Pinot Noir: Spreading the Wealth

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Patrick Comiskey:

SOMETIMES it seems as if Pinot Noir isn’t so much a beverage as an exclusive private club. Scan the pages of wine magazines and you’ll find glowing reviews on a bewildering array of Pinots from unfamiliar wineries, each with tiny, hundred-case productions, lovingly extracted from tiny, single vineyards, even from tiny blocks of tiny, single vineyards.
Every so often, you might find one of these wines at a wine shop, but chances are if you’re reading about it today, it was sold out last week. You might discover a bottle on a chichi restaurant wine list, and you’ll shell out quite a few chis for the privilege of tasting it. Or you may get hold of a bottle by adding your name to the waiting list of a winery’s buying club — which might have an opening in 2012.
It starts to feel a bit like unrequited love. What is the Pinot lover to do when the object of affection is so exclusionary, unobtainable? What if, instead of trophy worship, you wanted to make Pinot your house wine, the wine to pour each evening at dinner — without taking out any sub-prime loans? Where are the Pinots for the rest of us?
In fact there are plenty made in volumes that resemble rivers and not trickles, and with price tags that are pretty populist. And while these may not be the most au courant bottlings in the market, they can be very, very good. Some are being made by winemakers who have taken on the challenge of affordable Pinot with the zeal of evangelists.

Friends have a fabulous new Oregon vineyard: www.leftcoastcellars.com. Check out their Pinot selection.

All Roads Still Lead to Lombardi

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Dave Anderson:

All you need to know about Green Bay is that Lambeau Field is on Lombardi Avenue.
Even the numerals in the Packers’ address, 1265 Lombardi Avenue, are significant — 12 for the franchise’s record number of N.F.L. championships, 6 when Curly Lambeau was the coach, 5 when Vince Lombardi was the coach. The 1996 team won the other title in Super Bowl XXXI with Mike Holmgren as the coach (he later defected to Seattle) and Brett Favre at quarterback (he is still the face of the franchise). But Lambeau and Lombardi remain its cornerstones.
Lambeau, a star tailback at Green Bay East High School who left Notre Dame after a year, organized the original Packers team at a meeting in the dingy Press-Gazette newspaper offices in 1919 when a local meatpacking company put up $500 for uniforms and pro football was a small-town sport.
Lombardi, a New Yorker originally out of Sheepshead Bay, St. Francis Prep and Fordham before coaching at St. Cecilia’s in Englewood, N.J., at Army under Red Blaik and the Giants’ offense for five seasons (including the 1956 championship team), gilded Green Bay with a major league mystique.

Montana Governor Foments REAL ID Rebellion

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Ryan Singel:

Montana governor Brian Schweitzer (D) declared independence Friday from federal identification rules and called on governors of 17 other states to join him in forcing a showdown with the federal government which says it will not accept the driver’s licenses of rebel states’ citizens starting May 11.
If that showdown comes to pass, a resident of a non-complying state could not use a driver’s license to enter a federal courthouse or a Social Security Administration building nor could he board a plane without undergoing a pat-down search, possibly creating massive backlogs at the nation’s airports and almost certainly leading to a flurry of federal lawsuits.
States have until May 11 to request extensions to the Real ID rules that were released last Friday. They requires states to make all current identification holders under the age of 50 to apply again with certified birth and marriage certificates. The rules also standardize license formats, require states to interlink their DMV databases and require DMV employee to undergo background checks.
Extensions push back the 2008 deadline for compliance as far as out 2014 if states apply and promise to start work on making the necessary changes, which will cost cash-strapped states billions with only a pittance in federal funding to offset the costs.

Both of our Senators: Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl supported REAL ID.

How Brazil outfarmed the American farmer

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Susanna Hecht & Charles Mann:

Phil Corzine is not abandoning Illinois. A longtime soybean farmer in Assumption, a small town east of Springfield, he is firmly loyal to his state – he once ran the Illinois Soybean Checkoff Board, a program in which Illinois farmers promote Illinois soybeans. But the 1,300 acres Corzine planted in 2007 are not in Illinois, or even in the Midwest. They’re in central Brazil, in the state of Tocantins, part of a big swath of soy-producing lands that stretch between the Andes and the Atlantic forest and from northern Argentina to the southern flanks of the Amazon basin. Soylandia, as this immense region might be called, is almost entirely unknown to Americans. But it may well be the future of one of the world’s most important industries: grain agriculture.
Mainly out of curiosity, Corzine visited Brazil in 1998. Like most U.S. soy producers, he’d noted Brazil’s rapid rise in the trade – from amateur to global power in the space of a couple of decades. Its scale of operations, however, stunned him. A big farm in Illinois may cover 3,000 acres; spreads in Soylandia are routinely ten times bigger. Conditions there were primitive, Corzine thought, but Soylandia was going to expand in a way that was no longer possible in the U.S. With three partners he raised $1.3 million from more than 90 investors, mostly Midwestern farmers. In Illinois, he says, that kind of money “can’t even buy the equipment, let alone the land.” In Brazil it was enough for Corzine’s group to acquire 3,500 acres in 2004. Since then, the land has almost doubled in value as other American investors clamored to get into Brazilian soy. This year Corzine, now 49, raised another $400,000. “We feel like what’s going on is long-term positive,” he says with Midwestern understatement.

