TPC NETWORK NEWS

TPC San Francisco Bay



The PGA TOUR announced earlier this month that it will expand its presence in the San Francisco Bay area through an agreement to manage the David McLay Kidd-designed championship golf course at Stonebrae, a private, gated country club community located in the East Bay hills. The newly renamed TPC San Francisco Bay at Stonebrae will become the host site for the Nationwide Tour's new Stonebrae Classic, scheduled for March 30-April 5, 2009.

Read the complete press release >>

Reading the Green

Accurately reading the contour in the green is the necessary first step to holing a putt. Additionally, reading a green properly is essential in determining the line and speed of a putt. Golfers tend to under-read the amount of break and miss most of their putts on the low side of the hole. This is why the low side has inherited the term “missing on the amateur side” while the top side is coined the “missing on the pro side.”

Here are a few ideas to consider when reading greens.

All greens have undulation.

Pay attention to the low spots for these are dead giveaways to the slope.

Look at the green as you approach from the fairway.

You will see slopes better from a distance.

Once it is time to step on the green, mark your ball and stick a tee in the ground behind your mark (Do this only if your mark isn't going to interfere with anyone else's putt). The tee will allow you to clearly see where your ball is when surveying the putt from other angles. If it doesn't slow down play, look at your putt from four angles; behind the ball and hole and on the right and left sides. Make sure you are at least 15 feet behind the ball when reading the green from down the target line. This will give you the best chance to see the slope. Also, it is helpful to get your eyes as low to the ground as possible. Ask yourself where the water would drain? Take a few seconds and walk to the side of the putt. Ask yourself whether the ball or cup is higher. This will tell you if the putt is up or downhill. Take a few more seconds (time permitting) and walk behind the cup again making sure you are at least 15 feet behind the hole. Sometimes you will see the slope better from behind the hole and sometimes you will see better from behind the ball. Generally speaking, you will see slope better from the low side of the putt looking back up. Keep these helpful pointers in mind next time you are playing and you will become a better green reader and you will start making more putts.

TPC Wine Guy: Is Wine an Investment?

We all know (well, I think we all know) that wine’s a great drink. But is it also a great investment? Traveling from club to club this was a question I was asked at almost every TPC last year, and I have to confess, at the time I really didn’t know the answer.

But then I’m a wine drinker, not a collector. It’s a kind of article of faith among wine writers that we must never suggest that wine might be worth buying solely for the purpose of selling on. Even so, if it really is a good investment, why not? Maybe you can just sell a bit of your investment and make the rest pay for itself?

Because plenty of people are getting seriously excited about wine as an investment. In the US the value of wine sold at auction rose from $66m in 2003 to $190m by the end of 2007. And from early 2004 to mid 2007 the average value of fine wine (measured by Wine Spectator magazine) rose 79%. Compare that with the 29% rise in the Dow Jones over that time and you can see why people are getting keyed up. In fact, 2007 was a particularly juicy year for wine investment. Last year the Liv-ex 100 (a wine investment index) recorded growth of 39%, outstripping almost all comparable investment classes. One of the wines within that index – Chateau Lafite – almost doubled in value.

Incredibly, some people are even arguing that these gains still don’t quite reflect how well wine does as an investment. James Fogarty of the American Association of Wine Economists (seriously, it exists) recently published a paper arguing that we underestimate the value of wine as an investment. Although the costs of trading and storing wine are very high, gains on a wine portfolio are very rarely taxed so that on average they tend to return more of their total gross gains than either equities or bonds. Also many ‘share index vs. wine index’ comparisons don’t take into account the fact that investors only ever invest in the very best, most bankable wines, whereas they drink up the poorer vintages that drag down the overall figures. Fogarty also looks into the complex world of Modern Portfolio Theory, showing that even if wine has lower returns and higher risks than shares, historically its properties mean it can still improve the portfolio of an investor with a good spread of investments.

If that kind of thing tickles your interest you may be interested in a book with one of the unlikeliest titles: ‘Wine Investment for Portfolio Diversification’. Author Mahesh Kumar says ‘I'm not suggesting you don't invest in stocks, bonds or real estate,’ but argues that ‘having wine in there can increase the overall expected return of the portfolio, and reduce overall risk of the portfolio.’ This is because of the very attractive ‘Sharpe ratio’ of wine investments and the fact that wine prices very rarely move in tandem with the prices of shares, bonds or property. So that those invested in both enjoy something of a mathematical ‘free-lunch’ on the portfolio as a whole.

But a word of warning. The old line ‘the value of your investments can go down as well as up’ is especially true here. This is the wild west of investment and whilst the maths shows some great investment performances from wine for the last 20 years, it’s far from assured that they’ll remain the same for the next 20. And in several markets these investments have attracted fraudsters. www.investdrinks.org is a website detailing a litany of lost deposits and empty pockets of those who invested in dodgy schemes over the years.

My tips?

• This is a fun investment that you’d be as happy to drink as to sell
• Make sure your 401-K and mortgage are fully sorted first
• Buy the wine yourself and store it in a professional wine storage facility or temperature controlled cabinet in its original (unopened) cases
• Look to buy wine at auction, especially if you can find good deals
• Do your research with magazines like Wine Spectator and Decanter

And if you like, you can always get in touch with me through your TPC and I’ll be happy to give you a little advice on the way.

Happy wine buying,

Joe Fattorini
TPC Wine Guy