Coyote Blog

I am a bourbon and cocktail guy, not a wine guy.  When folks are tasting wine and saying they can taste grass and strawberries and chocolate, I am saying "I think that's a red one."  Never-the-less some new friends who know a lot about wine hosted us a while back on a trip to Napa to do some wine-tasting.  I will say that I left somewhat confused.

The incident that set me to thinking started at a gorgeous winery called Bond, part of the Harlan family series of vineyards.  I had never heard of Bond or Harlan, which generated approximately the same reaction from wine-lovers as, say, telling my daughter I can't name any Taylor Swift songs.  Anyway, we had a tasting there, which I understand was something of a coup in in itself.  At the tasting we tried 5 different cabernets from 5 different parts of the valley.  It was actually cool, they had a jar of the soil each wine's grape was grown in next to the bottles and there were very dramatic differences.  I found this infinitely more enlightening than being told the word "terroir" over and over.

They did a couple of things that I have come to learn make for the best high-end vineyard tasting experience.  First, the whole thing was quiet and private for just our group.  And secondly, in addition to opening up all their current vintage wines (all cabernet sauvignon) for tasting, they pulled a few 2013 versions of the same wine from the library -- "library" being wine-speak for inventory of older stuff.  2013 was apparently a very good year for them and this was by far the oldest stuff we had been offered anywhere.

I had always been told that you can't drink cabs right away.  They have to age in the bottle for 10 or 15 or more years to really be their best.  I had never experienced that for myself but drinking the 2013 version next to the 2023 version was eye-opening to me.  TL;DR it makes a big difference that even I could readily taste.

By the way, if you have any scientific bent, good luck asking any of these tasting room types what -- chemically -- happens in the aging process once in the bottle.  I am more used to bourbons that really do not continue to age once they are out of the barrel and into glass bottles (aging for bourbons requires molecular exchange with the wood in addition to evaporation from porous barrels and even changes to the weather).  So I was curious how wines age in the bottle.  But I asked wine folks about what happens in the bottle -- do long chain molecules break down, do molecules combine, do some chemicals vaporize and leave solution -- and all I could ever get was new-agey stuff about ... something or other.  Something happens to the tannins -- I could probably look it up.

But this is where I hit my conceptual wall I am still struggling with.  To understand this you need to know that the current vintage bottles of cab at this winery go for $800 a bottle -- that is for the 2023 version.  The problem is that I don't really buy $800 bottles of wine.  I don't actually buy $800 bottles of bourbon (see footnote below).  But I knew that people fight to get even a few bottles on allocation from this winery at this price.  So I thought about buying something because a) it was really a lovely tasting and buying a bottle or two seemed good manners and b) it might be fun to have a special bottle tucked away for a special occasion, maybe for the birth of our first grandchild or the night before I get put up against the wall come the revolution.

Outside the tasting, though, I searched on my phone for the 2013 Bond Pluribus we had tried.  I learned that this was considered a very good wine and scored a 100 from wine critic Robert Parker, which is apparently a good thing.  This very highly regarded and more fully aged 2013 vintage was going for $600 in several places. $600 aged 10 years vs $800 new -- I was confused.

My wine friends did not even blink when I said this.  Their reaction was "well, that wine was probably originally sold for $200 and $600 is a pretty big markup."  But that makes zero sense to me -- the original sales price should be irrelevant.  The 2013 is known to be one of their very best years and likely a better year than 2023.  But more importantly it had already been aged for 10 years in the bottle.  By any possible wine drinker metric, the 2013 had way more value than the 2023.  We all agreed the 2013 tasted way better, at least today, than the 2023.  But it was $200 cheaper.  Another way to think about that is that if I have to store the 2023 for at least 10 years for it to really be drinkable, that means the future value at 8% discount rate of my $800 I pay today is $1,727 in 10 years.  Why buy a young bottle today if I can buy an aged bottle from a really good vintage for cheaper?

I had a professor at HBS who taught investing -- I am sorry, I have forgotten his name but he was quasi-famous.  He would put crazy arbitrage opportunities on the board, and we would all argue about why they existed and how money could be made from them.  He would end all such discussions with the same phrase, "either this is a real opportunity or there is something you don't understand."  I am willing to believe there is something I don't understand and am open to commenters educating me.  I can think of a few possible explanations:

1. The online offer is counterfeit, like a fake Hermes bag  (I don't think so, I ended up ordering a bottle from a very reputable store and it appears quite real).
2. People don't trust the provenance of wine sold by third parties -- what if it has not been stored well?  Maybe they left it in a hot car trunk for a month?
3. People are buying lottery tickets -- just as a Pokémon card collector might buy a huge box of unopened card packs hoping to score a super-rare card, perhaps people are willing to pay more for wines at great vineyards in hopes that one will be that wine or vintage people talk about for decades.
4. With bourbon, people pay a premium to put together collections of all the different runs of a particular brand.  Do people do this in wine, try to collect all the years of a certain label?
5. Perhaps wine people are the ultimate marshmallow test kings, actually expressing a preference for 10-years deferred gratification.
6. Maybe it gives wine people an excuse to keep buying wine because none of what they already own is ready to drink yet

