My synopsis of a 40-year (well, nearly) journey in wine. Once upon a time in Stockholm, my hometown, I first came into wine by collaborative effort with my best friend to crack into his mother’s ‘home-fermented’ rosé, a yeasty concoction that nevertheless provided the 'lift' of alcohol that we were so eager to harness in our teenage explorative phase. Years later, a trip with my father to the Finger Lakes in upstate New York (yes, they grow grapes there, to perhaps modest international acclaim) etched a spell-binding image of autumnal vineyards in my brain. Encouraging a budding interest, my mother swapped the Bruce Lee biographies for wine books on the birthday list. Fast-forward, my lovely wife took me on wine tours in South Africa in the late 1990s and gifted me with my first professional wine course, at Leith’s School of Food and Wine in London. Having got through a decade of gratuitous wine consumption whilst working in equity research at HSBC, Bear Stearns and Cantor Fitzgerald (LinkedIn profile), getting more serious about wine was overdue. I attended tastings, harvests (Grape Escape - personal story) and embarked on a series of courses at London’s Wine & Spirit Education Trust, culminating in the completion of the WSET Diploma, the stepping stone to the Master of Wine qualification. Following another ten years in banking with Credit Suisse, during which time my wife, two daughters and I arrived in Zurich, the time was as ripe as a TBA Riesling for a switch to my new career, combining finance with wine. The finance part of this combination addresses the fact it is a serious and proven investment proposition. As for the wine part of the equation – though backed with an academic qualification, it continues to be a passion! Skål!