Meet Ms. Irene

 I like to jog and swim. Many mornings I am at work early jogging around the field or swimming in the pool for exercise.

I like to make myself up and collect all sorts of makeup.

I enjoy cooking a lot. Last year I helped the students in grade 3 cook spinach that they grew in the garden and I plan on doing a cooking ASA (After School Activity) this year.

Watching movies is one of the things I like to do at home.

Surfing on the internet, too.

I enjoy traveling and seeing new places.

During playtime, I like hanging out with kids and helping them.

I enjoy playing board games with my son.

I love cats and have a pet cat named Tiger. 


 

10 Fun Facts About Me!

Today was our first day with kids at IST and I am so excited to get the year going. It is a great bunch of children! Part of the process of meeting and getting to know one another is sharing information about our personal lives. That is why I am excited to participate in Blog Hoppin's Linky Party. Today is Meet the Teacher Day!

1) I live and work at an international school in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I love being an international school teacher. It allows me to work doing something I am passionate about while traveling the world and having amazing experiences. It also helps me meet wonderful people like my spectacular assistant Miss Irene. I couldn't do it without her!

2) I have an amazing, fun, supportive and all around wonderful partner who I get to work with at school too! We have lived in California together before moving overseas. We were in Malaysia first before Tanzania.

3) My favorite movie is The Wizard of Oz and when I am down, I watch it to cheer me up. Once a year, my mom, sister and I would have Wizard of Oz night. We would get in our jammies, cuddle under the blankets with the lights off and sing along. I know the whole movie by heart.

4) I am addicted to my blog roll and follow many bloggers. The blogs I mostly read daily are teacher blogs, but I love vegan cooking, fitness and book blogs too!

5) I used to teach students with disabilities and was an administrator for 3 years before moving overseas. Teaching general education is relatively new to me as a professional and I love it!

6) Cooking and baking are the perfect way for me to relax. I am willing to try new recipes and have a little cook book collection going. As much as I love to cook, I do not eat beef, pork, lamb or much dairy. My decision to not eat mammal came to me when I was 10 years old, but the smell of bacon still gets me.

 

7) I can't leave home without earrings on. I collect them like crazy and often my earrings match my outfit.

8) Running is the perfect way for me to get going after a long day at work. I have a few running buddies in Dar and try to keep motivated to run weekly, although I do have a nagging back injury that won't go away for good.

9) I like watching sports and have gotten pretty serious into watching football. My favorite team is Chelsea! Really though, I will watch any sporting event and have a great time.

10) I am in a book club and often read multiple books at once. My favorite genre is non-fiction, but really, I love all books. In fact, the best part of my day is reading aloud to my students. Roald Dahl is one of my favorite children's authors.


 

Wine Sales In the Last Half of 2013

The Best View of the Housing Bubble Pre-Crash

I recall giving a speech in August of 2008 to about 125 growers and winery owners. The speech was on the economy and I pulled up the slide above to demonstrate what I was seeing ahead of us. This was at a time just after Lehman Brothers collapsed where it had become apparent that we had crested a market high in housing and entering a bearish period. What the chart says in brief, is the historical average ratio of existing home price divided by median 4 family income is 2.8 times. That's what the red line is. With a ratio of 2.8 times, if a family made $100,000 a year, they could afford a $280,000 home. You can see what happened by late 2006 into 2007.

We are taught in school that in economics, measures have a tendency to revert to the mean. But talking heads everywhere were suggesting back then that what we were experiencing was a normal correction. Maybe, but the chart above along with some other indicators told me otherwise and I suggested we were about ready for a nasty correction and reversion back to the mean, and that correction was going to be huge and take years based on the slope of that line. 

If that weren't enough, I also suggested the growth rate in wine would fall to flat (zero percent) growth. I really thought there was a strong chance wine sales growth could go into negative territory for the first time in memory - but predicting that would get me permanently banned from the Economic Optimists Union so I fudged up a little on the forecast. I was actually being optimistic on what was ahead for us, but people didn't hear it that way. My speaking invites started falling like the stock market. I've never been invited back to speak in front of that Grower Association again. From all sides the message was, "If you don't have good news to report, then we'll find someone who can." Well, OK then, go ahead and listen to your excessively optimistic speakers and see if I care. My dog still likes me and my mom still ...... well ...... my dog still likes me anyway.
 

"The housing correction poses the biggest risk to our economy. Our economy and our markets will not recover until the bulk of this housing correction is behind us." Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, 11/12/2008

This video was what we saw just months after the speech I made noted above. It was pretty stinking gloomy. The stock market was in the crapper and home prices crashed. With speed never before seen and perhaps treading on Constitutional Authority, the Government and Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson started to make investments in the Banks through the TARP program and several other initiatives. Ben Bernanke started to throw money at the financial system and economy. The banking system and Detroit were stabilized. But with the markets dragging bottom and hundreds of billions of dollars being thrown at US industry, the average voter started asking the question, "When do we get a bail out?" The answer came soon enough though most of America missed the memo when Fannie and Freddie were put into conservatorship to protect the US mortgage market from vanishing, causing a free-fall in house prices.