Footnote on Bourbon:

I have various types of bourbon tucked away all around my house, but I don't think I have ever paid $800 for anything.  And it is certainly possible to do so.  The most famous, the 23-year Pappy Van Winkle usually goes for $4000-$5000 a bottle on the secondary market. I saw a special bottle of Eagle Rare going for $10,000 a 2-ounce pour in a Nashville bar.  Woof.

I have been lucky enough to try Pappy and other very rare bourbons on someone else's dime.  And my general conclusion is that they are not worth it.  My wife and I did a very special trip to Buffalo Trace several years ago and somehow scored a tour and tasting from the CEO of Sazerac.  So even my wife, who hates bourbon, knows that Pappy and Weller start out in the same barrel.   I signed a Pappy/Weller barrel that my wife hammered the cork into -- it should be available for my funeral.  Anyway, the main difference is Pappy stays in the barrel longer -- which is NOT always a good thing in bourbon IMO -- and it has a higher proof, about 20 points higher on ABV proof (10 points higher on ABV),

So my wife ran a blind test last weekend with a friend and I between Weller 12 and Pappy (18?)  Anyway, my friend could not tell the difference and I could tell only because I knew Pappy had a higher ABV and I could taste the burn from the greater alcohol content.  Had we diluted the Pappy down to Weller level, not sure I could tell the difference.

I find almost any bourbon quite drinkable.  If you like your Angel's Envy or Woodford or Knob Creek or Makers Mark -- great, and I am more than happy to share them with you.  If you want a recommendation, however, here are my go-to's:

• Everyday bourbon, $55 at Total Wine -- Colonel EH Taylor Small Batch.  Seriously if you told me that this was the only one I could drink the rest of my life, I would be fine
• Pricier bourbon, $150-ish on secondary market -- Weller 12.  Probably my favorite of all bourbons and much more affordable recently (several years ago it was going for $400)

Special variations of these, like the EH Taylor Single Barrel and the Weller CYPB are great and fun to compare to the base models.  If you like these, you will probably like the other Buffalo Trace offerings like Eagle Rare and Blanton's as well.  Blanton's definitely has the best bottle, looks great on the shelf, and everyone loves the little horse.  If you are in a bar and see a nearly empty bottle of Blanton's, finishing it off in any good bar should score you the horse.

From these selections you can guess I hang out a lot in the upper left right of this map but I still enjoy things all over the spectrum.

Note:  Watch for a podcast coming out soon.  I am working on an outline I have tentatively called "the birth and death of a small business" covering issues across the range of small business life.

I have put off dealing with the large drop target assembly, but finally it was time.  It is now cleaned up and in pieces. I hope it goes back together.

I am still thinking about how I can systematically engage with this administration without it becoming a full-time job.

So in the mean time, pinball restoration!  I moved everything to the new playfield and completed about 200+ solder joints.  I fired the thing up, with some trepidation, inserting one fuse, testing, and then another fuse, with the General Illumination fuse first and the solenoid fuse last.  After finding just a few shorts, and a few swapped wires, and one drop target where I reversed input and output on the sensors, everything is mostly working.  After these photos were taken I get the pop bumpers installed and a few other details like the coil that puts the ball in play.  Next up siderails and all the playfield details.  I still have not cleaned up the huge 7 drop target monstrosity that is really the core of the game.

Not sure that anyone cares about these updates, but posting them helps me stay on a path of steady progress.  As a reminder, I am refurbishing an early-1980s vintage Eight Ball Deluxe pinball game including the installation of a new playfield.

Progress has been faster than I had feared, mainly because of a deep well of internet resources for working on pinball games in general, and this machine in particular.  Also because of a pretty good supply base of parts for these vintage machines.

I began by removing all the electromechanical parts from the old machine -- like the flipper mechanisms, thumper bumpers, and the drop target arrays -- and totally disassembling them and cleaning them.  Some folks who do this kind of thing employ tumblers and polishers to get all the metal parts gleaming but I have mostly eschewed that -- a vinegar bath to remove rust combined with some ultrasonic cleaning and a bit of steel wool is enough for me.  I will say that I can't believe it took me to age 62 to discover impact drivers, though really this is the first time I have really worked much with metal (rather than wood) assemblies.  I had frozen screws in some of these assemblies I soaked in Liquid Wrench and the equivalents for days with no luck, but got turning in 5 seconds with a few hammer blows on the back of the impact driver.

