Vocation, Vocation, Vocation

In this crazy world, there’s more than enough noise for you, if that’s your cup of tea. The ability to filter is of utmost importance for a number of reasons, perhaps mainly for sanity maintenance. If you can keep your head clear, you can accomplish just about anything. Picture Neo dodging bullets with that far-off look on his face, like either a Boddhisattva or an idiot savant. Be that, and your efficiencies will come into line, and you’ll swat your emails, your problems, your projects off course like so many horseflies. (note: Trust me – East Coast horseflies in particular don’t give up after one swat – but the analogy was invigoratingly satisfying).

It bears to reason that in your job, product knowledge has a relative component to the point above because when you’re peddling wares or ideas, you have not only boatloads of extracurricular data in your head fighting for airtime but scads of information you’ve picked up to help you perform your task as best you can. The way to handle my husband just texted me that the water heater has died in tandem with this microprocessor does not run on biodiesel despite what a blogger told me is fairly simple: read a kajillion self-help books on meditation and organization. Right? Naw, not necessarily. One answer among several, though, is to wake up in the morning with a firm grasp on what one does for a living and embrace getting better at it.

It’s not about the cache of where you work (location, location, location) but rather what you do and improving upon it (vocation, vocation, vocation). Do you have a gig as a host at a shi-shi bistro? Will you ignore me, the guy who tips 30% because I hate math and would rather just round up to the nearest ten buck increment, or will you dispense with the iPhone and greet me like it’s the last conversation you’ll have before being interred in Gitmo? I’m not a good employee because I aspire to rule the world a bottle at a time, but I got to CEO by bull__ing with the best of them, acting like there would be no other place I’d choose to while away a shift, including bed. And 9 of 10 customers surveyed afterwards preferred this saccharine antic. The 10th was a masochist and preferred rudeness (see iPhone texting, glazed-eyed apathy, etc.).

I was on the other side of the hill today (Napa) taking an exam under the watchful eyes of the Society of Wine Educators. Wish me luck, and if you can mentally manipulate ScanTron readers from a distance, feel free to bend to your will the machine about to mark any of my answers as incorrect. Cheating is OK if it employs Star Trek techniques. Anyway, I came back to the Sonoma side and idled into a very famous tasting room. What do I have now, 5 or 6 wine business cards? I ask about industry comps and upon acceptance, deal her the Jack in my poker hand. She’s been around, 20 years my elder, and by default earns a great deal of my deference. I’m just genteel like that. But it starts to go haywire from an informational standpoint, and you’ll see the impact of her ‘tude as we go along here. I remark that the driveway was the longest one I’d seen since Highway 128. She glowers. I was just sayin’. I wasn’t sayin’, you know? I say that the place is just huge, huger than I’d expected, and that I was there to taste some wine from a renowned winery after having opened one of their early-’80s zins and being impressed with its ageability. She’s nonplussed by my proferral of props. I’d expect some warmth on that one.

She says this is a multi-generational, tiny winery. I ask how much they produce. She says 250,ooo cases. M-hm. Tiny.  She takes the spit bucket away from me and offers a stainless steel martini shaker, saying that they don’t allow spitting into spit buckets. Not in those words, but hence another disconnect. She pours a pinot for me, and here it gets good. 1) “Pinot noir is a Rhonal varietal.” Come again? I asked thrice for clarification/verification and nearly got a spanking. nkay. Who the hell took my world away? Then 2) “How does this compare to your pinot?” Apples/oranges? Whaddya mean? (And she’s wont to repeating her questions without rephrasing, which is like reasoning with the Headless Horseman.) “I mean, is the finish spicy?” So you’re asking if my pinot has a spicy finish? Well, yes. Erm, I use Dijon clones, and this is clearly of Pommard, and it doesn’t make sense to compare dissimilar pinots except on their own merits, and your question about spicy finish seems to be one of quality and I’m just confused by this line of questioning…. More silliness ensues, but she’s really a rude person. I taste an ’08 cab franc, and we go on to, as she puts it, “the reserve”. What does that mean? From a technical standpoint, what – oh, this is a totally different varietal, OK – so anyway, back on the rails, are we talking about barrel selection, time in oak, bottle ageing, what connotes “reserve”? Answer: “From a technical standpoint, it means this is what the winemaker wants to call reserve; it’s his special wine.” (repeat the Q & A, seeking a rephrased answer – to no avail). She hands me a receipt, even though it totals $zero (comp – thank you), and wants to know if I’d like to take a brochure.

