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

Bulgaria's wine exports have registered a significant growth in 2007. During the first nine months of 2007 Bulgaria exported 857 000 hectoliters of wine, which was a 21% increase compared to the same period of 2006 (711 000 hectoliters). Almost 80% of the exported wines were bottled, and the rest were in bulk. The total wine production in 2007 amounted to 138 million hectoliters. A total of over 200 000 tons of grapes were used for their production. Russia is the number one destination for bottled Bulgarian wines with 68% of all exports. It is followed by Poland, the UK, and the Czech Republic. Russia is also the number one market for bulk Bulgarian wines with 65%, followed by Germany, Moldova, and Sweden.

Pros' guide to bargain shopping - link Jonathan Waters Wine Director, Chez Pan isse Strategy: Great values from sustainable, small producers The hits: 2006 Targovishte Traminer , NV Dibon Cava The miss: 2007 Calina Carmenere First, a bit of disclosure on Jonathan Waters' hand up. For his quest, I directed him to the Berkeley Bowl Marketplace, where it turned out he already knew wine buyer Simon Ball and scored recommendations before we went shopping. This actually bolstered his first bargain-hunting tip: Get to know your wine buyer. With more Bay Area supermarkets hiring wine stewards and individual buyers, personal recommendations should be ever easier to get. "If you go home and you don't like any of the wines, then the strategy hasn't worked," Waters said. "But at least it's a good place to start." To convert our $70 into eight wines and pocket change, Waters employed other tricks up his sleeve, which to be fair is precisely what you need when...

YOU MUST CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO ***** When Trentadue Winery hired new winemaker Miro Tcholokov, the wines he made immediatly recieved critical acclaim. Miro's wines were so good the folks over at Trentadue Winery didn’t know what to do with them! Known for affordable, everyday drinking wines that sold between $10 and $20 a bottle, the new wines were so good they had to start a reserve line-up (called La Storia) and raise the prices in order to keep them in stock. Miro took a stable, consistent producer of good wines and turned them into a major player in the high-end spectrum of age worthy-collectable wines. Tretadue wines compete with the best wines in Sonoma County, Napa and abroad. You can learn more from Miro in 10 minutes than you can learn from most people in a lifetime. One of the more entertaining and funny winemakers you'll ever meet, he is always willing to spend time with you and talk about wine or anything else. All this at a winery with incredible faciliti...

By Alan Mozes HealthDay Reporter Thursday, July 3, 2008; 12:00 AM THURSDAY, July 3 (HealthDay News) -- A key compound in red wine known as resveratrol appears to protect against many of the health ravages associated with growing old, new animal research reveals. "It's very hard to extrapolate from this finding to comment on the benefits of red wine directly, because red wine has many other compounds besides resveratrol, including ethanol, which have very active biological effects," noted study author Rafael de Cabo, unit chief of the laboratory of experimental gerontology at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore. "But red wine is a good source of resveratrol," he added. "And, in this mouse study, we have shown that this particular compound has very strong positive effects on preventing cardiovascular disease, reducing heart inflammation, keeping bone health in terms of structure and function, and maintaining loco-motor and balance activity. So, if th...

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...