I did not have to move any of the many many many bulb sockets because I was going with LED for most lights (using Yoppsickle boards) and even when I wanted bulbs I was changing the socket to accommodate bayonet-style bulbs rather than the insane wedge style things that were standard.

As you can see below most of the mechanical assemblies and switches, with the exception of a few rollover switches still to be done, are in place.  All lights and sockets are in place as well as the power busses for the lights.

The one missing assembly is this bad boy, an enormous and very heavy combination of 7 drop targets and 6 standup targets behind them.  I am a little intimidated by this and, like the other parts, am going to film its disassembly so I have some hope of it going back together correctly.

As for the wiring, the entire wiring harness has been de-soldered from their connections and tagged.  Something in the ballpark of 200 connections excluding the power bus.  All the wiring is one big wiring harness and is now free and will be lifted and dropped onto the new board as soon as a few last things are installed.

Next up, a sh*tload of soldering. Hopefully it will all work again some day.  The one thing that has me a bit paranoid is orientation of the diodes on the switches.  Pinball machines of this era use a polling scheme where switches are in sort of a matrix, with the machine polling a column of the matrix at a time.  If the diodes are wrong on each switch, chaos ensues.

For a variety of reasons, I was pretty late going out to find a Christmas tree and did not actually begin the search until last Sunday  (I had a conference the week before and my kids were not in town and it is not that much fun to shop for trees without my kids).  Anyway, it turns out that there is some sort of Christmas tree shortage, at least in this area.  All my go-to inexpensive spots (the grocery store, Costco) were out.  The usually high-cost tent location at the plant nursery had trees but double and triple the usual costs -- starting at $250 for a 6 foot tree.  I am a big supporter of allowing price "gouging" during shortages and in this case the pricing mechanism worked just fine -- I passed on these trees at this price, presumably allowing someone who valued these trees more than I to find some still available.

Finally, I went to the Home Depot and they were apparently out as well - they were just selling some miscellaneous branches to people to wanted to make wreaths.  But way in the back was one tree -- and a tall one at that, at least 9 feet.  No one had wanted to buy it because it looked like something out of Dr. Seuss -- it had nice foliage at the bottom, then a completely open 2 foot gap, then nice foliage, than another large gap, etc.   Anyway, my daughter the artist and the undisputed right-brain flag bearer in the family, immediately loved it and insisted I buy it.  The guys there thought they were out of business and did not even have their price list any more.  I said, "hey guys, no one wants this, you have to give me a discount."  We agreed on $40 and we had a tree.

It turned out great.  The large gaps in the tree have become more of a feature than a bug, allowing a 3D ornament display impossible on normal trees.  It is tall and thin and looks great in our tall room.

Then, on the same day we had our tree adventure, we realized that no one had done anything about a Christmas card.  It was always my job in the past to design the card, but last year I passed the mantle on to my daughter.  But we had not explicitly assigned responsibility this year so nothing got done.  At this point my daughter disappears into her room with her laptop for what we supposed was a nap.  But she exited two hours later with our card design.  She didn't have all the fancy Wacom tablets and such she had at art school, only the trackpad on her laptop, so she said she just used the circle tool a lot but to my eye it came out great, and allows the Coyote family to continue its 25+ year run of never buying an off-the-shelf Christmas card.

I think the table I built for our new hobby room came out pretty well.  Having only really done woodwork on speakers, I am most comfortable working with mdf so this is mdf with an alder veneer to match the cabinets in the room.  Because I knew the slab of marble (a scrap we found at the stone store on discount) was going to be super heavy (something like 400 pounds) the table is built super solid.  I will say that modern design is much easier to build than something antique-looking - really this is only rectangular boxes and frames so it was pretty easy.

Taking in account the over-designed pedestals that are 3/4 inch mdf with interior baffles, this whole things weighs almost 500 pounds.  I observed to my wife, who wants to use it as a cutting table, that it would make an awesome beer pong table.  Perhaps when she is out of town we will have a coyoteblog get-together to try it out in that mode.

Next up, I finally have  small room to do my model railroading in so I will be boring you with updates on that particularly geeky hobby.

Postscript:  Yes, I run parks and I like model trains, like Ben in Parks and Rec:

• Ben is a fan of model trains, Game of Thrones (his eBay username is "Tall Tyrion Lannister",a reference to a character from the franchise), Batman (he purchased a Batman suit when he joined Donna and Tom for Treat Yo Self), Star Trek (he writes Star Trek fanfiction, and had expressed a preference for Captain Picard over Captain Kirk), Fringe, Harrison Ford, Twin Peaks, Homeland, and Star Wars (among other things).
• Ben is a "nationally ranked" player of Settlers of Catan

I am comfortable with all of this except perhaps for the preference for Picard over Kirk.