A Tale of Two Valleys by Alan Deutschman

Author:Alan Deutschman [Deutschman, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767914604
Published: 2003-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

TWO WEEKS LATER, in late August 2001, the Nickels held one of their traditional Friday outdoor lunches for two dozen of their friends and associates. The harvest had begun the day before with the picking of chardonnay grapes, and Father Reginald from the nearby monastery had come to bless their ripe fruit.

“He's been blessing it every year since eighty-two,” Gil said, “and every year has been a good harvest.”

Gil was in a particularly buoyant mood since the previous weekend he had won a car race at the Laguna Seca track in Monterey, California.

“The kid is back!” he said.

The lunch was served on a long table beneath a row of thick-barked old trees. The trees resembled the live oaks that are common throughout northern California but actually they were cork trees, the kind that grow mainly in Portugal, where their barks are harvested to make corks for wine bottles.

“Cork trees take thirty-nine years until they generate their first cash flow,” Gil said. “It takes thirty years until the first harvest, which you throw away. Then it's another nine years to the next harvest. Thirty-nine years. Can you imagine starting a business today if it was going to take thirty-nine years?”

Figuring backward from 2001, that thirty-nine years would reverse time to 1962, when Robert Mondavi had his inspiration for reinventing the Napa Valley. In the time it would have taken to make a single cork, he remade the wine world.

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