I genuinely don't understand why plates exist. All you need is a cutting board and wine glasses. Try it tonight.🍷

You're being lied to about wine, Anon. To most people, vintage variation is entirely theoretical. They haven't actually experienced it and even if they have, it's a bit shrouded in mystery. Have you ever taken the time to open up 2 bottles from the same vineyard of different vintages at the same time and given them the attention it takes to recognize the differences? Vintage variation is ephemeral and hard to experience. That's exactly why it's become lost in most American wine. The average wine consumer is buying a $20-$30 bottle. They're picking by variety, then likely by finding a cool label. Once they find one they like, they stick with it because the wine aisle is an extremely daunting place to be. That wine brand now has their loose loyalty because you liked their product that one time and know where to find it on the shelf. If the winery makes a vintage that tastes different (not necessarily "worse") they could lose you as a customer. Not to mention, the ratings agencies that score wine have very specific flavor profiles they look for and, at the scale of these wineries, the difference between a 90 and a 91 score is millions and millions of dollars. The fiat wine world incentivizes manipulation, and sameness and blending between vineyards to the extent that vintage variation is an extreme afterthought and no one even knows they're missing it. But Ben, if no one even knows they're missing it, why should I care? Vintage variation is a look into the soul of wine. You can tell characteristics about the vineyard from any vintage, but the difference in taste year to year is that ephemeral bit that makes people go crazy about wine in the same way that people go crazy about bitcoin when they first start going down the rabbit hole. It's the secret sauce. It's what truly differentiates soulful wine from the grape derived alcoholic beverages that are created by food scientists in labs that pass for wine these days. Most bottles are just empty vessels. The soul was never invited in.

Wine sulfite removal drops are everywhere, They promise to eliminate headaches and hangovers with a few drops. But do they actually work? These products contain food-grade hydrogen peroxide that chemically converts sulfites into sulfates through oxidation. UC Davis research shows a quarter teaspoon of 3% hydrogen peroxide can neutralize free sulfites in a typical wine bottle. So yes, they do legitimately reduce sulfites by 30-50% through legitimate. Only about 1% of people have genuine sulfite sensitivity, mostly those with asthma. For everyone else, hangovers come from alcohol dehydration, acetaldehyde buildup, histamines, tannins, or one of the 72 other additives allowed in American wine. Outside of the Placebo Effect, the "hangover be gone" claim is misleading marketing for 99% of wine drinkers. I don't think you need to be paying premium prices for stabilized hydrogen peroxide to solve a problem you probably don't have. Better hangover prevention: drink water, eat food, moderate alcohol intake and drink Low Intervention Wine.

Bitcoin attracts people from every walk of life The only real barrier to entry is curiosity. Curious people tend to be successful, so when you gather a bunch of curious people together, you get humbled fast. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met a random Bitcoiner only to realize they were way ahead of me. Smarter. More Successful in business. Or just figured this all out 10 years before I did. I have been in countless conversations thinking, "Who the fuck am I? I’ve done nothing compared to this person, but for some reason they want to talk to me?" There's always a bitcoiner thats better than you at everything. For Example: Skiing has always been my thing. I am really fucking good and I rarely get to ski with people who push my limits. Being the best in my crew has been a source of ego for me for a long time. A few years ago, I went to the Bitcoin Ski Summit and as we broke into groups and the first one was labeled, “If you’re the best skier on the mountain, join this one.” I jumped right in. It was a powder day at Jackson Hole. I wasn't about to be polite waiting on some Jerry to go find their lost ski. The last person to join the group was some dude without a helmet. Jerry-ville for sure. Turns out the dude was an Olympic skier and I couldn't keep up even going 100%. Best Day Ever and I was honored when he defied the authorities to smuggle a bottle of my wine home to Canada. They say firewood warms you twice. Well, Bitcoin humbles you twice. First, by showing you the world does not work the way you thought. Then, by surrounding you with casually incredible people.

I need a license to buy grapes. I need a license to drive to pick up grapes. I need a license to make wine. I need a license to pay taxes on the wine I sell. OI! You got a Loicense for your life?

