In This Issue:

• Surving the Market Recovery: Part III - Evolving Into a Stronger Species
• Marketing Strategy for IP Companies: Part II - The Positioning Dilemma
• Tobak's Great Wine for Techies:

Surving the Market Recovery
Part III - Evolving Into a Stronger Species

In the first two parts of Surviving the Market Recovery, we concluded that many companies may have survived the downturn, only to falter during the hyper-competitive recovery.  We identified some of the warning signs for those companies and survival strategies based on superior marketing practices.  In this final part of the series, we’re going to discuss a critical success factor for companies in highly competitive markets like the one we’re in now: strategic planning.

Wait a minute, I know what you’re thinking.  You’re imagining months of your executive team’s precious time and hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees to put an intricate and garish plan together that nobody will ever look at again.  I’ve heard tales of nightmarish processes like that, and, just so we’re clear, what I’m talking about isn’t that.  I’m talking about a simple, analytical process that goes hand-in-hand with your annual operating plan (AOP) process.  And while an AOP sets and tracks performance to annual operating goals, an annual strategic plan (ASP) sets and tracks performance to the company’s long-term strategic goals.  It’s still an annual plan, but tracks progress toward longer-term goals.  I like to think of a strategic plan as a company’s “trajectory” as it progresses over a longer time horizon than operating plans typically comprehend.   

Before we get into how it works, I’m sure you have questions like, “Okay, so maybe it’s not a big process, but why should I waste any of my management team’s time doing this?  I mean, what’s the goal and what happens if we don’t do it?  How does it increase sales, profits and shareholder value?” 

A Critical Success Factor for All Great Companies

All good questions.  Look at it this way.  You can design and build a house.  In fact, it can even be a great, expensive house, with all the modern features a house should have.  And you can make it dynamic, so as you live in it you can populate each room with furniture, art and features that reflect your lifestyle.  But what if you didn’t take the external environment into account?  An earthquake can come along and your beautiful house can be critically damaged.  Or the internal environment can change.  A baby can come along and you suddenly realize that, as the baby grows up, you want the child to have friends close by to play with.  So you decide you need to move the house out of the country – where all the earthquakes are – to a residential street in a nice, safe neighborhood.  And perhaps you now need to furnish the house differently, as well.  

As you can see, the new baby has the potential to change things pretty dramatically, while the earthquake can have a catastrophic effect.  Now let’s come back from our home analogy to the business world.  It’s a big, dynamic, highly competitive market out there and companies are a pretty dynamic place, too.  Things change and the possibilities are endless.  Obviously, you’re better off with knowledge or anticipation of internal or external strategic influences, and sooner is better than later.  A strategic planning process forces your management team to spend dedicated time away from day-to-day operations and thinking about strategic influences, opportunities and threats.  All great companies know about this.  They all know that having some kind of strategic planning process is a critical success factor.

Speaking of great companies, I once heard that Intel, under Andy Grove, looked at their company and business as a castle.  Potential incursions on the castle were strategic threats and strategies were “erected” as barriers to avoid or eliminate those threats.  This, of course, is the methodology of a leader who wants to stay in the lead.  A newcomer to the market – who is more interested in opportunities than threats at this point in the company’s lifecycle – would probably use a different metaphor.  Since each company needs a different process, I recommend a methodology that’s scalable and adaptable.  But remember, while there are many approaches that work, there are many more ways to fail. 

Going From Point A to Point B – What Could Be Easier?

To avoid the myriad of pitfalls, it helps a lot to put strategic planning in a context that’s simple and easy to understand.  I like to look at things very simplistically, and although these concepts may seem obvious, there’s always a catch.  The devil’s in the details, so implementation and execution are critical, as with most things.  In a nutshell, there are five key ingredients for any successful strategic planning process:

• An objective snapshot of where your company stands today, relative to employees, customers and the marketplace – Point A or “reality”
• A vision or strategic goal to define where your company is heading – Point B or “vision”
• A strategic plan for getting from Point A to Point B
• The commitment and goal alignment among the management team to ensure the company executes effectively on a single trajectory
•  A process for affecting and driving change throughout the organization, unless you already have a culture that embraces change
  
  

As for the process itself, as I said, there are many approaches that work.  If your company is doing this for the first time, there are six distinct steps you should consider as part of the overall process:   

Step 1: Reality Audit.  Source the management team, employees, customers and analysts to develop a snapshot of the current state of the company.  This is Point A, which also serves as a metrics baseline.

