The blog at www.wineforbusinesspeople.com focuses on the intersection of business relations and business entertainment. People in my network who use wine in business entertaining often share stories with me about ways they use wine to help them be successful. They are also alert to the ways other people use wine. There observations tend to illustrate a wide range of do’s and don’ts.
Out of my career-long experience with wine, and with others who share my passion for wine, has come the idea for this blog.
My objective is to give visitors a window on the kinds of wine-related behaviors that either help or hinder someone in business. The big idea is to showcase the right things to do and point out the inadvertent behaviors that damage relationships.
One story that illustrates the importance of doing wine well came my way when starting out in business. I had already made an embarrassing wine blooper and was aggressively shrinking the vast scope of my wine ignorance.
At a luncheon meeting with a client, one of my colleagues, who had only half listened to our server regarding our drink options, played back that he thought “a half a caliph of wine” would be just right for our group.
Our client thought this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard and, for a long time afterwards, repeated the incident whenever my colleague’s name came up. One really wants to avoid an instance like this happening.
It’s not that hard to do. Just start paying attention to wine. BL
wine for businesspeople 
Ha! Great story – I look forward to more! And you are sooo right about the importance of choosing the right wine for the right business occasion. Those can be treacherous waters, indeed.
I gained my own tiny bit of wine knowledge by meeting the right guy. His father was in the wine business and he’d grown up around viticulture. He gave me a taste of what wine knowledge could be, but then I met his father, who was not only knowledgable, but an exceptional teacher as well. He took the time to challenge me with tastes I never would have dreamed of sampling had I not been in that ‘safe’ setting, where I knew I wasn’t gambling with my wallet. Anyway, I took the plunge, spent what he suggested, and learned a lot. It’s really paid off. Especially in business where opening the right bottle can imply you’re savvy in all things…not just the evening’s wine selection.
However, my circumstance was lucky. To the average person, gaining wine knowledge is an expensive crapshoot. If this website becomes a fount of useful information for the young entrepreneur looking to ‘wine and dine’ for the first time, it will be a tremendous value for the next young kid coming up the vine.
Genuinely looking forward to more content on the site, let alone the books and seminars. I’ll be following you. 🙂