A small group of people can reshape an entire system. Nassim Taleb coined the term Intransigent Minority to describe the phenomenon. When the cost of acquiring that group is low, the rest of the population is indifferent, and that group is stubborn enough to stand on what they believe, the system bends. His go-to example is kosher food. Fewer than 0.5% of Americans follow kosher rules, yet a huge portion of the grocery store is certified. Observant Jews won’t touch non-kosher food, but most people don’t think twice about it. So if you run a factory, it’s easier to make everything kosher than split your product line. One group has strict requirements. The other is flexible. That’s enough to tip the entire system. I’m seeing something similar with bitcoin businesses. The pressure here isn’t negative or rooted in avoidance. It’s completely positive. What I do see is a sharp rise in demand for products and services from companies that accept bitcoin alongside the dollar. Whether bitcoiners use it as a medium of exchange or not, it’s clear that having that option is good for business. This pattern has been clear to me ever since bitcoiners started buying my wine, but my scale is small. Since then, I’ve watched everything from cottage producers to large ranching operations benefit from the same magnetic pull. Steak n’ Shake, with over 450 locations, is just the next evolution. If a bitcoiner is getting a burger, Steak n’ Shake just jumped to the top of their list. They’ve already gained the attention of a group that punches above its weight. Time will tell how much we impact their business. Bitcoiners’ impact doesn’t come from protest. It shows up as positive reinforcement. The Magnetic Minority rewards alignment and that reward is scaling. Taleb gave us the template. We’re writing our own story.

I do not foot stomp my grapes

Winemaking is v dangerous

How Fiat Thinking Warped the Wine Industry In Europe, wine culture was built slowly over generations. Time, not money, was the main ingredient. You could not fake it. You could not rush it. In the U.S., it was different. By the time American wine started gaining recognition, the corporate mindset was already seeping in. Short-term profit was not a side effect. It was the strategy. The top tier of American wine still exists. But everywhere below it, corners were cut. Volume has mattered more than vineyard. Brand has mattered more than bottle. Massive corporations scaled up, standardized the product, and flooded the shelves, crowding out everyone else. Not because they were evil. Because the system rewarded short-term thinking over long-term value. Now, the cracks are showing. People are starting to ask why wine makes them feel so bad. Some are giving up on it entirely. Others are looking deeper and finding that lower-intervention, local wines are what they had been missing all along. Wine, at its core, is a low time preference vehicle. It seems to not want to be rushed, manipulated, or manufactured. It seems to er towards expressing the land, the season, and the patience of the people behind it. The roots of wine are still strong. In Europe, they were never fully severed. And in the U.S., we are finally starting to let them grow. But we are a long way from home.

If you’ve seen Sour Grapes, you know the story: A guy sold millions of dollars of fake "fine wine". The reason his scam worked reveals something deeply engrained in the wine industry. Most wine drinkers are being fooled. Just in a different way. Rudy Kurniawan blended cheap wines and passed them off as rare Burgundy. He wasn’t exposed because something tasted off. He got caught because some of his labels didn’t match historical records. That’s how easy it is to manipulate wine. People trusted the story, not the contents. Wine is ephemeral. Every bottle changes every year and every hour after opening. There is no fixed flavor to test against. You could open five identical bottles and each one would taste a little different depending on how it was aged. That’s part of the beauty. But it also makes it easy to hide behind. The wine Rudy made wasn’t necessarily fake. It was engineered. He used blending, additives, and packaging to mimic the character of rare bottles. That same playbook is used across the wine industry. Only now, it’s considered standard practice. Most grocery store wine relies on: - Low-grade grapes - Oak flavoring - Sugar - Concentrates - Lab-designed enzymes It’s a formula made in a lab, sold with a story that is designed to make it feel like art. The same confusion Rudy exploited is what allows commodity wine to dominate. A wall of bottles, branded with warmth and tradition, hiding a product built through food science. The wine world keeps you in the dark. On purpose. How do you avoid this? You don’t need a cellar or a huge budget to drink something real. You just need to get closer to the source. Shake your winemaker’s hand. Ask questions. No one worth buying from will make you feel small for wanting to understand. If they do, they’re part of the act. The wine industry sold its soul. And most people are still drinking the lie. I make Unfiltered Wine in Colorado and am happy to answer any questions.

Here is a list of all the preservatives a winery can add to their wine without having to disclose that information on the label. sulfur dioxide potassium metabisulfite potassium sorbate ammonium sulfite ammonium bisulfite sodium sulfite sodium bisulfite sodium metabisulfite copper sulfate zinc sulfate There's no way to find out which of these is in your wine without contacting the winemaker directly. Shake your Winemaker's Hand.

At Peony Lane is just You and the Grapes, Skin to Skin. 🍷 No need for an ingredients list. Wine, the Justman way. 🍇

An unlimited supply of this wine is why all my friends are now Bitcoiners.

There are two questions that matter in wine 1) Does it taste good? 2) How do you feel after drinking?

Saturday Sun! ☀️ Pregame for Saturday Night 🍷 Whoever said "Don't get high on your own supply" definitely never made wine. 😉🍇🧡

The idea of Tokenizing Fine Wine is clever. But it only makes sense in a world distorted by fiat money. Platforms like Bacchus and VinoVest let people buy fractional shares of rare bottles as an alternative investment. The demand for this product is coming from people looking for new ways to protect or grow their wealth as the value of fiat erodes. This is the same force driving crypto speculation, meme stocks, the explosion of sports betting and the rise of the S&P 500. When saving doesn’t work, you're forced further out on the risk curve. Vintage wine is a great candidate for financialization. It is more scarce than Bitcoin. Once a vintage is gone, it’s gone and unlike bitcoin, its consumable. The best bottles can increase in value for decades. But ultimately, wine is not forever. It peaks, then fades and the fleeting goal of collectors is to time the peak...by drinking it. The highest purpose of wine is to be opened and enjoyed. That purpose disappears when a bottle becomes a line item in your brokerage app. Tokenizing wine solves problems that only exist in the fiat world. It is a way to turn enjoyment into speculation, but it kills wine's fundamental value prop. YOU DON'T GET TO TASTE YOUR FRACTION. No one is going to mail you a sip of wine. You just have to hope someone else wants it more later. That logic treats wine less like culture and more like collateral. In a world where money works, where saving in Bitcoin preserves your time and energy, you don’t need to chase exposure to an obscure asset class that you probably don't understand.. You don’t need a token for everything. These platforms aren’t bad ideas. They are just ideas for a broken system. Fix the money, fix the incentives. Make Wine Wine Again.

Does wine get more valuable over time? Let's level set. You can't just walk into a wine shop, grab any bottle off the shelf, stash it away for a few years, and expect to flip it for a profit. The wine might improve in quality if you store it well, but there are real barriers to resale. Don't trust. Verify. How can I be sure you stored that bottle properly for a decade? What if the power went out one summer and your wine fridge hit 85 degrees for two days? That's enough to cook a bottle. The only real proof that the wine was aged well comes when you pop the cork. Unfortunately, the sale happens long before then so reputation is everything and that takes decades to build. The wine has to matter in the first place. Most wines on shelves aren't built to age and don't come from a vintage anyone's hunting for. There's a glut of wines that taste similar, fade fast, or never had any upside to begin with. Why would someone pay a premium for your ten-year-old bottle when there are tons of others with the same profile? Only a small handful of wineries have earned a reputation for age-worthy wines. Within that, not every vintage even stand out. If you want to dip your toes into aging wine, here's my advice: Buy a full case of a red you love. Store it properly. Open one bottle every six months. You'll notice a difference and it'll be an enjoyable exercise. As for those of you buying my wine with the idea of flipping it someday: I'm honored. I think my wine is suited to age well and unique enough to be worthwhile. If you end up making money by reselling my wine, that's great for me. But I'm not holding my breath...especially in Bitcoin terms.

I tell people all the time, go meet your winemaker. But that’s useless advice if you don’t know what questions to ask. Here’s where I would start. Your goal is to get them talking. To do that, you need to come off curious and compassionate, not accusatory. You’re not trying to catch them in a lie. You’re trying to learn how they think. Start with sulfites. You could say something like, “I know all wine has sulfites, but I keep hearing they’re overused in a lot of wines out there.” That’ll open the door. If they immediately agree, you’re probably talking to someone who’s thinking carefully about what goes in their wine. If they bristle or start defending heavy use, there’s a good chance it’s a more conventional approach. And if they’re using a lot of sulfites, they’re probably using a lot of other stuff too. Then ask about the vineyard. Not, “Do you spray?” That comes off combative. Instead, ask, “What’s the biggest weed, pest, or fungus issue you deal with?” Then follow with, “That sounds like a nightmare. What can be done to stop it?” Their answer is going to tell you everything. You may need to look up a spray name later, but the tone of the conversation will already have given you what you need. Listen for whether they talk about the land like it’s something they’re connected to, or something they’re trying to control. Personally, I’m a big vibes guy. If it feels off, if they’re defensive, cagey, or dodging the question, that’s your answer. Trust your gut. It’s good at tasting wine too.

If Bitcoiners are Cyber Hornets, what should I call this wine?

EAT MEAT DRINK WINE🇺🇸🍷