern-day wizards, somehow pulling the hints of raspberry jam and cinnamon from a single sniff-sip-swirl-and-spit and immediately knowing which obscure French cheese would make the best pairing. My palate (which for an embarrassingly long time, I thought was pronounced "pa-lay") seemed so unrefined and uneducated next to theirs. One glass of Cabernet Sauvignon seemed just as good as the next (as a middle-class college student living in Texas). Ultimately, I decided that it was a lost cause, and I would forever be dependent on the opinions of "wine experts" for "what to drink when and why."

Then I entered investment banking, and the head of my group was, to say the least, a wine enthusiast (he owned half a vineyard in France). He introduced me to my first glass of luxury Pinot Noir (>$100/bottle) and turned my wine world on its head. I'd never tasted a wine so smooth and flavorful, and though I still didn't have names for the flavors, that glass of red, along with my years as an investment banker, reignited my curiosity about wine tasting and the industry at large.

This class represents the next phase of my wine exploration. Reading about the creation process and tasting tips in "Around the World in 80 Sips" is like encountering and deciphering a Rosetta Stone for the language of wine. Wine represents the delicious intersection of science, art and business, and I want to explore all of these facets: how different vineyards establish their competitive advantages (even, or especially, the discount wines of my youth); how winemakers interact with different stakeholders, from the government to critics to end consumers; how 21st century innovations and trends are going to transform the wine industry. I am so excited to get a taste of it all (in addition to some fantastic wines each class 😀) with the goal of stepping ever closer to those "wine wizards" I so admire.

Blasphemy or Genius?

Growing up in China where drinking is a key element of family gathering, I had access to a variety of alcoholic beverages at a young age at family banquets. Out of curiosity, I had my first sip of baijiu (a high proof Chinese liquor) at a big family dinner to celebrate the New Year Eve. “Atta girl”, My grandfather acclaimed and laughed. “This is absolutely disguising… and adults are weird”, I thought at that time. And I was turning eight that year.

Among wine-related mischievous memories is the one of my 14^th birthday party – I mixed a bottle vintage Bordeaux from my dad’s proud collection with Sprite to entertain my friends! “Blasphemy”, my dad frowned. “But honey, she’s creative’, mom whispered into his ears, “it is a beautiful mess”. I’d like to think of that moment as the beginning of my passion for cocktail mixology (or, just to justify my onset alcoholism).

Learning more about wine has always been a personal goal since I graduated from college. I’ve grown to understand my own taste and what type of wines I personally like, but eager to learn more about the ones that I don’t love or haven’t tried before. When it comes to choosing which business school to attend, GSB’s geographic proximity to Napa and Sonoma is one of the many factors I considered. That said, I am excited to not only learn more about the wine industry but also to form new friendships with other wine enthusiasts in this class!

Beer Girl Wants to Learn About Wine

There’s nothing more relatable, more ordinary and extraordinary, than grabbing a cold one at the local spot. Nothing that makes you stop and connect like getting tipsy with new friends and learning the particulars of a country’s craft. Beer is at its core only four ingredients: malt, water, yeast, and hops, but it’s incredibly complex in its simplicity. I’m a big believer that every beer has a story – from the fruity, funky farmhouse ales of Belgium to the delicate, disciplined rice beers of Japan, you can’t deconstruct a local beverage without learning something about the people and country that created it. It’s a powerful lens through which to experience a culture for the first time.

I wrote this in my beer blog back in December of 2016 when I was about to take off on a 6-month beer backing trip across the world. Craft beer has been a big part of my life for the past 5 years. I fell in love with the art and science of brewing after working with local breweries in San Francisco as the Food and Beverage marketing lead at Eventbrite. I became a homebrewer, and weekly Sunday night beer pairing experiments with a local chef gradually turned into a business – a beer pairing education supper club in SF called Amuse Booze.

The most rewarding part of my job and of running the supper club was getting to introduce people to amazing local brews and the communities behind them. So when I suddenly found myself with several months free on my hands before GSB, I decided to spend them visiting countries where I knew nothing about the beer scene, meeting as many people as I could, and writing about it. I had some of the most incredible experiences of my life -- meeting brewers but also makers across all facets of the craft beverage industry. I shadowed a hop farmer in Tasmania, I brewed with an expat in Vietnam, I learned about bootlegged liquor in Indonesia, and yes, met winemakers in South Africa.

I see wine as an untapped area of learning for me, the other side of the craft beverage coin. I would love to learn more about the wine industry, and specifically about how geographies and cultures shape the products that are created. I’m also interested in this class because I can potentially see my future career being in the food and beverage industry, and I’ve struggled with marrying what I love about beer and wine -- this authentic passion and joy of bringing people together -- with building a successful business. Like the supper club, my favorite experiences and products often seem inherently unscalable. I’ve seen so many brands that become behemoths and lose what made them successful in the first place. I want to explore what it is that makes a brand authentic, and how I can I bring people together around local experiences and products at scale without losing this authenticity. I’m looking forward to dropping the pint glass and picking up the Gabriel Glass this quarter to see where it takes me.

Catching Up

I was a devout Mormon until I was 19. In the Mormon religion you don’t drink alcohol so other than my friends who would get their older siblings to buy them PBR, I wasn’t exposed to types of alcohol. Not having seen much responsible drinking, even after I left Mormonism I still had a negative connotation associated with alcohol. I took my first drink when I was 21. It was a red wine at a decent steak place. I did not like it. A couple months later I took my second drink, a champagne toast at the sell dinner for my summer internship. Mistakenly I downed the whole champagne flute in one gulp on the first toast and was left waiving around an empty glass for the rest of the toasts. The champagne was actually pretty good. Flash forward a couple of years and now I occasionally drink and enjoy it. At Stanford I’ve started to like the taste of wine and want to learn more about it. I’ve never studied this type of product in depth before, so it will also be interesting to learn about how the market functions.