The Balance Sheet / Wine History

Back to school! Everyone was very sweet and curious about Ediebird, and I get the impression I didn't miss too much. The rest of the class gave menu presentations (I do regret missing Zach's "Cheesequake" concept...), Marc Murphy gave a lecture, and Richard went into details of a financial statement.

Today we looked at the basics of the balance sheet. A profit & loss statement is a summary of the past. A budget is a prediction of the future. A balance sheet is a snap shot of where a business is at at a singular moment in time. Typically done at the end of the fiscal year, the balance sheet has two main categories: Assets and Liabilities. Assets can be current (cash or easily turned into cash) and fixed (things that typically last longer than a year, like equipment and furniture.) Liabilities are either short term (need to be paid soon, like pay roll, rent, inventory invoices) and long term (loans and mortgages)

A third category is owner equity -- what the biz owns outright. Assets = Liability + Owner Equity. The total value of a business, everything that it is, is adding up everything that is owned by the business and everything that is owned by the bank or lenders.

Richard, whose passion is wine, got into the nitty gritty of wine history, much of which I had already heard when I took a 7-class wine course with him last year. The first wine is thought to have been made in what is now Georgia (in Eastern Europe). The grape varieties of Europe have always made better wine than American grapes, but a mite in the American soil killed off most European grapes in the 1850s, only saved by grafting old world vines to new world root stock. The U.S. had it's own natural disaster with Prohibition, with many old, mature vineyards being torn up for other crops. Richard ran through all the steps and choices it takes to start a vineyard -- not a simple or cheap task. It could easily be 10 years before the first bottle of wine can be brought to market from a new vineyard. That's a pretty steep entry cost!

We watched a film from the 1980s about the origins of wine. They showed an old Georgian farmer who still makes wine like they did 1000s of years ago. Pluck grapes, step on them, put them in clay cisterns, put them in the cold ground with a cover and let 'em ferment. After a month or so, take out and drink, that's it. Looked dirty-funky, but probably fun.