So where are we today? Fannie is actually starting to repay the bailout money (Self serving note: the Bank bailout through TARP was paid back with a sizable profit to tax-payers thanks to the strings Paulson put on that Bailout.) Of course Detroit is now going Bankrupt, but the American Auto Industry was able to rationalize their insane Union compensation plans, and has a chance to pay back a large part of that bailout, if not all of it .... well most of it anyway. The economy isn't healed but the most recent Case-Shiller Index had this happy news last week:

"As of May 2013, average home prices across the United States are back to their spring 2004 levels. Measured from their June/July 2006 peaks, the peak-to-current decline is approximately 24 to 25 percent. The recovery from the March 2012 lows is 16.5 percent for the 20-city index."

Essentially the news is, housing prices are back! In the Bay Area consumers even see an overheated market again with multiple offers and short listing periods. So I was wondering now ...... just where is the recovery in terms of the measures in the chart at the top of this page? My speech back then said that we had to revert to the mean. Paulson said we wouldn't see the economy and markets recover until we had the bulk of the housing correction behind us. Did we get there? The current information out there suggests we have reverted to the mean and are now showing home values at 2.85 times median income. Of course the bad news in that is we will likely see growth in home prices slow now due to investors cashing out and more of the average mortgage payment going to interest, thus reducing the amount of house a person can afford. Being an optimist, we are at least not looking at another bubble. Housing growth will take place as median incomes rise.

Consumer Comfort Index at 5 year high

Don't get me wrong. There is a lot to do still to heal housing and the mortgage business. Banks aren't able to make home loans anymore and sell them as packaged securities. Prior to the crash, that was half of all new bank lending. Now it's 0%. Banks now have to keep the loans on their books or sell them to Fannie or Freddie for the present. While its nice to know they are starting to turn the corner, last week President Obama outlined plans for the wind-down of the Governments involvement in those institutions. Having just gone through qualifying for a home loan, I can tell you first hand that the mortgage business is dramatically different than it was.

In the SVB State of the Wine Industry Report released in January, we predicted bumpy going in the first half of the year and an upturn in the back half with average fine wine sales growth in the 4% - 8% range. While there are still plenty of variables out there that can throw that forecast off, I think at this stage with the good news in housing and retail sales hanging in still, its remains a good forecast.

The middle class consumer is showing resilience, housing is now below 6 months of inventory which typically signals a short market, and the Fed is talking about ways to slow their bond purchases in response to what seems like a healing economy. We have a lot to look forward to in the last half of the year, and I'm hoping my pre-recession gloomy speeches will be forgiven by the organizers in hindsight, and maybe my phone will ring again since I have happy news to report? Oh well  ..... at least my dog loves me.

What do you think? Where is the last half of the year headed? Are we going to hit my sales forecast for fine wine this year? What about the mortgage and housing markets? Are they going to stall or improve? There are lots of moving parts but please log in and offer your perspective for the community.

Do You Like Drinking Day-Old Wine?

My mom used to go to the Day-Old Hostess bread store. She would get apple pies and Ho-Ho's and freeze them for our school lunches. They were really good....maybe not that healthy but Hostess advertising said they were healthy snacks back then - wholesome goodness I think was the pitch line, and even day-old Hostess snacks never were stale. Of course now we know it was due to the overuse of preservatives which by themselves can cause a corpse to never decompose.

There is no Day-Old Wine Store for good reason. With Twinkies and Snowballs, freezing made the product usable on my schedule. With wine once its opened, you either drink the whole thing or risk letting the remnant oxidize. Personally, I hate oxidized wine but there's a dilemma. Do I drink a really nice bottle with dinner and have some left that might not be consumed? Or, do I drink a lesser bottle and not be as concerned if I have to dump it? Of course I can just drink the whole bottle, but the calorie thing is becoming a real problem these days .... maybe it was the Twinkies. Either way I blame it on my mother pushing me into addiction. Twinkies are a gateway drug you know.

I can't tell you how much day-old wine I've had to dump over the years. I'd hate to think about what that cost me; maybe thousands of dollars given my drinking habits stemming from my traumatic childhood. While I've not found a solution to my Twinkie addiction, I have found the solution to my dilemma of wasted wine. If you like this solution as well, there is a deal for you at the end of this blog - only for SVB on Wine readers.

