08/26/2026
Today marks 20 years of marriage for Mike and me. It's also about 16 years of running a business together, which mostly means 16 years of him pitching big ideas and me asking how we're going to pay for them.
Mike's the visionary. He's the one chasing the next collaboration, the coolest seminar, or the new way to make things bigger. I'm the one asking whether we have the budget for it. Somewhere along the way, we figured out how to stay in our lanesâŚhe works the food and wine relationships, I run the financials and the details that keep the wheels on. Twenty years later, that division of labor is still the reason any of this actually happens.
He's also the reason I can usually pick up on the difference between a decent bottle and the ten-year-old White Zinfandel someone left in my rack before I met him.
Twenty years in, we still love each other (most of the timeâŚmaybe not the week of the festival), and I still can't believe I get to do this with my best friend.
These two photos span a good part of the durationâŚthe first shows us, soaked in the rain, at one of our first festivals in Waterfront Park, and the other is from this year.
I like to think weâve come a long way. â¤ď¸â¤ď¸â¤ď¸
