Why I'm Taking this Class

Since I've moved to the Bay Area in early 2016, I've had a chance to taste some of the finest wines in the world and have made countless visits to wineries all around Northern California (Napa, Sonoma, or the Central Coast). During my travels at the GSB, I've made broadened by exposure to wine by trying wines from Oregon, Portugal, France and more recently, Chile and Argentina. Despite all this exposure, I still fall back on my first few tastings in Sonoma and keep coming back to my love for Pinor Noirs from Russian River Valley. My primary motivation for taking this class is to increase my appreciation for different varieties of wine and become a more informed consumer, either at restaurants or while purchasing at retail. I would love for there to be a time when I'm at a restaurant and I don't immediately pass on the wine list to someone else, or blindly order the best Pinot Noir on the menu.

As a business, wine is something that poses a multitude of interesting questions for business, ranging from product features (grape varieties, ageing, type of fermentation, etc.), distribution (retail, DTC), consumer segments (from the everyday consumer to the luxury wine connoisseur to the millennial wine enthusiast), positioning and branding (from a two-buck Chuck to the premium $300+ bottles), to non-market factors (regulations, health concerns (or benefits :)). I am excited at the prospect of grappling with many of the above questions and potentially seeing parallel learnings in other CPG or luxury businesses. An aspirational long-term agenda in taking this class is also potentially investing in wine business in emerging "New World" regions and I believe this course will provide a great foundation for that.

Finally, one of my biggest takeaways from my courses at the GSB has been to figure out what kind of leader I want to be. From what I've heard in the class reviews and seen in the first session, I believe I could learn a lot from Alyssa's leadership style. Her strong subject-matter expertise in her field, relentless drive for excellence and growing her company, immense passion for a particular topic (wine in this case) and her force-of-nature personality are all things I could potentially incorporate in my own leadership style.