Transcript
Intro
Stephan Shipe: Welcome back to the Scholar Wealth Podcast. Today we’re looking at the financial and family considerations behind buying a childhood home abroad. It is a mix of cross-border planning, rental economics, and navigating family expectations.
Then we shift to a question from a listener who has carried interest as part of their compensation. We break down how carry works, what makes it valuable, and how to plan for something that may or may not pan out for years.
And in today’s From the Field segment, we chat with Walker Strangis, founder of Walker Wine Company in Los Angeles. He has spent nearly 20 years working with rare wine collections, and he shares what families should know about building a collection with real long-term meaning and value.
So let’s jump in.
Question 1 – Buying a childhood home abroad
Listener: I’m considering buying my family’s home in Portugal for about €450,000. It’s the house my sister and I grew up in. She still lives in the same town, but she doesn’t have the finances for the purchase. I would buy the property myself, rent it out, and have my sister manage the rental locally. I’d love to have the house for my kids to go visit someday. I think I can make this work with my financial plan but my wife isn’t so sure. What are your thoughts?
Stephan Shipe: We need to disentangle three major things that are going on here. We have the vacation home, we have the purchase with family related, and then you have the whole spousal alignment consideration, which is probably the biggest factor here. Because that’s gonna be miserable if you both disagree completely on how you should spend 450,000 euros. At the end of all of this, that’s gonna be the one big driver. You both have to be aligned with this one, regardless of how much you have in net worth. But I assume since it is a conversation happening and being debated, it’s not an insignificant amount.
So the first then is the step back into the vacation home side of things, and this is something we’ve talked about before. We have to be really careful of trying to justify a vacation home as a source of income. Now, maybe you’re able to offset some of the costs with rental income. You’re adding complexity there to that income, maybe tax in both Portugal and the US. So there’s some considerations, but we have to be careful about letting the emotional pull here of the childhood home blurring that financial decision of whether or not this is a good investment.
And the question typically starts with, would you go buy a rental house right now in Portugal if it wasn’t your childhood home? And if the answer to that question is no, then at least we can be honest that this has nothing to do with an investment decision. And this has everything to do with just purely emotion of you wanting to own the childhood home, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It just, that’s important step one, right? It’s probably gonna help with all the other steps that we deal with as well as having that knowledge of whether or not this makes any financial sense whatsoever.
So if we go through that and you say, you know what, it is emotional. So what are the costs associated with this? The cost of this is gonna be possible tax complications, definitely bringing in different complexity when it comes to legal and tax layers. Owning international property, having income abroad always adds complexity. So there’s an added cost there. The one that worries me even more though, is that you’re planning to manage this through your sister and having her involved with this. Anytime we start getting into any business relationship with family, that requires clear expectations and compensation right up front. Everyone’s gotta be on the same page, and I would add a different layer for you in that this isn’t a rental house that you’re buying down the street from you, that your sister’s gonna manage. And if she decides one day that she doesn’t want to manage the house anymore, that you could say, well, that’s not a big deal. I’ll manage it or I’ll hire somebody to manage it. You don’t have that option, so unless you’re going to pick up and move to Portugal, the next question is if she decided not to manage it sometime in the future. Would you be okay still owning that home and hiring someone to manage it out of Portugal?
And we’re getting into these layers of complexity and they’re these what-if scenarios. But the reality is you’re not renting a house for the summer. You’re buying a house that you’re going to have to deal with these situations and the odds of your sister managing it forever are low. And the odds of the rental income being high enough to actually make this a positive investment is low. So we have to deal with the economics around the opportunity cost there. If this is 450,000 euros leaving your account, how does that impact your ability to spend and do all of the other things you’re looking for in your financial plan? If that’s irrelevant, then that’s fine. Then if we can just drop 450,000 euros from the portfolio, not a problem from an opportunity cost perspective, and maybe you’ll be able to sell it later on if you needed to.
The other consideration that always comes in is the kids going to visit it someday. Typically, the strategy is you find a house that you’re gonna consider kind of a kid trap. You’re gonna go buy the beach house or the lake house, and as they get older, it’s hard to pass up going to the lake house or the boat, and all of this for free because Mom and Dad own it. In your situation, you’re adding some other levels of complexity here that you just have to go internationally to go to the house and depending on what kind of childhood you had, I don’t know, this may be a lake house or beach house type scenario, but if it’s not, you have to start weighing whether or not that is an effective kid trap and how many times your kids are gonna go over there.