Step 2: Analysis and Assessment.  Analyze audit data to assess the company's situation and develop an effective SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis.  Determine the critical issues affecting the company's ability to meet its strategic business goals.

Step 3: Corporate Identity.  Develop consensus among the executive management team on the company's vision, strategy, value proposition and high-level positioning. This is Point B.

Step 4: Strategic Planning.  Set strategic goals and develop specific strategies and plans designed to overcome issues identified in Step 2 and enable the company's transition from Point A to Point B.

Step 5: Change Management.  Align the goals of the executive management team and develop specific strategies to drive those goals throughout the organization and affect change.

Step 6: Execution.  Integrate strategic plans with operating plans and execute to achieve both strategic and operational goals and success metrics.

When your company has gone through this process once, the process for subsequent years is pretty obvious; you essentially test your current plan and assumptions, with respect to changes in internal and external strategic factors, to ensure you’re on the right strategic trajectory.  If you think conditions have changed, then it’s time to do another audit.  If you think your strategic vision may no longer be valid, then you should update Step 3.  If the change is not taking hold throughout the company, then you may need to take a look at Step 5 again.  And so on.   

As with any critical process, strategic planning has many pitfalls and failure modes.  Remember that a plan is just a blueprint for getting from Point A to Point B.  It’s impossible to plan accurately without an objective snapshot of the company’s existing situation, especially in terms of customer perception of the company and its products.  Likewise, no plan is effective unless the entire management team is aligned to achieve a common strategic goal.  And strategic plans and goals must go hand-in-hand with operational plans and goals – they should complement and never contradict each other.   I’ve even seen companies do all that right, but fail to actually affect change because the company’s culture resisted change.  You know, it’s always something. 

The final word: strategic planning is an analytical and systematic process.  If you approach it that way and integrate it into your company’s processes, your company will have a much greater chance of meeting its strategic and operational goals on a sustained, long-term basis.     

For more detailed information on the strategic planning process described above and the strategic principles that support it, just click on these text links.

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Invisor Insights – a monthly letter – provides direct perspective and analysis on issues critical to high-tech industry leaders.

Coming in the March issue of Invisor Insights:

• Success Strategies for Startups: Part I - Getting Customer Traction
• Marketing for IP Companies: Part III - The Art and Science of Positioning Strategy 
• Tobak's Great Wine for Techies: Focus on New World Pinot Noirs, How to Serve Wine: Temperature, Breathing and Glasses

Marketing Strategy for IP Companies
Part II - The Positioning Dilemma

In the first part of this series, we found that – with respect to IP companies – there appears to be relatively no correlation between shareholder value and brand identification on customer products.  While this is true, the natural extension – that building a strong, positive brand is irrelevant to IP companies – is not.  Au contraire, mon ami, nothing could be further from the truth.  In this installment we’re going to tackle a challenging issue unique to IP companies: positioning and building a strong, positive brand image when 1) the value of the technology is essentially invisible – locked away inside of a chip or an end-user product, or 2) the company’s involved in litigation with brand name customers and looking like a leach on high-tech society.  I call this “The Positioning Dilemma.”

At this point you should be asking some very pointed questions, like “Why is all this even relevant?  Last month you said that IP companies didn’t need to brand their technology on their customer’s products.  Then you said that all they had to do was issue a press release and everybody would know what’s up.  So what’s the problem?”  The problem is that there’s a great deal of confusion and misperception associated with IP companies, specifically in terms of 1) the licensing business model, 2) the value of “ingredient” technology, and 3) the role of litigation in defending their intellectual property.  Confusion resulting from a combination of these factors can damage a company’s brand image and have a dramatic effect on two of the most important things to any business: customer trust and shareholder value.  Here’s why.

Perception is Reality

The first issue is the simple fact that the entire IP concept is confusing to many people.  Let’s face it; our world revolves around market capitalism.  I pay somebody and receive a product in return.  On the other hand, most people deal with business relationships similar to the IP model all the time, but they just don’t know it.  Buying software, paying for access to the internet, leasing a car, even mortgaging a house, are all similar concepts to licensing intellectual property.  They’re all paying for access to a product for a period of time, but the product doesn’t actually change hands until some time in the future or not at all, depending on the terms of the arrangement. 

