There are two things you need to know about me in order to understand my addiction to historic Southern California steakhouses: First off, I’m from the Bay Area, where nothing new can be constructed unless something old is torn down.

Andrea Chang published a chilling article in the Los Angeles Times this morning about the addiction issues that have plagued crypto investors since diving head first into the fray during the pandemic.

I’m not sure how many of you watched Bill Maher this past Friday night, but I was absolutely blown away by his guest Batya Ungar-Sargon, the former Newsweek editor who spoke brilliantly and eloquently about the current state of the media in our country.

When I first started working in the wine and spirits industry back in 2007, I had already missed the boat for Bordeaux. Whereas most of my older colleagues had already built cellars around $40 bottles of Pichon Baron and $25 bottles of Haut Bailly, I was facing anywhere between $75 - $150 per bottle for wines of a similar quality. No matter how much I wanted to partake, I was limited by my wallet (similar to first-time home buyers today).

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle this week laid out a very interesting scenario: there are 40,000 empty homes in one of the most concentrated cities in the United States that has been dealing with a housing crisis for more than a decade.

Please excuse the little blogging vacation I’ve taken over the last few weeks! Between a sick cat, Omicron, and the usual workload, I’ve been juggling a few different hats in both my professional and personal lives.

Continuing the conversation about the booze business in the face of the pandemic, I had the chance to sit down this week with my longtime friend Nicolas Palazzi to discuss retail logistics, supply chain woes, and all the other challenges facing importers and distributors with COVID-19 spiking once again.

Whatever your personal and political thoughts on unions may be, I think most people agree that workers should have the right to a decent wage and certain benefits that might not be guaranteed them without the collective power of a workers’ union.

Given that I’ve already chatted with retailers, brand owners, importers, and distributors about the impact of COVID-19 on the alcohol industry, it was time to sit down with the on-premise side of the business and talk about how the pandemic has affected bartenders. Death & Co’s Devon Tarby answered the call, discussing the need for cocktails-to-go, our human need for socialization, and the future of the bar business.

The cost of housing is an unavoidable subject in California because it’s all anyone I know talks about. No one can afford to buy a home, the costs are outrageous, and the few affordable options out there usually turn into a bidding war between buyers, driving prices even higher.

Since you can only do Instagram Live from two accounts, I headed over to my friend Toni Basil’s house for this special happy hour edition with my other good friend Dave Smith from St. George Spirits. Together we made a basil cocktail to celebrate Toni’s new single: Wham! Re-Bop.

Earlier this year, in response to not being allocated a rare bottle he had requested, a retail customer told me: “I’m never shopping with you again. I’ve been a good customer and you’ve given me nothing in return.”

For those of you who spend hundreds every year on dry cleaning like I do, Patric Richardson’s new book Laundry Love isn’t just going to save you some cash, it’s going to have you rethinking everything you know about taking care of your clothes. Patric has also become a hot guest in the talk circuit. When he’s not on Kelly Ripa in the morning, he’s posing with Taylor Swift on his Instagram!

In a recent op-ed about the future of money with the emergence of digital currencies, one economist states:

“It is a period of a great degree of concern about what happens to traditional forms of money and whether these technological developments we see around us are going to benefit us in some way or just create more disruption and turmoil.”

I can clearly remember the four most common words uttered by consumers each time I recommended them a new bottle of whiskey: Have you tasted it?

It all seems so long ago.

Many of the changes we’ve seen in the wine and spirits industry over the last year were already developing before COVID, but the pandemic helped accelerate a number of digital alternatives to human interaction. To get a sense of how the importation and distribution side of the business has been affected, I sat down for a happy hour chat with Skurnik Wine & Spirits head honcho Michael Skurnik. He had a lot to say about the topic.

Just as the new DTC (direct-to-consumer) market for wine and spirits is upending the distribution channel that is the American three-tier system, the new social media-based, direct-to-influencer strategy has completely reversed the three-tier marketing funnel. Rather than allow a product to trickle down through the inner-workings of the outdated booze machine, modern brands and producers have found success in reverse engineering.

Our state of California has been ravaged by climate change, bringing terrible wildfires and extreme drought along with it. While not necessarily the happiest subject for a happy hour, I wanted to check in with my friend Jasmine Hirsch from Hirsch Vineyards to ask exactly how these changes have impacted her family’s business and what both winemakers and consumers can expect from these challenges moving forward.

A quick point of clarification: the title of this blog post is referring to a career in retail, not the entity itself.

Boutique wine and spirits retailers aren’t going anywhere for now. Their employees, however, are getting the hell out of Dodge.

Someone said to me this week:

“Authentic, to me, means that my beliefs, thoughts, actions, and behavior have nothing to do with anyone else’s opinion of who I should be, and nothing do with what I think other people’s opinion of me should be.”

Amen.