This is a one-time situation where they go to your childhood home and see it and get to say, wow, this is where Dad grew up, and all of that’s fine. Or is this a place where they’re saying, this is great, I’m gonna go back two times a year and we’re gonna make the most of this vacation home. In most cases, when we’re dealing with this type of situation, especially abroad, it ends up being the former and it’s more of a one or two-times trip, and it’s more for the emotional benefit for you owning the childhood home, which again, is not necessarily a bad thing. We just can’t start to rationalize the decision with other types of reasons besides the fact that you like to own the childhood home as well.
So when we mix all that together, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea in a context of the entire financial plan, but there are a heck of a lot of things going against it. So you really have to start weighing whether those benefits are worth all of the, not only the current negatives, but the potential negatives that can come from this, of just the uncertainty of property abroad.
And now onto our next question.
Question 2 – Carried Interest
Listener: I recently moved into a principal role at my firm, and part of my compensation now includes carried interest in our newest fund. The fund size is about $800 million, and my share of the carry is small but meaningful if the fund performs well. The vesting schedule is four years. Payouts are years away, and I’m trying to understand how to plan around it.
Stephan Shipe: When you look at carried interest, we have to keep in mind, as you’re doing that, carried interest is not guaranteed. It’s just going to be some share of the profits if and when things go well in the fund. So you’re thinking about this right, of we have this potential lump sum out in the future, or annuity of cash flows out in the future, that could materialize in a big way, but there’s no guarantee for it. So how in the heck are you supposed to go and try to figure out how much you spend on college or when you can retire and everything with this much uncertainty out there?
And part of that is purposeful. As you’re aware, the reason carried interest is given is it’s a great way to lock someone into the team. You’re principal in the firm. They’re gonna go and have all this carry that you have out in the future. So the odds of you leaving is lower. Now, I will say in the past year or two, we’ve started to see a lot more movement of, even if someone has the potential for carry out in the future, they are leaving the firms, going to different firms, because they’re worried about the carry in their initial firm materializing or the initial fund materializing. So remember, that’s always an option if you look at the fund and things aren’t going well. Moving to somewhere where you’re going to have a higher probability of income is always a decent thing to keep in mind.
So when you go into the vesting schedules, and that doesn’t seem too crazy, you have plenty of time there. Payouts probably, my guess, is 10, 15 years out on the high end, maybe around seven or eight years on the low end. So we’ve got some time, which means you’re likely going to meet the long-term capital gains treatment of carried interest. If you’re receiving it, it is great. If you’re a lawmaker, everyone loves to hate carried interest because of the capital gains treatment. Long-term capital gains on this, which ends up being a significant portion of income for you, is great from a tax perspective. So there’s some big benefits out there.
The way I would look at this from a cash flow perspective and a planning perspective is I would look first at: when you model out what the future of your life looks like, what does it look like if none of this carry materializes? If none of it shows up and you’re just getting your salary and bonus every year through your kids’ college, through retirement, would that be okay? That would be the first thing. If that is not okay, then I would start increasing savings to a level that you would be okay retiring and comfortable with that amount of cash flow later on in retirement without the carried interest.
And then we can go and start looking at scenarios of: this is the base scenario, no carried interest. It can happen. Everything works well. And then we can shift and say: what would it look like if we were to receive carried interest? And what are the main goals that you would have at that time? Because what I’ve seen done before, and tends to work out, is we can look at it as a scenario of—if this is the base scenario, no carried interest, what are the goals? Maybe it’s a vacation home, maybe it’s early retirement, something along those lines.
Then we can look at it and say, how much would be required for you to be able to achieve level A goals, and then what would be level B goals that we’re dealing with? And having that set up gives you a little bit more understanding of what the impact of that carry would be as it materializes, and also give you a little bit of the—you know, year one or year two of carry starts to come out, you’re starting to get payout on those scenarios. Now money’s coming in. Probability of getting the rest of the money increases. So at that time, we’re a little bit more comfortable with you going to spend some of that money—maybe not the retirement, because you’ll likely need that for the carry anyways—but the vacation home or increased spending, anything along those lines.
So just keep that concentration risk in mind that not only are you dealing with the uncertainty of income in the future, but that is uncertainty of income in the future that is also tied to your career and current income as well. All tied to one strategy or one fund, which adds a ton of risk to a portfolio. It’s an odd type of concentration risk. We typically see a concentration risk in owning an individual stock. You have the exact type of risk that’s here. It just materializes through profits as opposed to ownership.
