The morning after: after touring wine country, Top Company winners rise early to discuss the economy and their businesses.

• Author: Cote, Mike

Touring California wine country should have offered the winners of the Top Company awards a refuge from the market chaos. If only they had left their BlackBerrys and i-Phones at home.

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On what would be declared the worst week in Wall Street history,, executives from the winning companies and sponsors UMB Financial and ColoradoBiz visited vineyards in Napa and Sonoma valleys in October, wining and dining and getting to know each other.

But as much as the group of 20 kicked back on the bus and relaxed, they couldn't help watching the Dow freefall from their phones-and feeling a little like they were fiddling while Rome was burning.

Even if they had managed to push that thought out of their minds, it was there waiting for them the next morning when they convened at 7 a.m. for an economic round-table at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. This year, Bill Greiner, UMB's chief investment officer, wouldn't be making the trip to offer his forecast. He had more pressing duties so UMB CEO Mariner Kemper told him to sit tight.

"We're running an $11-and-a-half billion shop here," Greiner would say a month later. "I was talking directly to clients a lot, two or three at a time. And clients were calling in. I needed to be available."

So Kemper kicked off an informal round-table discussion. A lot more would happen in the weeks ahead, from the federal government taking a stake in major banks to the election of President-elect Barack Obama, with plenty more Dow chaos in between.

The general theme was to plan for tough times and be ready to take advantage of opportunities.

"Consumer confidence is what leads this whole thing. People are pulling back," Kemper said. He noted that September sales figures from major retailers were down between 10 percent and 15 percent in September - foreshadowing the dismal consumer confidence report that would come out a few weeks later.

"The consumer is drawing back," Kemper said. "As a banker, I'm pretty concerned about where this is headed. The big question is: Where is the bottom?"

For upstarts like Alpine Waste & Recycling and LEI Companies, both Top Company winners this year, the big question is access to credit. Commerce City-based Alpine relies on financing to purchase trucks.

"Last year we did a phenomenal amount of borrowing," said John Griffith, Alpine's president. "I don't really know how dramatically the credit market is going to affect us because everything is fine right now. The trucks we...