White wine contest results
A good time was had by all at the wine contest last night, the rain notwithstanding. The wonderful Pasanella & Son laid on five wines for us, all of them sauvignon blanc or thereabouts.
Wine A was the most expensive, a Vacheron Sancerre which sells for about $30.
Wine B was brought in especially by Pasanella to get a US wine: it was a Walter Hansel Sauvignon Blanc from Sonoma, which retails for about $25.
Wine C was another French wine, a Domaine Massiac from the Languedoc which Pasanella was selling for $10 a bottle.
Wine D was Dog Point from New Zealand, which Pasanella sells for about $20.
Wine E was Basa from Spain, sold by Pasanella for $15 per bottle.
Armed with our range of similar whites at dissimilar prices, we embarked on a not-remotely-blind tasting, and everybody tried to rank the wines in order from most expensive to least. I also asked people to rank each wine out of 20, with limited success, since that wasn't part of the competition and a lot of people didn't bother. And as a tie-breaker we asked everybody to guess the price of the Dog Point. The results are in a Google spreadsheet here.
Looking at the people who judged the taste and not just the price of the wine, the results were close, but unambiguous: the best wine was C, the Massiac -- more people judged it their favorite than any other wine, according to a show of hands I asked for, and it also got the highest average rating. It was certainly my favorite wine. The worst wine was D, the Dog Point.
No one really believes the efficient market hypothesis when it comes to wine: they know that Sancerre and Californian wines are generally more expensive. Still, when they ranked the wines, they tended to say that the ones they liked cost more, and the ones they disliked -- especially the Dog Point -- cost less.
Wines A and C -- the two French wines, which were also the most and the least expensive wines respectively -- both got 13 (out of 44) votes as being the most expensive wine, and both got 4 votes as being the cheapest. People clearly liked them. And people clearly didn't think much of the Dog Point, which was voted cheapest wine by 17 people and second-cheapest by a further 16. Still, they didn't think it was cheap cheap: the average price they put down for it was just over $20, surprisingly accurate.
No one got the exact right result (ABDEC), but two people came very close with ABCED, elevating the better Massiac and pushing down the less good Dog Point. Rolfe Winkler came in second place -- he won the Jill Platner gift certificate -- after guessing that the Dog Point cost $45 a bottle. That seems weird, since he also said it was the cheapest wine. But then again, we'd all had quite a lot to drink by that point. The winner, David Snowdon-Jones, was pretty much spot-on, guessing $22 a bottle. He also had something of an artificial advantage: he arrived quite late, and tasted all the wines systematically, instead of just drinking them in sequence like most of the rest of us. And his dad's a sommelier.
But many congratulations and thanks to everybody for turning up on a rainy night -- we raised a lot of money for the South Street Seaport pirate-flag public art exhibition, which means it's definitely happening. Yay!
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Del.icio.usA public wine contest
If you've been reading on this blog about the various wine contests I've held over the years, you might have wondered when you'd be invited to one. Well, that day has now come!
Michelle and I have organized a wine contest to be held in the beautiful tasting room at the lovely Pasanella and Son vintners, in the South Street Seaport where Michelle's Sea Warriors public art exhibition is going to be held. The contest will double as a fundraiser for the art project, which will involve flying pirate flags from vintage lampposts; if you donate more than a certain amount, you get to keep one of the flags for yourself when the project comes down.
The wine shop is at 115 South Street, between Beekman Street and Peck Slip -- come along at 6pm on Tuesday June 30. We'll be tasting five different wines, all similar, but which have quite a wide range of prices. Your $40 entry fee will get you a ballot, where you will attempt to rank the five wines in order of price; you can buy as many additional ballots as you like for $20 each. The winner will get an original Michelle Vaughan pirate painting; second prize is a gift certificate to Jill Platner.
Bring as many people as you can -- it's all for a very good cause! Once again:
See you there!
Studio Sale
My incredibly talented wife, Michelle Vaughan, is having a studio sale tomorrow -- come pick up some bargains! The official announcement:
Flat file sale by the work of Michelle Vaughan... there will be drawings/paintings from past series, plus a few special pirate pieces. Reduced prices. Can arrange framing. Drinks served.
Studio Sale
Thursday, June 4th
5-8pm
10 Jay Street #609
Brooklyn, NY 11201
(F Train to York Street, or A/C Train to High Street)
Pedestrianize Broadway! (Redux)
Back in 2005, I put up a blog entry entitled "Pedestrianize Broadway!" in which I waxed rhapsodic about Broadway being made a pedestrian thoroughfare at least from Columbus Circle down to Union Square.
