wine

The 30th generation winemaker Marchese Lamberto Frescobaldi was raised on the stories of his eminent ancestors who have produced wine in Tuscany since the beginning of the 14th century. They were explorers, musicians, scholars, bankers and politicians, trading with European courts and supplying wine to royalty and the papacy, as the family archive reveals in documents dating back to the 1200s.

One of the main risks associated with so-called “passion investing” is in its name—the high level of adoration and emotion involved, which sometimes takes the place of rational decision-making.

James Haithwaite, a classic car specialist and director at First Names Group, tells of one collector who had his heart set on a classic Mercedes-Benz Roadster and was set to throw down $1.5 million without an inspection—largely because he liked the colour (green).

It was over a century ago that 17-year-old Philip Bargetto first came to California from the village of Castelnuovo Don Bosco, in the northern Italian region of Piedmont. “My family has been in the wine business here in this country since 1890,” says John Bargetto (pictured, left), the fourth-generation of the family and director of winemaking at the eponymous business. In 1909 Philip’s brother John joined him in California and they set up a winery in San Francisco. “They operated that for about 10 years and then prohibition came in 1919.”