How Do You Recharge on Weekends?

As busy, always-connected business professionals, how do you recharge your batteries? For me, during the week it’s growing an emerging company and on the weekend it’s growing wine in the backyard vineyard. The vineyard work is exhausting manual labor. Friends say I’m living a dream. But to me the chores often seem a penitence for my transgressions. Like jogging – always painful during a long run – it feels good when you stop after 8 hours toiling in the vineyard or bottling wine. On the other hand, concentrating on planting, growing, nourishing, trimming, watering, netting, harvesting, fermenting, bottling and pruning on weekends provides quiet time for the mind to think about solving the challenges that face our growing business. We literally wine down on weekends. How about you? How do you recharge your batteries to prepare for a new work-week in the office?

As I think about our wine hobby, which has now reached the point of a small family business 10 years after taking that first step down the slippery slope stomping our first grapes, I notice many analogies between vineyard overseer and high-tech entrepreneur, and that lessons learned from the business-world apply equally to our weekend hobby, or should apply.

Entrepreneur passion. If I had known how much work a vineyard would be, would I still do it?
You can make a great wine, but without sales & marketing effort there are no sales.
People do “judge a book by its cover” in the wine industry. The importance of packaging.
The power of pricing: price high, and the perception is it’s better. With wine, higher priced wine tastes better in the consumer’s mind.
What I like in wine isn’t what you like. The opportunity of niches.
Social media marketing and Facebook advertising works in wine and business.
Customers like cute animals on the label.
Pruning makes the vine stronger – true also in business. Pruning non-performing sales partners and when necessary staff.
Sustainability in the vineyard: building a business to last.
Here’s a little chart I came up with thinking about my "leisure time" as a weekend wine warrior compared with my work as a road warrior.

Interested in a virtual visit to our vineyard? Here's a quick little movie we stitched together for you. Cheers!