Quote Originally Posted by skywatch View Post
Thanks!

You need only look at the bottle in the picture. It's Ridge, perched above Santa Clara county (Silicon Valley.) The vineyard has been there since the 1890s. The grapes were being sold to an Italian jug wine maker here in Mountain View (Gemello) until the early '60s, when three SRI engineers bought the property as a vacation spot for their families. One of them (Rob Bennion) started making wine from the grapes there, as a hobby, and people started to realize that the location was very special. These days the Montebello sells for over $200 a bottle. For about 15 years we were on their futures program, which was very affordable, and also a great way to go up the mountain once or twice a year to taste their new wines. We stopped buying futures a few years ago, when even those prices started climbing north of $100. We don't have enough opportunities to justify opening a wine like that, and I'm not "an investor."

We used to be able to afford Ridge up here.