Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it’s been

The Grateful Dead, of course, must have been singing about the long, strange trip of the wine business. They were singing about hot markets and cold markets, about big crops and small crops, about rain and drought.  

I was reminiscing about the strange wine business journey with a longtime grower client recently over lunch at Willi’s and he said something that surprised me. He said that the single most valuable thing I have done for him over the years was to expand his radar screen to help him detect potential problems before they bit his head off.

I argued, on the contrary, that the most important thing I had done for him was to identify ... read the entire article.