So if that fund doesn’t do well, well, that may put your current income and current career in jeopardy as well as your potential income in the future in jeopardy as well. So I don’t like when we have that correlation between human capital risk and financial capital risk, which is what you’re dealing with. So planning for everything on a base scenario without carry is how I would start as a base round of modeling. And then building up a good amount of security around that, and cash, to balance out what you have right now as a lot of positive long-tail risk on the good side. So to balance that, we probably want to start adding a little bit more to the—whether it’s the fixed income or lower-risk side as well—to get you back to something that looks or resembles normal when it comes to a distribution of returns.
From the Field – Wine with Walker Strangis
Stephan Shipe: And for today’s from the field conversation, we explore the world of fine wine collecting and what families should keep in mind as they build, store, and eventually pass on a meaningful cellar.
Today we’re joined by Walker Strangis, founder of Walker Wine Company, a fine and rare wine advisory firm based in LA. Walker has nearly two decades of experience working with some of the most valuable wine collections in the country, and is here to talk about how families can think about fine wine not just as an asset, but as a passion and a legacy. Walker, welcome to the Scholar Wealth Podcast. Please tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, how you got into this business.
Walker Strangis: I got into the wine business after struggling in the entertainment business. Was exposed to wine mostly through family, but nothing serious, and was curious and started studying, and that led to finding myself working in the auction business on the wine side, starting at Christie’s in 2006, and then having to look back. Sort of stayed in the auction business a long time. Loved wine, loved that specific area of wine. And the auction experience was also interesting because it puts you around a really well-informed clientele. Tends to be extremely knowledgeable. So I was around people who I could learn quite a bit from, and then went out on my own and started my retail business in 2015.
The bottoms there were letting quite a few people go during a period, 2015 roughly. They were kind of scaling down the business, and I took that as an opportunity to go out and start my own retail business, and now I’ve got that and a wine storage business.
Stephan Shipe: So with all this experience around all these really rare collections, a lot of wines and collections that most people would never get a chance to see, when you look at this, how should families think about building a fine wine collection with true lasting value, both on the financial side and the personal side, the legacy side?
Walker Strangis: Yeah, it’s tough. I think that building a collection as an asset, as a family asset — something that has value beyond just opening things at the table — it’s a tricky thing to approach. Everybody has their own totally subjective likes and dislikes. What do they want to accomplish? So what I start with is making sure that you are buying things that you enjoy drinking. They matter to you in a way that’s not just viewing wine as a commodity. Because if you do just come at it with that in mind, I think it’s easy to make missteps. You’re gonna find yourself sitting on a large portion of your cellar that you don’t enjoy and probably won’t go up in value, or may not.
I think that starting with it as a passion that you enjoy, that’s meaningful, safeguards you against where the market may go. If you’re going to view it as more of like building an asset — in addition to what you like to drink and share with your friends and family — you want to buy in serious quantity, meaning in case quantities or sixes when available, but buy something that will be easy enough to assign a value to later and will retain its value. You don’t have to buy multiple cases of every single wine, but I would try to avoid buying ones and twos or broken cases as a very sort of general approach. Some bottles are only available in ones and twos — smaller quantities, certainly large formats — but things like the best Burgundy in the world, let’s say that there are 30 world-class Burgundy winemakers that you would want to collect. You probably won’t get them in serious quantity.
But when we start to talk about things that retain their value, it’s mostly Bordeaux and in case quantity from known producers. But that starts to get into treating it more and more like a business or a commodity. And I urge collectors to really follow their passion, and that may change over time. If you’ve got a young family and you’re starting out to collect, your palate will change. Your ideas about wine will change. So I would say start small. Really get into the weeds a little bit. Build a community of people who are drinking different things and similar things. Share the opportunities, build your knowledge, and really focus on the things that you enjoy, because at the end of the day, that’s what you’re gonna be left with.
Wine right now — the values, we’re seeing extraordinary numbers — but I think that a lot of the amazing value growth or the increase in prices, it’s just not sustainable. And we’ve seen the biggest changes probably have already occurred. I think that some of the things we were seeing in the market in ’06 and ’07 and ’08 was a great time, but there were prices there — you bought it, if you were buying active at that time and you sold it now, you’re going to go through a massive growth. You’re gonna realize huge gains. But if you started buying five years ago or six years ago, I just don’t think that we’re gonna see the same kind of growth across the market as a whole. So building a legacy — the foundation needs to be what you like.