Now it seems there's a non-zero chance that my dream will come true and that the current plan to close off small chunks of the Great White Way is only the beginning:
If the Broadway plan does succeed, the next step (though Sadik-Khan is not talking this way publicly) will likely be to close more sections of Broadway until one day in the near future the entire boulevard has been converted to pedestrianized open space. It’s hard to characterize how dramatic a change that would be. Imagine a Manhattan with two major parks: one built in the nineteenth century as a confined space of bucolic wonder; the other refashioned in the 21st century as a long, open boulevard slicing the island on the diagonal. This would be the most striking alteration of the city’s physical landscape since the days of Robert Moses.
Oh, to see it happen!
Update: This is what it looks like, now, when there's a street fair on Seventh Avenue:
Pig's head
A special guest post by Michelle Vaughan:
The butcher at Marlow & Daughters ran after us. "Wait. Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Us: "No, not a clue." Him: "Make sure to soak it in a brine overnight. Here's a box of Kosher salt, dissolve it into hot water and brown sugar... throw in coriander, white wine, vinegar, pepper..." Us: "We might call you tomorrow if there's an emergency."After grabbing some ingredients at the shop and shoving a pig's head in my bicycle basket, Felix and I rode over the Williamsburg Bridge back to the East Village while the head wobbled behind me. I was given the choice: half a head with the skin on from Flying Pigs Farm, or a whole skinned pig's head sans ears. I ordered the latter and prayed for the best. I also prayed I wouldn't hit a bump while the head flew out and smacked some poor passerby walking over the bridge.
The following day, with it's piggy snout and teeth sticking out of our too-small (massive) pot, we pulled the head out of the brine. Its nose had gone completely red and I tried not to flinch. After adding fresh water, wine, leeks, onions, garlic, carrots, celery and pepper, we dumped Sally (I had to give it a name, my god it was staring at us all day) back into the pot to simmer for 6 hours.
Meanwhile, we botched up the Bartolli beans which were supposed to go in the recipe - so I braved the rain, bought another batch and tried it again. All was well. Sally was ready to exit the pot, and the true moment had arrived. Was it globular? Gross? Would an eyeball go flying and hit the floor?
Felix dug a fork into Sally and started ripping through her head, collecting as much meaty-meat as possible. There was a lot of fat, about half the mass was fatty. We saved some of that and threw it back in. The eyeballs, teeth, and some of the snout stayed put. Anything else got tossed into the beans with reserved liquor, radishes, carrots, ramps and watercress for a light "wilting".
It was, indeed, a Fergus Henderson evening. Not only does he put new meaning into "pork and beans", we made his killer "Bread & Wine salad" (Boston lettuce, mint, spring onions, red wine vinegar, lemon juice and olive oil) which was light and airy. We also added the mushy courgettes as a delcious side dish. And for desert, I fused about 3 recipes to make a fresh ginger/apple/rum-infused prune cobbler which ended the menu FULL ON.
Without a doubt (and there were some doubts in the beginning) it was probably in the top 3 best dishes we've ever made. I don't know how the pork and beans "emotionally bond", but when they do - it's magical. We sat around the table with 6 other guests and after the first few bites, everyone looked at each other with satisfaction. This was not a graphic display of Sally's head on the table with an apple stuffed in her mouth, this was emotional bonding with beans and radishes. Poetry.
Thanks, yet again, to the insanely talented Mr. Henderson for bringing us closer to our pork deity. All hail the mighty pig. We even plucked 3 teeth to remember Sally and her excellent, lovely head.
Another Reason for Banks to be Small
Mike at Rortybomb finds some empirical research on what happens to loan rates when banks get bigger and more consolidated. The results make intuitive sense: as competition falls, loan rates go up. The exception is loans which can be securitized, like auto loans: those rates can fall as economies of scale improve.
The lesson here is that we should keep banks small, while encouraging securitization -- which of course itself helps in reducing the size of banks' balance sheets. Bank competition is good for consumers; big banks are bad for consumers. It's worth remembering that, as we construct a new regulatory regime.
GM's Whining Bondholders
Andrew Ross Sorkin takes aim at GM's bondholders today:
Not three hours after the president spoke on Monday I received an e-mail message from a group representing G.M. bondholders -- people who are likely to have an enormous influence over the future of the Detroit carmakers...
By the end of the e-mail message, they were complaining that they were "very disappointed that the government and company have had virtually no real dialogue with bondholders while designing the proposed restructuring plan.
The e-mail message came from the same group that two weeks ago grumbled that "G.M. bondholders have been asked to make deeper cuts than other stakeholders," and threatened to send G.M. into bankruptcy...
