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| About Us |
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Lori Lapides is the founder and CEO of ViciVino.com.
She is a trained chef and travel agent and has long dreamed of
combining her two passions in a single business. She also is a long-time entrepreneur,
starting with selling her homemade fudge (Oh Fudge!)
in high school, then running her own bookkeeping business for over 5 years,
then starting and running a mail order gourmet food and gift basket business
(Whet Your Appetite!) from 1990-1996.
She has traveled to many of the world’s great
wine regions, including; France, Germany, New Zealand, upstate New York, Oregon and throughout
California. She earned her culinary and business certificates from Diablo
Valley College in 1998, which included a 7-week externship at a Patisserie in Paris. Lori has
been a volunteer in the local chapter of the Assistance League since 2002.
She and her husband Larry, (who met in the youth group at their Temple) have two adult sons
and a daughter-in-law all of whom love to cook and drink wine.
Lori and Larry are proud owners of 2 cats, Wesley and Jersey and a dog,
Elmer Fudd, who is a Katrina rescue dog.
Lori & Larry at the Wine Bloggers' Conference in October 2008.
Larry Lapides is the VP of Business Development. Ok, really,
he's just along for the ride! He started learning about and drinking
wine at age 11 when his father and uncle started a wine club in the
L.A. area. Since then he and Lori have lived in the Finger Lakes
wine region in upstate New York, the Santa Barbara area, and
currently split their time between the Livermore Valley and Santa
Cruz. Larry has a BA in Physics from UC Berkeley, MS in Applied
Physics from Cornell, and a MBA from Clark University. He has spent the last 17 years doing sales
and marketing in software startups in Silicon Valley.
Some of our favorite things to do are:
• Entertain family and friends, cooking fun menus and pairing food with wine
• Traveling to the various wine regions in California and around the world
• Opening a bottle of wine and cooking for ourselves on a weekend
• Bring a bottle of wine to someone else’s house for a nice dinner
• Play bridge with family and friends and go hiking as much as possible
Lori & Larry during the Avon walk to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.
San Francisco Bay in the background.
We’ve had some memorable wines/dinners, and some great trips to the wine country.
Feel free -- actually, we’d really like it if you did! -- to contribute some of your
own stories on the ViciVino.com blog.
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