Just spotted this today:
Rancho Salsipuedes Vineyards In Santa Barbara County Sold For Reported $26-$28 million
Any of you Santa Barbara wine country locals know any more about this?
Ann and Stan Kroenke…do you need to say anything else…They know what they are doing.
Had a Sandhi chard from Bentrock vineyard that was stunning. Nice piece of property there.
I know those vineyards were owned by CalPERS (CA Public Employee Retirement System) until the sale. Tyler makes a Bentrock Pinot, and Dragonnette makes a Radian Pinot which is great.
I think Ojai makes a Pinot Noir from Puerta del Mar.
http://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/#
Are these the Walmart folks?
She is.
At 200 acres planted, they’re going to have quite a bit of wine to sell if they don’t… They’re low yielding, but that’s a lot of acres under vine.
Back in the day, when the federal Social Security system was running a surplus, some people argued that that surplus should be invested in a true “lock box” in the form of purchasing actual private property [such as publicly traded C-Corporations].
But other people countered that the SS system was so massive that the USA would soon become a socialist nation because SS would quickly subsume every publicly traded company on the exchanges.
Of course, it was all a moot point anyway, since the Supremes had already ruled that the FICA tax receipts could be dumped in the general treasury and so Congress went ahead and squandered it all on whatever it is that Congress squanders money on.
The point of this post is that CALPERS is rather a ginormous blob of a money pit, and it makes you wonder just how much of the state of California [and maybe Oregon and Utah and Arizona] is in fact owned by CALPERS.
Of course, the other big take-away from a story like this is the sense of the elites - be they gubermental or mercantilist - bouncing around their fiat electron sheltering schemes amongst one another, the same way these professional sports owners trade their draft picks like so many prize cattle headed for the slaughter house.
Wine is certainly not a game for peasant farmers anymore.
Much less peasant drinkers.
I toured the Rancho Salsipuedes property with Peter Cargasacchi and Tom Hill back in 2008. Huge property, most of it can’t be seen from Santa Rosa Road.
That’s some beautiful country right there.
I wonder if it’s gonna get a great big fence around it now? Or maybe a wall?