I called Gabe Roth, the spokesman listed at the bottom of the message, and asked if I could speak with some of the bondholders the committee represents. The answer: "No. We're not making them available."
I followed up by asking which investors were members of this ad hoc committee. "We're not making that public," Mr. Roth said.
I reminded Mr. Roth that government money was at stake, and that we taxpayers might end up bailing out the bondholders. Doesn't the public have a right to know whom they are negotiating with -- or against? He demurred.
Sorkin does mention that Pimco is one of GM's largest bondholders; what he doesn't mention is that as recently as January, the head of Pimco, Bill Gross, was saying this, as he unilaterally withdrew from the GM negotiating committee:
"We have the interests of our clients more at heart than the interests of particular corporations or even the government, I guess, so it's best that we simply look at the situation from afar as opposed to from inside."
When Pimco's largest bondholders behave like that, is it any surprise that they haven't had much in the way of "real dialogue" over the restructuring plan? After all, it's not as though their demands would come as any surprise: they want more money. And if they want to, they can force GM into bankruptcy -- which is a pretty likely outcome in any event. But so long as they're moaning from behind a cloak of anonymity, there's really no reason to give them any sympathy at all -- they're asking for a government bailout just as much as GM's management is, but they have a much weaker case for getting one.
Moving to Reuters
As you might have heard, I'm moving my blog from Portfolio to Reuters. The new blog will be here, and the Reuters RSS feed will be here. But if you read my by subscribing to the felixsalmon.com "all posts" feed, then you should need to do nothing.
Extra Credit, Monday Edition
Why size matters: Steve Waldman is a fan of banks getting smaller.
In Market Cap, Google Now Bigger Than GE
The Taiwanese war against tax evasion: Clever.
The Government Crackdown on Peer-to-Peer Lending: I think it should be regulated by someone. If not the SEC, then who?
Whither This Year's MBAs?
One thing drilled into every MBA student is that sunk costs are irrelevant, while opportunity costs are paramount. Which is a lesson this year's graduating class will put to good use. Let's say that in any given year, there's a graduating MBA who has the choice between creating a green-energy start-up, on the one hand, or joining Goldman Sachs, on the other. Normally, the start-up loses, because the opportunity cost of going that route -- all that foregone Goldman remuneration -- is enormous: it probably has a present value of a good $10 million.
Today, however, the opportunity cost of starting your own company is tiny: if no one on Wall Street is hiring, then you literally have nothing to lose. To be sure, it's not pleasant trying to make your way in the world with no steady paycheck and hundreds of thousands of dollars of student-loan liabilities. But those loans are sunk costs: there's nothing you can do about them, and so there's no point stressing about them overmuch. The art of any career decision is to make the best possible choice given the decision set available, rather than to kvetch about not having graduated a few years earlier, when MBAs were hot commodities.
Paul Oyer puts it another way:
There is a deep pool of potential investment bankers in any given Stanford MBA class. During the time these people are in school, factors beyond their control sort them into or out of banking upon graduation.
Never has this been truer than today: I'd wager that in any given MBA class, a very high proportion took the class with the intention of going into banking, and a much tinier proportion will actually do so.
The ones who don't go into banking might be upset about their bad fortune, but I'm not sure they should be: there's a case to be made that they actually dodged a bullet here. Given the choice, what would you rather be: a freshly-minted MBA with thousand of possible career paths ahead of you, or an MBA of vintage 2004 who got snapped up by a subprime mortgage origination desk and who now has an all-but-unemployable skillset?
For those of us who aren't and never were in business school, however, the big question is what this all means for the economy. Will the best and the brightest now enter the real world, as opposed to the bizarre parallel reality of Wall Street, and put their skills to good and productive use? Or, conversely, will a cohort of finance MBAs infect the real world with their outdated and dangerous ideas about modern portfolio theory and whatnot, causing formerly well-run companies to follow the trajectory of Lehman Brothers or AIG?
To put it another way: what did this year's MBAs really learn during their course? Was it much the same thing as their predecessors, or did the magnitude and severity of the financial and economic crash teach them a few home truths which will come in useful going forwards? I fear that the answer is largely the former: it's hard enough just keeping up with your coursework, without trying hard at the same time to unlearn a large part of the compulsory curriculum. And certainly anybody I've ever talked to who's taught a classroom full of would-be quants has told me that they tend to concentrate on formulas and algorithms to the point at which they can't even perform a basic smell test on results, let alone look at those algorithms critically and decide to discard them.
But the optimist in me says that if there isn't any demand for financial whizzbangery any more, then maybe the supply of it will wither quite quickly. And that today's MBAs might yet add more value than you might think.
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