In addition to confusion over the business model, IP companies typically license an “ingredient” technology that’s inside of a more discrete and identifiable product.  And how that technology relates to the end-product you actually buy – and therefore its value – is not always clear.  Take Qualcomm for example.  How many people actually understand the significance of CDMA technology?  They just want to call their spouse to remind them to pick up bread on the way home.  Sure, Qualcomm makes chipsets, but the primary value of their innovation is the IP behind CDMA.  So the value of intellectual property is often unclear – not only to end-users, but even to OEM customers, as well.    

Then there’s litigation.  IP companies often find themselves in a situation where they must litigate in order to obtain fair compensation for the technology they’ve developed.   But lots of folks – including potential and existing customers – don’t see it that way.  They think that IP companies are just scientists and lawyers: the scientists write patent disclosures and the lawyers sue everyone who steps on the patents after they’re issued.  To make matters worse, more often than not, when an IP company sues another company, there are tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue at stake.  That’s a lot of revenue for a little IP company with a few hundred employees.  With litigation being such a huge swing factor in the company’s business, it’s no wonder that’s all investors want to talk about.  Understanding the breakthrough technology the company actually develops and the product capabilities they enable get lost in the litigation media hype.   

Don’t You Trust Me?

As I said earlier, the cumulative effect of these three factors results in confusion and misperception that impacts customer trust and shareholder value.  First let’s talk about customer trust. When one company has fundamental intellectual property that’s critical to a second company’s products, it tends to make the second company nervous.  What’s unusual about this is that the second company is a typical customer of an IP company.  As a result, customers and potential customers of IP companies find themselves in the unusual position where their “IP vendor” – typically a much smaller company – has significant leverage over the core technology inside their product.  This upside-down customer/vendor relationship raises a number of trust-related questions in the customer’s mind: Will the much smaller company – that’s holding all the cards – be around to support me?  Will the IP company sue me over some cards it has yet to reveal?  Am I getting a good value for the IP when there’s little or no competition for the technology?   As you can see, trust is a big issue, making customer relationships tenuous at best.  

Then there’s shareholder value.  Perception issues can have a dramatic effect on market valuation.  The two most common misperceptions about IP companies are 1) that their IP is much narrower than it actually is, and 2) that they’re litigious … like the “scientists and lawyers” thing I mentioned earlier.  In addition to customer trust, both of these misperceptions can have a significant impact on market valuations.  Here are some examples of how that works.

The difference in market valuation between Rambus the “RDRAM company” and the Rambus that has fundamental intellectual property behind all synchronous DRAM – which includes SDRAM, DDR and RDRAM – is at least an order of magnitude.  But, until recently, Rambus positioned themselves as the “RDRAM Company.”  As a result, the market had that impression, as well.  In addition, their “litigious” reputation hung over them, breeding customer distrust, when they were actually doing the right thing to protect and gain fair compensation for their primary product, their IP. 

Another example is SanDisk.  Intel invented Flash memory.  But it’s a little-known fact that SanDisk invented fundamental technology that enabled Flash memory to be compatible with existing storage file systems.  In other words, you could, for the first time, replace a disk drive with a solid-state Flash memory sub-system.  This enabled rewritable, removable solid-state storage for consumer applications to be interchangeable with each other and with PCs.  This invention helped to enable the explosive digital camera market, among others.  Today, about 90% of SanDisk’s revenue is from the sale of Flash chips and cards.  But the roughly 10% of revenue that comes from licensing their IP goes right to the bottom line, since there’s minimal expense associated with that business.  So if you were to compare SanDisk’s fundamentals with other Flash chip or card companies, SanDisk has a significant built-in gross profit advantage and their market valuation should reflect that.

Successful positioning and developing a positive brand identity are not only challenging but critical success factors for IP companies.  And although each company’s situation is unique, there are several pretty strategic tips I can offer that will help IP companies resolve or avoid perception issues, build a strong, positive brand, and as a result, build customer trust and improve shareholder value.

Solving the Positioning Dilemma

It’s all about the customer.  You think that being an IP company means your relationship with potential customers is different than for other companies.  Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s not.  Some customers don’t pay, some customers negotiate ruthlessly and some customers steal your technology and don’t pay for it.  That’s just the way it is.  Get over it.  They’re customers and you’re the vendor, which means that if you threaten them, they may very well not trust you again for many years.  Customers get to do that.  Regardless of the complexity of the relationship, never lose sight of the fact that your primary goal is still to win and maintain customers.  That’s always the way to build shareholder value, even for IP companies.

