A dash of the old, a dash of the new – that’s the theme of this year’s Top 100 Wines.
The Chronicle Wine section tastes wine from all over the world, but our Top 100 Wines are a showcase for the most compelling winemaking on the West Coast. We tasted thousands of wines this past year from California, Washington and Oregon. We recommended hundreds. You may recognize some of the lucky 100 from our weekly Wine Selections, but instead of simply choosing the best of what our panels tasted, we sought out a balance between quality, price and innovation – particularly innovation. So while many of our top contenders are familiar names, this year we also kept an eye out for new faces, new locales and new types of wine.
Consider, for example, the Pinot Noir made by Stewart Johnson of Kendric Vineyards in San Anselmo. A few years ago, uttering “Marin County Pinot Noir” would have prompted the same stare as “San Francisco suntan.” Now Marin has proven its potential as a wine region. (No such luck on the San Francisco suntan part.)
Snowblower Zeitgeist, or the Best Urban Snowblower
I’ve manually moved snow for the past 14 years – my entire post UW time in Madison. Always thinking that the act was a bit of exercise until a neighbor mentioned his back difficulties and said “it’s not worth it”.
Last spring’s deluge, a particularly wet and heavy snowstorm, was the impetus to turn over the shovel, fire up my browser and shop for a snowblower.
My first stop was Ariens’ website. Ariens is a classic family owned Wisconsin based firm that manufactures snowblowers and lawn mowers.
Most serious snowblowers, defined as two stage models from the likes of Ariens, John Deere, Honda and Toro among many others are at least 24″ wide (Toro has a 22″ model). That width is a problem for small garages like mine.
Ariens offered a useful 20″ model that featured a multiple speed transmission – perfect for a variety of snow conditions and available at a reasonable price. Conveniently, their website offers online ordering which made it simple for me to enter a bit of information and a few days later the snowblower arrived at my home. Ariens customer service was great, as was their local dealer – Middleton Power Center.
About the snowblower zeitgeist. The owner of a working, somewhat powerful snowblower on a day like today (crunchy, heavy snow) quickly has the opportunity to converse with the neighbors. Typical conversations include:
- “Can I pay you to clear my driveway (no, if I have enough gas and time, I’ll be happy to)
- “My snowblower won’t start.”
- “I attempted to purchase a snowblower yesterday, but just before I said that I’ll take the last one, someone else grabbed it.”
- or, Chaplin moments when a neighbor is somberly pondering the large, heavy pile of snow recently deposited by the City plow in his driveway as I’m clearing another neighbor’s walks and driveway.
There you have it. Living in a cold climate subject to snow, we should never turn away from neighborhood social opportunities. Buy a (two-stage) snowblower.
I would be remiss if I did not point out the powerful prose at work marketing such machines. Arien’s description of their model 624E:
624E Compact
After 9 months of hibernation, this compact monster, has an appetite for the cold and crystallized.
When the white and fluffy flakes begin to fall; the corners of the 24” clearing width begin to salivate. The 120 volt electric start quickly awakens the 6HP Snow King® OHV Engine. You fear nothing! Snow fears this trusted Sno-Thro® midsized monster. Keep the snow afraid and out of your way.
A Glimpse of Pottersville
THE 1946 MOVIE IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE has become a holiday favorite for many Americans. The heart-rending story of George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart), who in his hour of despair is vouchsafed a glimpse of what the world would be like if he’d never been born, holds great meaning for many Americans. So does the drama played out between George and his father, Peter, and their professional nemesis, rich old banker Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore), which provides a vivid look at the dramatic changes that had taken place in American finance in the years leading up to the time the movie was made.
The recent problems in the mortgage market bring the story and its characters to life once again. The Baileys and Old Man Potter disagreed about a number of things, but principally about the credit-worthiness of what Potter calls “the riff-raff,” the average citizens in their home town of Bedford Falls. The Baileys believe they are credit-worthy, and Potter generally does not.
Potter remembers the recent past, when lenders made the rules, insisting on repayment in gold coin or its equivalent, on big down payments and short terms. Most important for middle-class folks, Potter sees residential real estate as illiquid, mediocre collateral. George and Peter Bailey and their Building & Loan envision a future of suburban development, of small down payments and decades to pay. When George looks at the world had he never been born — and sees a vacant field instead of the Bailey Park housing development financed by the Bailey Building & Loan — he is looking at what would have been Pottersville.
A Company is the Sum of its People
Compound this with a very astute tweet by my friend Chris Heuer (another budding author) a couple of weeks back:
Companies don’t really have conversations with customers, their employees do. People talking to people is real, beyond marketing and spin… 10:56 AM November 01, 2007
“The” way vs “a” way (Japan v China dept)
James Fallows offers up an interesting contrast between Japan and China.
