Over the last year, my "relationship" with wine has changed. What started as a gastronomic exploration has progressed to a more exciting phase.....wine making.
Searching for and tasting other peoples' wine is rewarding but creating, tasting and sharing my own.....is priceless.
To be transparent, I'm not yet growing or harvesting any grapes. (I have trouble keeping my Sago Palm alive in this Texas heat). What I'm doing is buying the raw materials like the must (from the Latin vinum mustum, “young wine”), yeast, wood chips, etc, through my friends at Water2Wine. I select the grape varietal, do the mixing, design the labels and eventually bottle final product. The W2W pros do the hard work....managing the fermentation process and such.
It's fun. It's educational. It's relatively inexpensive. And, the final product is more rewarding to drink and to share than any Premier Cru!
To date, I've made 3 batches of wine. My first was an Amarone. Amarone is a stunning Italian wine whose grapes are "raisinated" prior to crushing & fermentation. The resulting wine is bigger, deeper and more multi-dimensional than wines made through more traditional fermentation processes.
I named my first bottling, BlueJay Red, to commemorate the launch of an innovative data Storage Platform (The Dell DX Object Storage Platform, code named "BlueJay"), for which I was the Product Marketing Manager. The DX scales beyond traditional file storage platforms and provides unique file management features. If the DX were a wine, it would be an Amarone!
My 2nd bottling was a Brunello, another big & bold Italian varietal. I dedicated that bottling to my peers, commemorating the launch of our big, bold Data Management Strategy for helping customers to solve the challenges associated with storing Big Data.
My 3rd batch, just released, is an integration of Grenache & Tempranillo grapes. Blending grapes is a 1+1=3 proposition where the combination accentuates strengths while mitigating rough edges to create an exceptionally gratifying experience.
Fittingly, I dedicated this wine to our Fluid Data Architecture vision. Fluid Data is about the integration of industry-leading storage and data management technologies architected to work better-together and supported by an intuitive and consistent user-experience framework.The Fluid Data Architecture can be what Seth Godin refers to as a Purple Cow....a stand-out in a field of monochrome Holsteins.
The Fluid Data Architecture represents an exciting but challenging transformation for my team and our employer. Success relies, among other things, on the effective integration of technologies where ownership of Intellectual Property is imperative.
Charting this new path will present new challenges beyond just the IP integrations (stay tuned for a post on solution selling versus box selling!) but the results can be groundbreaking.
After all, selling another company's black box was rewarding but designing, building and sellling our OWN "Purple Cows" will be......priceless!



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