(SVBWine) - With the New Year's Resolutions on our minds, one related question someone inevitably brings up is "do-overs." If you had a chance to do anything over, what would that be? 

I have more than my fair share but I'll throw out one. It's the story of the young lady who agreed to marry me when I was 21 and she was 18. I thought she was a real keeper and we were in love. She said yes! I was so excited until my brand new fiancé said I had to ask her father and then reality started to set in. What if he said no?

In the evening, I took a bottle of sparkling wine to her home and with my knees shaking, got up the nerve to ask her dad, "Mr Lexon, I'd like to ask you to marry your daughter." That is the way I phrased the question. Of course it was very poor grammar. I wasn't trying to ask Mr. Lexon to marry his own daughter. It was me - I wanted to marry his daughter.

Perhaps it was that impressive elocution, or maybe it was the fact she had just graduated from high school - I don't know which, but he didn't have to think very long: HELL NO YOU AREN'T! His elocution was much better than mine.

The whole scene was actually much worse than that, but in my imagination before getting the hook I thought it was going to be just like a Hallmark movie with everyone living happily ever after. The film was to include me popping a plastic stopper on my cheap bottle of sparkling wine, right at the same moment I asked her father

Instead of a love story, it became a Syfi horror flick. What really happened was a fountain of sparking wine emitted from the bottle opening right as the stopper made a dent in the ceiling. Trying to keep the flow from damaging the couch, I reacted by putting my mouth over the bottle. But instead of stemming the eruption of bubbly, I ended up turning myself into a champagne fountain with wine gushing out of my puffed out mouth and then my nose! Then I awaited her father's decision.

Needless to say that was pretty embarrassing for me, so if I had that whole event to do-over, I would have never asked her to marry me in the first place. I would have instead focused on getting my life on track first. But looking back, the painful truth is her parents were right. They had seen more of life than I, and knew marriage at that stage of our lives would have been difficult if not a complete disaster.

While hard for me to believe, today I'm older than her parents were back on that surreal evening. Age brings perspective that can be applied to life and career. I've never stopped learning and growing, probably because by nature I'm always trying to understand why things are as they seem, how things work, and how to improve. That's why I started the Annual SVB Wine Conditions Survey a decade ago. 

Getting to the Point ....

I'm curious about this business, ill-trusting of what I read in the press, and want to help the business be better. So with this survey, I hoped to tease out for myself what winery owners are thinking and feeling. The survey results are now complete and were returned to the respondents in December.

One of the additions to the survey this year was a winery confidence index. You will read a little more about it when we release the State of the Industry Report on January 21st, but it's a little like the Consumer Sentiment Index.

Without getting into the details of the calculation, the index had about 10 questions that gave response options of positive, neutral, and negative. For instance, one of the factors was "The Economy" and respondents only had to answer how the economy impacted them; positive, negative, or neutral. With a little math we are able to discern where perceived strengths and concerns lie.

The places where the business evidenced the most concern were the impact from imports, and from substitutes such as craft beer, spirits and legalized marijuana. That could be a surprise to some, but I think the industry is showing it's combined wisdom plucking out those two issues.