Before Retirement, Vance Petrunoff Was Selling Bulgarian Wines from Sonoma, CA

ECONOMICS is a highly specialised field. There is, for instance, an economics journal dedicated entirely to the economics of wine (aptly called the Journal of Wine Economics). A recent paper in that journal examined the effect of globalisation on American wine consumers. It turns out trade in wine has been a boon for American oenophiles: For instance, the real price (in 1988 prices) for the basket of the entire Top 100 list [for the U.S.] was $4,313 in 1988; $3,132 in 1993; $2,533 in 1999; and $2,421 in 2004. That is nearly a 44% decrease in prices from 1988 to 2004. At the same time, there was no significant change in the quality of the wines on the Top 100 list... Our econometric analyses show that the decreasing wine price over the past 17 years can be explained by the loss of shares of the Old World countries: Replacing a French wine with a U.S. wine lowers the average real price by 1.0%; an Australian wine by 1.1%; and a wine from non-incumbent countries by 1.5%. To put i...

'Slow movement' wants you to ease up, chill out - ENTIRE ARTICLE LINK (CNN) -- Edgar S Cahn is fighting for your right to be lazy. Other activists might devote their time to reversing global warming or saving the whales. But the 73-year-old attorney is battling to preserve a commodity that he says is more fragile than the environment and more precious than oil -- time. Cahn is a leader in the "slow movement," a national campaign that claims that speed kills. Its leaders say that Americans are so starved for time, our need for speed is destroying our health, families and communities. They say we live in a culture in which being overworked has become a status symbol. Cahn created TimeBanks USA, a nonprofit group that treats time as money, to put the brakes on people's high-velocity lifestyles. TimeBanks members barter blocks of time known as "time dollars." One member may, for example, buy groceries for a stranger in exchange for someone else walking ...

Toasting the Joys of Imbibing Properly Got a hangover? Search Google, and you’ll find a thousand home remedies, from mild palliatives (buttermilk, honey, bananas) to shock therapy (pickle juice, kudzu extract, raw cabbage)। If you can drag yourself into Walgreens or Rite Aid, there’s usually a potion or two that promises relief। The problem with these cures, the British novelist Kingsley Amis (1922-95) wrote in his now-classic 1972 book “On Drink,” is that they deal only with the physical manifestations of a hangover. What also urgently needs to be treated, he observed, is the metaphysical hangover — “that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future” that looms on the grizzled morning after. Amis’s ideas for curing a physical hangover were fairly routine, though a few of the crazier ones will make you laugh. (“Go up for half an hour in an open aeroplane, needless to say with a non-hungover pers...

I know this study is true since I have been doing the same experiments for years and my heart is definitely younger then many...I still fall in love, go to Bikram yoga, do Tai-Chi, run downhill from the Overlook spot above Sonoma and drink a lot of wine to confirm the tests. Vance Red wine compound seen protecting heart from aging By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A natural compound found in red wine may protect the heart against the effects of the aging process, researchers said on Tuesday. In their study, mice were given a diet supplemented with the compound known as resveratrol starting at their equivalent of middle age until old age. These mice experienced changes in their gene activity related to aging in a way very similar to mice that were placed on a so-called calorie restriction diet that slows the aging process by greatly cutting dietary energy intake. Most striking was how the resveratrol, like calorie restriction, blocked the decline in heart...

UK Survey by Decanter Magazine Richard Woodard Despite the economic downturn consumers will not cut back on wine but will trim household budgets in other areas, according to new research. The survey of 1,000 regular wine drinkers in the UK, carried out by Wine Intelligence on behalf of the Wine and Spirit Association (WSTA), found that consumers would rather cut their spending on sweets, chocolate, beer and soft drinks. More than 60% did not consider wine to be a high priority for cutbacks, while less than half of those surveyed did not believe that wine had become more expensive in the past six months. This was in stark contrast to their perceptions of other categories, such as bread, fish, poultry, cheese and coffee. But the survey comes as wine prices are being forced up by a combination of excise duty increases and escalating production and supply chain costs. 'The message is that wine will not be the first thing to go for the majority of wine consumers,' said Brian Howard ...

Sonoma Jazz+ Festival, May 22-25 KOOL & THE GANG AL GREEN HERBIE HANCOCK DIANA KRALL BONNIE RAITT