PROTOCOL Wine Studio

Tag Archives: Chicago

The Elephant in the Friend Camp

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Driving through Virginia wine country with a fellow professional, our conversation turned to friends and how they may feel awkward and even hostile toward a new business.  My driving partner is Cindy Rynning. By day, she’s an Early Childhood Special Education teacher from one of my newest favourite cities, Chicago, by night, she’s blogging all things wine at Grape Experiences. Cindy has a wine path for her future self and with an Advanced WSET certificate and a carefully nurtured wine network she’s begun the journey on the wine-coloured road.  As … Read more →

The Passion Games

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Following an event, and with sufficient rest in hand, we typically find ourselves at the debrief.  Returning from the Chicago auction I realized so much goes on behind the scenes, from the complete dossier of our client, research on wines including auction and retail values, travel arrangements, logged hours, to making connections with wine folks all in a relatively short time frame.  We’re both on the road quite often.  And although we have friends who say that they want our lives, I’m reminded of a phrase I’ve heard many a … Read more →

The Startup, Volume II Paddle 305

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HDH Wine

 

ImageEric and I participated at the Hart Davis Hart Burgundy wine auction at Tru Chicago a few weeks back.  More specifically, we were there with a client, assisting them in their burgundy bids.  This was our first live auction and it was nerve-wracking.  Fun, crazy fun, bordering on maniacal, but nerve-wracking.  In fact, writing about it now, I’m feeling that nervous gut all over again. (In a few weeks we plan to roll out a new post with photo montage focusing on all the fantastic folks and restaurants we visited during our short time in Chicago–a killer time! Who knew?)

Seriously, in the past few weeks.

Nervous stomach:  blog piece

Don’t get me wrong, it’s an exciting time, but damn, I’m nervous and agitated about everything now

If pushing comes to shove, I’m shoving. Really it’s just myself, no one gets hurt here.

Wre a little out of the way, but see, that’s the point, anything worthwhile we need to work just a little bit harder for.  We want to be a ocummunity hub and not just for our customers, but for the wine trade.

PWS Blog piece

Physical address, waitig on licensing, need to do some creative revenue seeking:  auctions

We’re still liearing of course but we’ve become pretty good at it.

So it’s been a ridiculously busy past few weeks: Chicago for the above half million dollar wine auction, a presentation for the Virginia Wine Board in Charlottesville, then to San Diego for the cellar drop off.

 

 

It’s funny though:  I was spectacularly nervous about the whole thing, renting a cargo van, driving around with about 20 cases of wine, particularly a 1959 Maison Leroy and thinking, hey, my parents were married in 1959. So although I was crazy nervous about it all, in that one moment when I thought about my parents I realized that without even drinking the 1959, I had a memory association anyway.  And I can picture myself in that van, smirking, because I know Eric and I are crazy busy but crazy happy in the business.

 

 

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