Wine Shipments Are Being Delivered & The Week At Hand

Hey guys. Mark Aselstine with Uncorked Ventures.

First a Happy Monday. Hope everybody's having a nice start to their week.

A couple of things, first, if you're in the midwest or on the east coast and you have a current wine club membership with us, or you received a wine club gift, it's likely that you're going to receive some wine in the next 24 to 48 hours, if you haven't already this morning with Fedex. The simple reason behind that is the weather has sucked. We've been trying to time shipments to get everything there so it doesn't sit in a warehouse in say New Jersey or New York where it could be exceedingly cold over the weekend. We try to time it so it stops somewhere that's a little more palatable. Hopefully, we've done that pretty well. If you're a wine club member, shipment should be there shortly.

Second of all, over the past week you'll see, or the next coming week at least, you'll see a couple of things from me on the written side of our Uncorked Ventures blog. That'll be largely about a couple of tasting events that I had on Friday. First, I got a chance to go to a Premiere Event for Atlas Peak Vineyards. Not the Valley Premiere, the wider wine auction that has been in the news the last couple of days, was two days ago on Saturday. They raised what is an ongoing record. It seems every year the amount of money raised for charity goes up. In this case they raised 6.1 million dollars. Last year it was 5.9. The year before that, if you remember when they first started to ramp up the program, was about 3 million. You're seeing a pretty quick ascension into a wider amount of money raised for charity.

Napa Valley Premiere is interesting because it's largely focused on both retail and wholesalers. The idea is as a wine club I could go and bid on some of these small lots of Cabernet. It's not largely happening. I could bid on some Cabernet. Then in turn resell that at a profit to my wine club customers. That's not something that we currently do. Although you've seen some astronomical prices paid. Last year there was in the Erickson lot of 260 basically Screaming Eagle bottles that sold for, I forget, $250,000 or something for a wine import house in Los Angeles. You can see all that stuff. It's kind of fun. It's a fun time in Napa. You have all these small scale private events. It's not a great time to visit. We saw some folks yesterday who were just trying to go and to view wines cellars in Yountville and found the place closed. Although much to the folks from Dos Lagos' credit, they found a glass for them and were able to turn what was going to be. These guy from Denver were going to go home and say Napa was difficult because we couldn't get anywhere, to wow that was really a lot of fun and the folks from Atlas Peak are really nice. I think that's something you see in the wine industry a lot. That's one of the reasons why I like the industry myself. Premiere happened. It's interesting because it's both a charity but a business event as well.

Thirdly, I had the chance to sit down with Matt Reid who makes the wine at PWR which is the People's Wine Revolution. I'm going to have a write up about that. I got a chance to actually sit and taste with Matt in his backyard. Met his dog who was a fun guest at the tasting, as well as taste through six of his wines. He does an amazing job given the price point of under $20. You can bet better than even money that People's Wine Revolution will show up in our Explorations Wine Club here in the coming months. Once again Mark Aselstine with Uncorked Ventures, Wine Club [inaudible 00:03:40], coming your way in a couple of fun tasting events on our site that we'll write up a little bit more later. Hope everybody's off to a good week. Thanks again.