Stephan Shipe: So talk to me a little bit more about that. A lot of it is based on subjective preference of the types of wine. Collect what you like. What would make you say this is a good collection? Because there’s gotta be some objective portion of it that would make it go to an auction. Because I can’t imagine somebody puts their wine collection up for auction, you’re just kind of fingers crossed somebody in the audience likes the same wine that you like.
Walker Strangis: When we’re talking about wines that you would collect, we’re really talking about a very small percentage of the total wine world in terms of production. So there are maybe 500 wines in the world that are most heavily traded. Most of them objectively are very well-made and they’re good. They may not be the thing that I like.
Walker Strangis: You can approach building a cellar also with that in mind, that you may not necessarily emotionally connect with the wine, but you realize that there’s value in it. That’s where I think it gets a little bit tricky. I advise people, look, if you have fallen in love with Spanish wine and Italian wine on the red side, and you do not really enjoy Bordeaux, you can still buy great Bordeaux from great top producers and understand that the value will be there.
That probably won’t go down in value, but is there real growth? There’s value to be had there, but if you don’t enjoy drinking it, then you’re sitting on something that the value may not go up. Maybe it outpaces inflation a little bit, but not enough to make it worth your carrying cost, and you laid money out for this.
I think it’s a much better idea to focus on the wines that you enjoy drinking, but just buy the best version of it. If you are focusing on Champagne, please don’t buy even the best bottle that you can get at Ralph’s or a grocery store. Buy the best that you can find through your local brokers and know that you’ve got something that will get better over time and will probably go up in value, but that you deeply enjoy.
There are certainly collections that you walk into the room and there’s a head scratching moment where you’ve got wines that are not really connected, but there’s value and those things will sell. They do well at auction, whatever they may be, as long as they were purchased and well stored. Provenance is great. But do they really find an audience? It’s these single-owner sales that have a real story to tell, that communicate passion, that communicate insight, that achieve the highest prices.
Stephan Shipe: Anytime we’re talking about collections, the passion part seems to be the hedge against the lack of investment return. You don’t have the passion aspect, then you’re just banking on a return, right? I think you nailed it. I think you’re missing something there. You mentioned legacy in this idea of estate. How do you see families incorporating these collections into estate planning?
Walker Strangis: Um, it’s usually quite messy, and I wish that more families thought about this impact earlier. Oftentimes, the heirs don’t have the same kind of passion and the same understanding of the collection that they’re then coming into, and really, it’s a sad moment. It’s a sad moment for the person in my seat that loves and appreciates what the wine is. The person or the family who had built a collection, I may not ever have met that person. Maybe they’ve passed away, but I gain some kind of insight by looking through their wine. So I feel like you get to know somebody just a little bit through their collection, and you assign a value to it, and then you work with a family that’s inheriting it, and oftentimes the conversation is, well, it was my parents’ love, it was my father’s passion project, and we don’t know what to do with it because we don’t share that same passion.
So then it becomes, okay, what is the value? How do we assign a value? We’ve gotta look at current market rates, and then there’s a tax obligation. And oftentimes, what is the easiest approach to this is, okay, sell the collection, offset the tax obligation, and at the end of the day, what have you done? It’s a deeply meaningful part of your life when you become a wine collector at a certain level, and then this person collected oftentimes for decades, and then it goes away and it goes out into the auction world. And you think, how sad would that person be if they knew that this was the legacy?
So with a little bit more thought and planning, I think that you can then understand, okay, what is the value and what would we like to do? Do we have to sell all of it? Do we only sell part of it? Do we not want to sell any of it? Have a conversation, and hopefully what you’ve done is built a real love and built a common language, a shared passion with the people inheriting the cellar, so that they are maybe less inclined to sell, more inclined to build on it and keep it going. But yeah, families need to talk about it because the person who built the cellar has the most knowledge in the family. Knowledge about pricing, where it came from, who they’ve enjoyed it with, how they came to really deeply understand this thing that is their passion. And then they probably will know or have an idea of the best way to get a maximum value from it, and the heirs may not. So it’s about having a conversation with everybody is the best approach.