Ministers of Silly Walks
Put yourself at Bernanke’s shoes; better yet, get Paulson’s shoes too and combine them: wear Ben’s shoe on the left and Hank’s on the right. The goal is to try and walk a straight and narrow a line for the economy, without embarrassing yourself. I submit that this is, in fact, impossible.
On the one foot, the Fed is getting screamed at to lower interest rates by at least another 200-250 basis points: PIMCO, Greenspan, The Conference Board, every bank and broker in town and abroad – they all demand and expect cheaper money for a variety of reasons, all immediately and extremely mercenary. The bond fund managers are salivating at the potential of capital gains from short and medium treasurys, the banks and brokers need the massive cash bailout to stanch the bloodletting from their toxic paper and real estate portfolios, the businessmen need the consumer to keep spending and Greenspan wishes above all to remain relevant – even in retirement.
Doonesbury on Celine
Stuck listening to Celine Dion over and over and over on a long roadtrip, I understand this Doonesbury strip.
An Interview with Sam Zell
In April, 2005, Sam Zell travelled to Abu Dhabi to meet Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. Zell is best known as a real-estate magnate, whose reputation has been enhanced by the sale, last February, for thirty-nine billion dollars, of Equity Office Properties Trust, the largest collection of office buildings in the country. Zell, who is sixty-six, delights in claiming that at the time the sale—to Blackstone, the private-equity firm—was “the largest single transaction that has ever been done.” But for decades his appetite for economic opportunity has lured him beyond real estate into investments in oil and gas, barges, insurance, wineries, cruise ships, department stores, waste-to-energy power projects, and radio stations. In April, he signed an $8.2-billion deal that would effectively give him control of Tribune Company, the giant media conglomerate, whose assets include the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. For about a dozen years, he has also invested aggressively abroad, most recently in the Middle East. He spends about twelve hundred hours a year on his plane—the equivalent of flying from New York to London every few days. “I want to see everybody in their habitat,” he told me, in a low, rasping voice. “When these people see me come halfway around the world to meet them and spend time with them, it creates a level of confidence that translates into other things”—by which he means, he says, “successful business.”
Zell has made much of his fortune by identifying opportunity where others see only trouble. He says that he is constantly trying to “shut out the noise” of conventional wisdom, because, although it may not always be wrong, it is rarely profitable. In the mid-seventies, he bought about three billion dollars’ worth of distressed real estate in cities across the country for “a dollar down and a hope certificate.” He made hundreds of millions of dollars. In 1978, he published an article about his exploits in Real Estate Review, which he titled “The Grave Dancer” (“I was dancing on the skeletons of other people’s mistakes”), and this became his nickname. If Zell gains control of Tribune Company—the deal is expected to close before the end of the year, though obstacles remain—it will be the biggest distressed entity that he has ever acquired. In addition to the Chicago and Los Angeles daily newspapers, the company owns Newsday, six other dailies, and twenty-three television stations, as well as the Chicago Cubs. In part because of rapidly declining profits in the newspaper industry, Tribune’s revenues have been dropping for years. When Tribune’s directors put the company up for sale, in September, 2006, a number of prospective buyers examined its assets and walked away. By the time Zell made his offer, last March, his only competition was a less fully formed bid from the Los Angeles businessmen Ronald Burkle and Eli Broad.
Icy Rescue as Seas Claim a Cruise Ship
Graham Bowley & Andrew Revkin:
They were modern adventure travelers, following the doomed route of Sir Ernest Shackleton to the frozen ends of the earth. They paid $7,000 to $16,000 to cruise on a ship that had proudly plowed the Antarctic for 40 years.
But sometime early yesterday, the Explorer, fondly known in the maritime world as “the little red ship,” quietly struck ice.
There were the alarms, then the captain’s voice on the public address system calling the 100 passengers and the crew of about 50 to the lecture hall, according to passengers’ accounts on the radio and others relayed from rescuers and the tour operator.
In the lecture hall, they were told that water was creeping in through a fist-size hole punched into the ship’s starboard. As it flooded the grinding engine room, the power failed. The ship ceased responding.
“We all got a little nervous when the ship began to list sharply, and the lifeboats still hadn’t been lowered,” John Cartwright, a Canadian, told CBC radio.
Top 12 Areas for Technology Innovation through 2025
What will likely be the most important scientific and technological breakthroughs with significant commercial value and impacts on the lives of consumers out to 2025?
To begin to answer that question, S)T’s Technology Foresight program conducted a virtual, global focus group of experts in technology, innovation, and business strategy. The group included experts from the Association of Professional Futurists, Tekes, Duke University, Hasbro, Worldwatch, General Motors, Shell, Johnson Controls, and Oxford University, among others.
After consolidating input from the expert panel and analysis by Social Technologies’ futurists, what emerged was our list of top 12 areas for tech innovation through 2025:
Personalized medicine—With the initial mapping of the human genome, scientists are moving rapidly toward the following likely breakthroughs for gene-based products and services: