Skip to Content

Stanford Business magazine

 
  • Email
  • Print
  • Share

Student Wine Circle:
A Blend of Appreciation and Business

Is joining the Business School’s Wine Circle artifice to enjoy an aromatic blend of oaks and tannins? It could be.

Leave it to clever biz students to dress up a party as a business meeting. For example, there's the Wall Street–sounding Liquidity Preference Function (LPF) every Friday where students blow off end-of-the-week steam over beverages, food, and loud music. So one might think the student-run Wine Circle is just a reason to uncork a bottle of Pinotage, kick back, and enjoy one another's company.

To a point, it is. However, the club's more educational functions have sparked interest among members to learn about the nuts and bolts of the industry. If tech-minded students can take advantage of the proximity to Silicon Valley, why can't wine enthusiasts tap into the wealth of information that lies 80 miles north? For more than a decade, business students have done just that through the club.

"It's up to the wineries sponsoring our club's events to steer the night," says Tom Van Stavern, MBA Class of '09, one of the outgoing presidents of the 300-member group. He explains that some of the events can get technical, like one that focused entirely on aroma. Or, it can get personal, when Jeffrey Mayo of the Mayo Family Winery explained the ups and downs of running a family winery that sells only to club members and visitors to its winery. Alumna Megan Anderson's, MBA '08, "Wine Industry 101" program drew upon her wine experience working at Foster's Wine Estates and Bain & Company's wine expertise to guide the meeting, which concentrated on the business side of wineries.

For some members, like Van Stavern, the club is an opportunity to better appreciate wine. For Liz Ewing, MBA Class of '09, being a Wine Circle member and attending Cakebread University—a three-day crash course on the wine business held at the hallowed Cakebread Cellars (CEO John Cakebread, SEP '83)—caused her to shift her job search toward winemaking. "I was coming from an economic consulting background," Ewing says, "yet I wanted to do something different." She got her feet in the vat when she did a 2008 summer internship at Crushpad, a San Francisco winery where customers choose the grapes and how much wine they want made, as well as how much they want to be a part of the winemaking process. For an industry that doesn’t traditionally recruit or value MBAs, Ewing sees opportunities for Biz School grads to make an impression.

Jared Stein, MBA Class of '10 and incoming copresident of the club, has always loved wine and has spent countless weekends in Napa in addition to making wine-tasting trips to Argentina, South Africa, France, Italy, and Chile. His gravitation toward the wine industry intensified since coming to the GSB, and the Wine Circle is partly responsible. "The tailored events of the club increased my interest," he says. He hopes to fulfill the foreign component of the MBA curriculum by working at a winery abroad this summer.

The Wine Circle also extends its membership to alumni, staff, and the Business School's significant other (SO) community. Sixty of the 300 members are SOs and during first-quarter midterms last fall, a lonely time for those keeping the home fires burning, they banded together and held their own Wine Circle event.

New leadership for the club hopes to organize more local wine-tasting trips and to increase marketing efforts and improve its website, http://gsbwinecircle.com.

—Arthur Patterson