Stephan Shipe: I had a client one time, they would never pass on that information because then their wife would know how much they spent on the collection.
Walker Strangis: That is also a reality. There are a lot of people who are not interested in revealing their annual spend on wine. That’s why I’ve got a storage business. There’s a lot of people here who…
Stephan Shipe: Now it all makes sense.
Walker Strangis: No…
Stephan Shipe: And it all makes sense. How do you start finding these wines? What does that procurement process look like? From what I’m hearing here, if I wanted to have a serious collection, I just can’t drive down to the local supermarket and go pick up a collection.
Walker Strangis: You really can’t. But that’s not to say that there are barriers to entry. Most people don’t go to buy wine at auctions because they perceive there are barriers, there are minimums, they’re going to spend far more than they’re comfortable with, or there are just too many intricacies to the process and they don’t want to have anything to do with it. The truth is auctions are public and we on the auction side would encourage people who know nothing about it to come in and allow us to explain the process so that it is more accessible.
But outside the auction world, you can develop a relationship with a local wine broker. And I would say that every major city in the US and a lot of smaller cities in the US have knowledgeable people who are local to them, either because they were qualified wine directors or somms, or people who’ve been in the wine business a long time, who bring a lot of knowledge, are anxious and happy to share that. So go and develop a relationship with — like here in LA you’ve got The Wine House, you’ve got K&L. There are a lot of places full of incredibly knowledgeable people who will help guide that depending on what you want to achieve. So it’s more than just going to the local liquor store or your grocer because you’re not gonna find the kinds of wine that hold their value, go up in value, in locations like that.
Wine-Searcher is the great equalizer. There’s a lot of information online. So go onto a site called Wine-Searcher and start poking around, start reading about what sounds interesting, what wines have you had recently that you’ve enjoyed? And then start to do some research. What else is out there that’s similar? And start to understand producers and regions and vintage variation, and these things all sort of come together. And then you can start doing some investigating on how do you source these wines? And they’re accessible. They’re accessible to everybody. Everybody’s online. My retail is online, and there are a few people who are in a position such as myself, where we really enjoy the conversation and helping people build a collection that expresses their interest, but really is personal and more meaningful to them in the long term.
I would say just don’t just start throwing darts at a board, walk in and start buying the most expensive bottle that you see, and think that you’re doing the right thing. You’re not building with any purpose. But I think it’s also important to develop a relationship with somebody who understands what your goals are. I may like certain things that you don’t, and you may like certain wines and regions or producers that I don’t really care for, but that doesn’t mean that I should steer you away from them. It just means that we should have an informed conversation to make sure that you really know what you’re getting and to know the full picture.
People will stay in their lane because that’s what they’re comfortable with. A lot of collectors will only focus on either California or Bordeaux because that’s what they were raised on, or that’s what they’re comfortable with and they don’t want to have anything to do with other regions. And I think that’s a shame. You want to have somebody around you or a group of people — tasting groups are wonderful — but people who will help broaden your knowledge base. So it’s a long-winded way of saying that there’s information out there, but you really, I think, should have a relationship with somebody, a retailer who can help you. They’re out there.
Stephan Shipe: The searching and the research is a lot of where the passion comes from, right? That’s the exciting part of the search.
Walker Strangis: I have a ton of old catalogs from my auction days and I took a look at some of the estimates of some high-end collectible wine from 20 years ago versus where they are today, and then where things were also about six years ago and where they are today, as a way of highlighting that the changes that people talk about — wine, collectible wine, outpacing the DAO and all these amazing performances — and a lot of that has now been taken out of the market. Those price increases are probably not gonna happen again because there was such a fervor, such intense enthusiasm coming at the market really when the Chinese tariffs came down.
So the Chinese market opened up and that changed everything fundamentally. And then even before that were new highs in the market, starting at about ’07, ’08, maybe a little bit before that, but that’s when we saw extreme changes in the market. Prices were skyrocketing, and I remember the discussions at that time were really centered around, is this sustainable? What are we witnessing? And people with cellars wanted to sell because they wanted to capture this amazing energy and these prices. And everybody sort of was waiting for those prices to start to tick down and it never happened. And then all these cellars started to come out and we would see amazing rare bottles from all over the world were coming into the auction market and people were paying huge sums.