Free LAX Shuttle to In-N-Out Burgers

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Neil Woodburn:

Stuck at LAX for a few hours on a layover and hankering for one of the best burgers in all of California? Well, you’re in luck.
There’s an In-N-Out Burger just around the corner from the airport, and Gadling knows a little trick to get you there for free.
An In-N-Out is located on nearby Sepulveda Boulevard right next to the Parking Spot–a parking structure that conveniently provides free shuttle service. All you have to do is wait under the red “Hotel and Courtesy Shuttle” sign outside of any airport terminal, and when the yellow and black polka-dotted Parking Spot shuttle swings by, jump on board. It will take you literally next door to In-N-Out. Follow your nose through the back door, across the parking lot, and right inside where you need to order a double-double and fries to enjoy the best layover of your life.
There are a few things to be very careful about, however.

In-n-out is, in some ways, the Culvers of California.

Credit Squeeze: The Press Meets the Wrench

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Suddent Debt:

The NY Times today has an excellent article that starts: Ben Bernanke, meet Gary Crittenden. While you’re easing credit, he is tightening it.” In two brief sentences the writer (Floyd Norris) speaks volumes: Gary Crittenden is Citigroup’s CFO, who just told analysts the largest bank in the US is reducing consumer lending and raising interest rates. Asked whether credit card lending was an area where Citi might want to “pull back or increase pricing,” he responded, “All of the above.” Mortgage lending is also being cut.
That’s what a credit crunch looks like, in the ground: lenders working to repair damaged balance sheets end up throwing monkey wrenches into the Fed’s “printing press”. And that’s also how economies slide to the bottom of a liquidity trap, staring in frustration at a useless ZIRP .

The Dealer Made Me Do It

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Steve Finlay:

First off, I’m not excusing auto dealers. Or lenders.
They have a moral and business responsibility to try to stop their customers from doing something stupid, such as buying a vehicle with a sticker price that will stick them with an oppressive debt.
But customers have responsibilities, too. It is their purchase, their money and their car payments. It is up to them, more than anyone else, to know their financial limitations and not cross them.
Yet, so many consumers today buy too much vehicle. Then, when the financial squeeze becomes eye-popping, they look for someone to blame. The dealership and lender make nice targets. Seldom do the debt-ridden blame themselves.
I pondered that while reading a Los Angeles Times article headlined, “New Cars That Are Fully Loaded – With Debt.”
The story tells how some Americans of average means roll over an existing loan on an expensive vehicle in order to get another expensive vehicle. They end up with two loans in one, when they couldn’t afford one.

From the LA Times article:

Americans haven’t just been taking out risky mortgages for homes in the last few years; they’ve also been signing larger automobile loans for significantly longer terms than they used to.
As a result, people are slipping into a perpetual cycle of automobile debt that experts think could lead to a new credit crunch extending from dealerships to driveways and all the way to Wall Street.

GPS Liability?

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Adena Schutzberg:

In early January accident, a California computer technician turned his rental car onto some train tracks in New York per the directions of his sat nav system. The car became stuck and he had to abandon it before an oncoming train hit it. There were no injuries, but there were significant delays in travel. “The rental car driver was issued a summons and is being held liable for the damage to the train and track.”
That leads a real live lawyer, Eric J. Sinrod, writing at c|net to examine the potential of a driver to point to the GPS manufacturer as being at fault. The article points out:

A History of the Packers vs. Giants

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Bill Pennington:

It was the day before New Year’s Eve, and New Yorkers were leaving the city in droves. Not to escape Times Square celebrations, but to watch the N.F.L. championship game.
Roughly 45 years ago, on Dec. 30, 1962, the Yankee Stadium championship rematch between the Giants and the Green Bay Packers was blacked out on local television sets. Enterprising fans fled to southern New Jersey, searching for the broadcast from Philadelphia, or to the north to receive the signal from Hartford.
Those who succeeded watched a pivotal piece of American sports history. The N.F.L. might have first grabbed the public’s attention in the late 1950s, but it needed celebrity, personality and recurring characters for its Sunday gridiron theater.
The 1961 and 1962 N.F.L. championship games, each ending with a Green Bay victory over the Giants, had it all. Born on those afternoons was pro football’s first televised dynasty with Vince Lombardi as king, Paul Hornung as prince and Bart Starr as trusted knight. And although the Giants were twice defeated, by 37-0 in 1961 and by 16-7 the next year, they were the franchise that brought an eminence to the clashes. The Giants were established N.F.L. royalty, having played for the championship three times in the previous five years. They would play for it again in 1963.

On Sears & Lands End: Retailer’s Profit Warning Signals a Persistent Slide

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Gary McWilliams:

Sears Holdings Corp., the storied retailer that helped civilize the American frontier with its catalog sales and later defined the modern department store, is searching for a new compass.
The retailer yesterday warned results for its fiscal fourth quarter and year would fall well below its expectations, continuing a sharp slide in sales and profit. Even during the best two months of the year, sales at stores open at least a year fell 3.5% compared with a year ago, the company said. Shares tumbled 5% to a more than two-year low, down $4.79 to $91.38 on the Nasdaq. The stock is off 49% in the past year.
But its record in acquisitions has been dismal. In 2002, it paid $3 billion for mail-order firm Lands’ End, a business that has declined since the deal.

Lands End is based in nearby Dodgeville. The post Sears acquisition of Lands End is a story waiting to be told.