It’s also all about market share.  The same thing goes for market share.  Don’t lose sight of the fundamentals; if you’re not the market leader, you need to creatively segment your target market so you can credibly position yourself as a leader.  And if that market’s too small, then maybe you need to look carefully at the underlying assumptions you’ve made about your target market.  Just remember: market leaders have higher margins and that goes double for IP companies, since their technology can often be positioned as a defacto standard or a critical market enabler.  Going back to the first point, don’t forget to listen to your customers.  That’s why customer relationships are so important; they’re what keep you in the innovation loop and provide market visibility.  If they don’t want what you have, then you’re probably on the wrong track.

Make sure you have more friends than enemies.  Even though you’re an IP company with breakthrough, enabling technology, you still need customers, partners and infrastructure to support your technology.  And if you’re going to sue one or two companies, make sure you build an ecosystem of loyal customers, partners, infrastructure suppliers, analysts, the media and others to support your war effort.  Pick your enemies and battles carefully and don’t fight on more than one front at a time, if you can help it.  Settle in and take your time.  Building a new market and driving a defacto standard takes time and patience, and so does litigation, for that matter.  Remember, time is on your side … patents last a long time.

Develop a clear and compelling value proposition.  Techies love to throw around acronyms like CDMA, CSP, RDRAM and RISC.  They are also irrationally in love with factors like signal integrity, bandwidth, performance, speed, power, cost and die-size.  Lastly, they’re masters of overused words like innovation, technology, solution, and system.  I’ve got news for you: everyone’s got acronyms and everyone’s technology is faster, cheaper and lower-power.  You need to determine the underlying, fundamental strengths of your company and its technology that solve critical customer and market problems.  That’s called your value proposition.  That’s what customers and investors respond to.  And find a way to put it in terms that at least all insiders can understand.  If nobody understands what it is you really do to benefit your customers and the industry, then it’s that much easier to just brand you as a bunch of scientists and lawyers.       

These are high level concepts, to be sure, but they’re fundamental to getting you on the right track to a strong, positive brand identity.  On the other hand, there’s a lot more to solving The Positioning Dilemma than meets the eye.  Positioning strategy is both an art and a science, and there are a myriad of common pitfalls to avoid.  Tune in for the next installment of Marketing Strategies for IP Companies, coming in April.   

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Tobak's Great Wine for Techies

Thanks to everyone for the great feedback from the first column. This month we’re going to discuss Italian reds, everything you need to know about aging wines, and our monthly wine picks will focus on US whites.   

Understanding Italian Reds

Some of the most exciting, innovative and versatile red wines in the world come from Italy, so understanding Italian wines is absolutely worth the effort.  However, the varietals are, in many cases, unique, so if you think of the red wine universe as Cabernet with some Merlot thrown in for variety, you may find this a little challenging. 

Italy’s pretty fragmented so we’re just going to discuss what I think are the more common and interesting varietals and regions, with the major focus on reds.  Wines produced in the Chianti and Chianti Classico regions principally use the Sangiovese grape, the most widely planted in Italy and an incredibly versatile grape that pairs well with a broad variety of foods.  In these and other regions of Tuscany a relatively new style of wine – known as Super Tuscans – has evolved where Sangiovese, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot are blended, typically in pairs, to create some of the greatest wines in the world. 

Brunello di Montalcino wines, or Brunello for short, are also made entirely of the Sangiovese grape.  Barolo, another famous region, uses only Nebbiolo grapes, as do the Barbaresco and Gattinara regions.  Barbera is an oddity in that the name of the region is the same as the name of the grape used in making the wine.  Go figure.  Another widely planted grape is Dolcetto, and the Valpolicella region also produces some good wines.  The most common and/or interesting white grapes planted in Italy are Pinot Grigio, Moscato and Malvasia.

As a side note, California’s great contribution to the wine world is Zinfandel, although it is believed to be related to the Primitivo grape of southern Italy. 