And then that sort of led to more speculation, because then people are thinking, okay, well, who are these producers? What are they doing now? So I’ll start buying them now, current release. So you start to buy nines, tens, elevens, twelves in the market, buy them on release, and then hold onto them for 10 or 15 years, which is where we are now, and expect them to achieve that same kind of price growth. And you just don’t see it. And now, even today, if you were to buy Bordeaux en primeur, it is a wildly different market than if you were to have purchased en primeur in the eighties. You would have experienced a 4x growth if you bought en primeur in the right kind of vintages in the eighties and sold them today.
But if you buy today, you’re never going to see that kind of growth. The market just doesn’t bear it out. And prices certainly en primeur will come down. So instead of buying a year and a half or two years before the wine gets released, thinking that you’re buying it at value, I tell people just to wait until they hit the market, because then they’re usually gonna come down a little bit. This is Bordeaux specifically. They’re going to be a little bit lower than the en primeur prices, so why not buy it then when it’s in the market? And that would be for the consumer. For the collector, you have to be really selective.
The market has just changed so much that I think that it’s even more important now to focus on just buying what you like to drink, because we’re not gonna see the same kind of growth that — even in the nineties, if you were buying in the nineties and you sold today the right kinds of wine, you would have made a very nice return. With some exceptions, it’s just not possible today. We’re not seeing that.
Stephan Shipe: I know you don’t have a crystal ball on that, but are there any wines you’re looking at now and say, if there was one that may go up in value that would go against that trend…?
Walker Strangis: It’s not tapped out, but it’s within regions and producers and names that are very well established. It’s primarily in Burgundy and in Champagne. There are certainly things that you could chase in Bordeaux, but it’s primarily Petrus, Le Pin, Ausone. They’re known quantities. I think where the real opportunities are are in Burgundy, but we’re talking about so much speculation is driven by a perception of scarcity. In Burgundy, there’s actual scarcity.
You may find a wine where a winemaker made a single barrel of something, and that’s for the entire world. In Bordeaux, you’re looking at a hundred thousand bottles. That just doesn’t exist in Burgundy. So yeah, I think that the known names in Burgundy are the things to buy and to hold onto, because there is always going to be growth. There will always be demand, regardless of where the global economy is or what’s in favor and what’s not in favor. There just is not a lot of it. And then even within Burgundy, there are some things that — they’re not meant to age. There are really wonderful wines that you should not buy a lot of, only if you are going to drink them within a couple of years. But I would say within Burgundy there are those names and there are those regions, those producers, those vineyard sites that are a safe bet. That’s where I would focus.
Stephan Shipe: Perfect sense to me as an economist. We like scarcity. As we wrap up today, if someone listening to this says, I’m gonna go online, we’re gonna start doing some research, give us one or two — what are the tips out there?
Walker Strangis: So foremost among the mistakes people make — and this reveals a lot about me — don’t chase scores. Don’t go out and see a hundred-point score that somebody assigned to a wine and think that that is the right thing for you to collect. And then related to this, sort of on the flip side, is don’t be afraid of some wines that either don’t have scores or get lower scores from critics, because their palate is not your palate.
There’s a whole market for wines with considerable age on them, and let’s just say that that’s wines more than 20 years old. I think that there’s a very serious part of the collecting community — passionate wine collectors — who look for those things, who want them. They will pay a premium for wines with age, with great provenance, because that’s critical. A lot of people who are just beginning the process will say, oh, this critic thinks that old wine is no good, or I don’t know anybody who’s drinking those things, it can’t possibly still be good. So you have to do your own research and be informed.
And I think another common mistake is going too heavy into one area, one region, one producer, before you really know what you like. It’s a common mistake to start buying Bordeaux and California. Let’s just say California cabs in the last 10 or 15 years are a very different animal than they were 30, 40, 50 years ago. I see a lot of people who will spend a great deal of money on California cult wines that they either won’t enjoy the fullness of their time drinking and enjoying wine — their palates will change — and these wines can be a little bit assertive, to put it mildly. And if you like those things, great, but understand: don’t go too heavy into any one category, because your taste may change. You may move away from something. And Napa is one of those areas that people tend to go really heavy in, and then they discover over time that they’re not in love with it anymore. So take your time and be purposeful with it, but allow your palate to change.
Stephan Shipe: Those are great tips for someone starting off there. Thank you so much for coming on today. Learned quite a bit there about the world of wine collecting. I appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day.
Walker Strangis: Yeah, thank you very much.
Outro
Stephan Shipe: That’s our show. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.
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