Soares Franco family: generations behind the winemaking traditions of José Maria da Fonseca brands
Paulo Pinto
Alti Wine Exchange founding member
Dear reader,
I hope you’ve had a fantastic beginning of 2021 after such an uncertain year.
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Today I want to speak to you about the wine producers that have listed their wines at Alti Wine Exchange.
These are people who work hard to provide excellent wines, but above all: each one of them being an exceptional human being.
How imagination and foresight drive the finest producers
With fine and rare wine, it is easier to understand that, in order to be successful, these people cannot be lying or cheating. Their product is the result of truthfulness, diligence, competence and good judgment.
I am a big fan of these producers whose wines we list on Alti Wine Exchange, because they have proven they are better than the average wine producers.
For some of them, sure: money makes life easier, but their singularity of imagination and foresight is the real driver.
People like Adrien Beaulieu, from Château Coutet, who created a replica of the oldest Bordeaux bottle in existence with their outstanding organic wine.
People like Eduardo Chadwick, who boldly decided to put himself on the line to have his finest wines competing in blind tastings against the best vintages in the world – and succeeding.
They don’t do what other people do. They are willing to be different.
These are people who will carry forth values worthy of the wealth: they don’t consume more than they make – and they don’t spend: they invest, they create capital.
In a nutshell: they take the long view, they put their money on things that hold value over time: fine wine.
Funny enough, some of the most interesting wines come from wine families – some with much more than one hundred years of accumulated capital and knowledge passed from generation to generation.
Old wine families like David Beaulieu, making wine since 1784 in France, or José Maria da Fonseca, since 1834 in Portugal, or the Errázuriz family since 1870 in Chile, or the Klein family in Germany – keepers of a winemaking tradition that spans more than 1150 years (no, not a mistake).
Everything changes, nothing is given. Why live above our means?
Those families have their own values, but the family side is the most important. Having success is difficult, but having success for more than one generation is even more difficult.
These families perhaps better than anyone else know that prosperity is not automatic or guaranteed.
All these families have seen a number of inflationary cycles, and that is probably the reason they understand money better than most – along with their knowledge of wine.
Families have a way to remind all within the family that everything is relative. All families go through bad phases, as companies (and even countries), but time is there to make things right if you do the right things.
Within my lifetime, I have seen the end of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the re-birth of China.
Things always get better somewhere along the road, nothing is really new, and these families of wine producers are here to remind us that not everything needs to be in fashion.
It’s your choice: wishful thinking or tradition. Inflation or real assets.
Debt only allows borrowers to live off the capital that others have accumulated. The world in this 21st century has basically forgotten this. And now, with Modern Monetary Theory, it just wants to give it a good excuse for people to live above their means.
The traditional wine families they know: the excuse might be good, but nothing is really new if people keep doing the same mistakes.
Until next time.