Here are some of the larger, better known, leading producers of Italian reds that you’re likely to run into around town, although there are literally hundreds of smaller producers:

• Altare, Piedmont.  Barolo, Nebbiolo (Langhe), Barbera (Langhe).
• Antinori, Tuscany.  Super-Tuscans (Tignanello, Solaia, Guado  al Tasso), Chianti, Brunello; a favorite producer of mine.
• Aldo Conterno, Piedmont.  Barolo, Barbera.
• Banfi, Tuscany.  Brunello, super-Tuscan (Excelsus).
• Frescobaldi, Tuscany.  Brunello, super-Tuscan (Luce - with      Mondavi, Lamaione), Chianti.
• Gaja, Piedmont.  Barbaresco, Barolo.  Very expensive, perhaps prohibitively so.
• Isole E Olena, Tuscany.  Super-Tuscan (Cepparello), Chianti, Cabernet, Syrah (L’Eremo); underrated, well priced.
• Monsanto, Tuscany.  Chianti Classico Riserva.
• Ornellaia, Tuscany.  Super-Tuscans (Ornellaia, Masseto).
• Ruffino, Tuscany.  Chianti Classico Riserva Ducale Oro, super-Tuscans (Il Pareto, Cabreo Il Borgo, Nero del Tondo).
• Sandrone, Piedmont.  Barolo, Dolcetto.
• Scavino, Piedmont.  Barolo, Barbera.

The Ins and Outs of Aging Wines

As you know, wine is produced from grapes as a result of fermentation – a chemical process that converts the sugar in grapes to alcohol, among other things.  There are also a number of additional techniques a winemaker may use in making wine, such as aging the wine in oak barrels to impart distinct flavors to the wine.  Why am I telling you all this?  Because, chemical processes change the character of wine and, here’s the key point: those processes do not stop when the wine’s sealed in the bottle.  Although the glass is inert, everything else in the bottle is active.  I’m sure you know the old adage about wine turning to vinegar, although that only happens on broad exposure to air over a period of time. 

The bottom line is that wine changes character over time, even in the bottle.  And the nature of that change is a result of many factors and differs for every wine.  Tannins that make wines rough around the edges in their youth allow them to age gracefully.  Some wines that are very fruity in their youth will develop complexity and balance over time.  Still others will lose their distinct character and become flat if aged too long.           

The Tobak golden rule of aging wine:  The only crime greater than drinking a great wine before its time is drinking it after its time.  If you understand and remember this, you’ll do okay.  So age wine a reasonable amount of time and do it properly, but don’t overdo it.  Here are some guidelines for storage and aging:

•  Store wine in a cool, dark place and keep it still.  If temperatures fluctuate a bit, don’t panic.  That’s not necessarily a problem, since fluctuations in ambient air temperature take time to propagate through liquid. 
• Lay wine bottles on their side.  If the temperature is not likely to be cool or constant, keep the bottles in Styrofoam or at least in the cardboard boxes they come in.  That will help insulate the wine.
• If you don’t have a cellar, storage on the floor of an interior closet, under a staircase, or under the house are pretty good alternatives.  Anything that will help keep the wine cool, still and away from light and temperature gradients will do fine.
• If wine is stored at a warmer temperature than the mid-50 degree range, it will age more quickly, so take that into account when determining if a wine has aged long enough.
• In general, new world wines are made to drink young these days.  Old world wines are getting there, more and more every year. 

As for aging specific varietals, you can use the guidelines below as a broad rule of thumb.  Resources in this column and any good wine book will provide more specific – and accurate – guidance, I’m sure.  These are average aging times – from the year on the bottle – for varietals to be at their best, but due to regional variations, I lean towards drinking them younger so you don’t violate the golden rule.  In general, old world wines mature later than new world wines of the same varietal.  Just remember, every wine is different.  Some Rhone reds, Bordeaux, Cabernets and German Rieslings can live for decades:

American
Cabernet Sauvignon: 4 to 6 years
Merlot: 3 to 4 years
Pinot Noir: 2 to 4 years (drink Oregon Pinots on the young side)
Syrah and Petite Sirah: 6 to 8 years
Zinfandel: 3 to 5 years
Sangiovese: 2 to 4 years
Chardonnay: 2 to 4 years
Riesling: 2 to 5 years
Other whites: 1 to 3 years
Rosé: 1 to 2 years

French
Bordeaux Red: 8 to 10 years
Bordeaux White: 2 to 4 years
Burgundy Red:  6 to 8 years
Burgundy White: 3 to 5 years
Rhone Red: 6 to 8 years
Rhone White: 1 to 3 years

Italian
Chianti: 3 to 6 years
Barolo:  4 to 8 years
Brunello: 5 to 10 years
Barbera: 3 to 6 years

Well that covers the basics of aging wine. In subsequent issues we’ll look at other important issues including: how to and how long to let wine breath or come into contact with air before drinking, temperature to enjoy wine at and choosing the best type of drinking glass.  Cheers!