 

Meeting Brain Pickers

Gadget to Hold Your Glass When Drunk

In my role at Silicon Valley Bank, I get lots of calls from people wanting to pick my brain. It's probably why I can't remember what day it is anymore. Brain pickers come in all flavors; as investors, the press, people with a business concept, and on occasion people who have the latest and greatest new product or gadget. Some of the ideas are novel but never has anyone presented me with something that I saw as a disruptive or transformational innovation. That changed in September of 2012 when I saw the beta model for the Coravin Wine Access System.
 

Gadget to Never Buy Wine Again

In August of last year I got a call from Josh Makower. He told me he had a product that "preserved opened wine for months" and "the transformational potential of the product for consumers, restaurants, and wine producers would be unprecedented!" To say I was skeptical would be a massive understatement as I've seen hundreds of gadgets in wine fail, but a few things intrigued me here. It turned out Josh had been involved with several successful medical start ups with Silicon Valley Bank on the Tech side of our organization, and he was a part of NEA which is a top tier Venture Capital Firm. He also said he was bringing his colleague Nick Lazaris who was one of the early CEO's of another of our technology start ups, Keurig.


The "AH-HA!" Moment

Gadget So Your Glass Never is Empty

Josh brought in one of the beta models of the Coravin system. With a special needle that's used in the medical field attached to a device that looked like a rabbit wine opener, he easily inserted the needle through the capsule of an unopened bottle. Then, pressing a button with his thumb and pumping in argon gas, he pumped out a single glass of wine. He removed the needle and the cork resealed itself. That was interesting but not earth shattering to me. Then the ah-HA! moment came: The bottle was half full, had the original capsule intact, and was first opened 4 months prior! This was not day-old wine! We popped the cork on an unopened bottle for a side-by-side comparison:  No difference whatsoever. The wines were identical. Now that WAS earth shattering. A wine that had the first glass poured months prior, tasted the same as an unopened bottle. My mind started racing to applications.

Gadget to Turn Wine into A Tree

I could have a glass of white, pinot, and cabernet every night at dinner and never worry about spoiling a bottle. Corked wine? A fine wine retailer or tasting room customer could take a very small sample and test it with reactive test strips to check for specific flaws before taking it home (First someone has to invent those strips). Tasting rooms could use an industrial version with a 1 ounce meter on the gadget that could be attached to a larger argon tank thus eliminating waste or accidentally pouring oxidized wine. My mom could drink her magnum of moscato one glass at a time for 2 months without the wine changing. That case of wine you bought a decade ago and stored ... has it reached the point where its time to drink it? The applications are limitless.

Product Release

On Monday July 29th; almost a year from the date I took the meeting, Coravin announced the launch of their new wine storage system. Robert Parker had interesting comments saying, Coravin is “the most transformational and exciting new product for wine lovers that has been developed or invented in the last 30-plus years.” He also posted a series of videos about the Coravin System based on his own testing. You can find those on his e-robertparker.com website.

Gadget to Make Sure You Spill Wine

I don't think the product is perfect yet:. The argon canister only contains enough gas for about 15 pours. It would be nice if that handled a few more glasses but I'm guessing we'll see more canister options at some point in the same way we saw so many different extensions from Keurig through the years. In addition, the product at first blush is a little pricey at USD $279.00. That said I drink a bottle of wine at that price on occasion so maybe its a bargain? Thinking further, after paying for the machine itself, we're talking about getting the freedom to try any wine in your cellar and not worry about spoiling it for 66 cents a glass based on 15 pours at $10 for a canister. Given the price of those bottles, the all-in price actually seems very reasonable, so I take it all back. Its a fair price.
 

Some of the skeptics out there might think I have a personal interest in promoting this. I assure you I don't. I haven't been asked to recommend this product by anyone and don't have any incentive. I'm just really jazzed with the utility of this gadget and the people behind it. The applications for the consumer, winery, restaurateur, and wine shop are game-changing. Me? I just can't wait to have any glass I want any night, or share any bottle with a friend without having to drink the whole bottle.

A Deal For SVB on Wine Readers

The good news for you is I did contact the founders last week to let them know I was going to dedicate the SVB on Wine Blog to the Coravin product. So while I don't get anything for recommending this, they have offered to anyone reading this blog, 3 gratis argon canisters if you buy a package between now and Friday August 9th using the PROMO CODE: SVBWine. You can do that through this link to the Coravin website.

As a final point, for those commercial wineries interested in trying this out, reselling these in their own tasting rooms at some point, or have other questions about commercial use, I've been given the contact at Coravin for additional questions and discussion. You can contact John Fruin, National Sales Manager here: john@coravin.com.

What do you think? Did you hang in there and read another exceptionally long Blog? Are you skeptical of this product like I was? Log in and offer your thoughts about this product or any other storage devices that you are using and appreciate.