Tobak’s Monthly Picks

Wines (all US whites, this time)

Kistler Chardonnay.  Steven Kistler arguably makes the best Chardonnays in America.  He trained under Paul Draper of Ridge.  There are numerous vineyard designations, with the best being: Kistler vineyard, Cuvee Cathleen, Dutton, Durrell, McCrea, Vine Hill and Hyde.  All are excellent, distinctive and have great aging potential.  I would age them for 2-3 years.  If you can get on their mailing list, you can get the Chard’s in the $60s range.  Otherwise, you’ll pay $80 to $120 retail.  If you see it on a restaurant wine list, you’ve got to go for it once.   

Matanzas Creek Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc.  From the Sonoma Valley.  Excellent Chard at around $20 and the best Sauvignon Blanc in the US at $17.     

Rochioli Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc.  From the Russian River Valley in Sonoma County.  Excellent Chard in the $30s and Sauvignon Blanc in the $20s, if you can find it.  There are also vineyard designated Chard’s that are expensive and hard to find. 

Merryvale Chardonnays.  From Napa Valley.  Silhouette and Dutton Ranch are great in the $30 to $40 range, Starmont is quite good for a lot less. 

Archery Summit Vireton.  A great Pinot Grigio with some Chard blended in.  Excellent with white-sauced pasta.  Typically costs around $20 but I’ve seen it in the teens at The Wine Club.  Etude also makes a great Pinot Gris for $20. 

Calera Viognier.  The best Viognier in America, but priced like it, too … at $33, recently up from $30.  Don’t try to find it for less, it can’t be done.  I’ve tried.

Lazy Creek Gewurztraminer.  From Philo in the Anderson Valley.  Josh Chandler makes the best Gewuzt in the US and he’s a great guy, too.  Just switched to dry farming with the most recent vintage, so yields are down and prices are up.  The best with spicy Asian food … $s in the upper teens.   

Bonny Doon Rieslings.  From Bonny Doon (where else?).  Randal Grahm makes a host of innovative, low-cost whites and I love most of them (and the prices!).  Try The Heart Riesling, Critique of Riesling from WA state, but don’t miss the Pinot Grigio and Malvasia Bianca.  All priced in the low-to-mid teens.  There are others, but skip the Big House white and Pacific Rim Riesling.    

Winery

Ferrari Carano Winery, Healdsburg, Sonoma County.  Where do I begin with these folks?  You have to visit the winery … the gardens are incredible so bring your camera.  Another reason to visit the winery is to taste and get your hands on some of their rare, vineyard-designated wines, mostly brand-named TreMonte and only available at the winery.  I especially liked the Syrah and Tre Terre Chard.  As for what’s available broadly, they make an excellent chardonnay, chardonnay reserve, merlot, Tresor – a reserve meritage blend, Fume Blanc Reserve (same as Sauvignon Blanc) and my favorite, a super-Tuscan-style red named Siena – a blend of Sangiovese, Cabernet and Merlot.  This is one of the most innovative wineries in California.  Do not go to Sonoma without seeing these folks.
www.ferrari-carano.com 

Merchant

The Wine Club.  Great wines at consistently low prices.  In addition to US, great selection of French and Italian wines.  It’s the best brick-and-mortar wine-shopping in the San Jose area, but limited on-line shopping.  Also has wine tasting on an honor basis with regional theme tasting on some weekends.   Also the best prices on Reidel stemware which I highly recommend.   www.thewineclub.com

Resources

The World Atlas of Wine, Hugh Johnson, Simon & Schuster (I have the fourth edition, printed in 1994, but there may be a new one out by now).

This book’s only for the serious-minded folks who really want to understand this stuff.  It’s a little big and scary, but the introduction is extraordinary, providing great background and history explaining the basics and why the wine world is the way it is.  The rest of the book, which discusses each wine-growing region of the world individually, can be tackled one region at a time.  My advice is to take it slow.  Read, travel, taste, taste some more … hell, taste a lot! 

Santa Cruz Mountains Winegrowers’ Association.   Great, local winegrowers.  Check out their passport club events …there’s nothing like visiting these small wineries once a quarter and getting special treatment.  My favorites that you can only visit on Passport days are Cinnabar, Ahlgren and Page Mill Vineyards.  
www.scmwa.com

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Steve Tobak
Partner, Invisor Consulting
Steve Tobak is a twenty-three year veteran of the tech industry and a founding partner of Invisor Consulting. His commentary is direct and he appreciates your equally direct feedback. He can be reached at stobak@invisor.net.

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