I hightail it out of there, never to return. But not without telling her that I’d diligently seek out the heritage of pinot noir as indigenous to the Rhone Valley!

Education is key. If you’re going to carry the overhead of a tasting room, you’d better hire people that know wine. Your visitors can absolutely slay your winery by word of mouth in the blink of an eye. I don’t care how many hundreds of visitors you get every week. Let’s understand what’s in our own backyards and promote California wines to visitors in a knowledgeable and professional manner. That will keep the numbers where they need to be, rather than be subsumed by the $5 South American plonk taking over our marketshare. Vocation, vocation, vocation.

The Value Wine Debate

I just read a headline stating that in 2010, the wine business managed to get back onto its feet. Pause for reflection. Keep pausing. OK, back to it.

The question I have is: “For whom?” In the multimedia complex, we’re given statistics all the time about which movies are successful, which TV shows are hitting it big, which singles are tearin’ up dance floors…Stop and think about how that happens. First of all, huge marketing dollars need to be thrown at the media for a product, tangible or otherwise, to get noticed. Secondly, technology dollars need to be leveraged in order to present the populace their choices along with the respective means to chime in. Nielson ratings – where do they come from? The explanation goes beyond the scope of this post but, suffice it to say that both marketing and tech bucks fuel that mechanism. Advertising is enormously expensive, and it needs to be for any message to rise to the surface of a very loud and crowded chamber of minds both eager to be told what to embrace while concurrently being bludgeoned into passivity and overload. The spotlight is more of a strobe light, so its bulb has to draw a lot more wattage than ever before to justify a palpable glimpse of who/what is standing beneath it.

It’s the same with any product in the West. Ever wonder why the barcode came into play? Yes, it’s for trackability. It’s a wonderful inventory tool. It manages sales and records product success, assuming success is equivalent to the consummation of the production-purchase flow. It also plays a subtle role in the consumption paradigm, though. You see, the barcode implies viability, and products wearing it engender a feeling in consumers of tangibility and merit. Sumpm with a UPC code gots tha bona fide, am I right?

Now, I’m not an economist but I am a recovering economics grad student. I’m also a member of today’s cleric underground, or one who reads for joy and upon whom many of society’s norms is formulated, believe it or not. Wanna stage a revolution? Get to the pleasure-readers first. It won’t be disgruntled proletarians wielding pitchforks that mastermind your local coup or foment any considerable shifts. All I’m saying is that – and here we go, Christian’s trademark way of circuitously bringing Socratic process to its whimpering knees – the definition of value is unfortunately perpetuated by quantitative consuption data, by what people buy. The population chooses what to buy based on what is presented to them as what’s prudent to buy. You see a circle forming here? I love it – it fits like a glove with my earlier observations on consensus consumption. But it aggravates me to no end that consumers, the fuel of our economy, are being continuously fed the notion that if it’s cheap, and if Joe Blow bought it, then it must be the right thing to do.

Oh, would that I were an Argentinean winemaker with a billion under the mattress.

I’m Gen X and proud of it. I’m not bitter or disenfranchised. I’m disappointed, yes. But I’m equipped with a solid understanding of personal responsibility, foresight, and that Ross Perot brand of pull-up-the-bootstraps-ness. Life is what you make it, and all that…But you see, Gen X has the built-in role of shepherding progress as the crumbs of insanity are sprinkled over the collective salad of non-Democratic countries facing the Big Brainwash, of corporate ex-pats facing the letdown-reality of Walmart setting up shop in Costa Rica, of thousands of cubicle farms collecting dust from sea to shining sea. We’re the entrepreneurs hoping to stem the tides of big buck squanderage and pension wastage. We’re the state of the union, or at least a pollyanna iteration of the what-could-be barometer reading on feudal-state mitigation. I’m not wearing a cape – just a satisfied grin brought on by a glass of organically produced wine and an expression of humility.

So on to the wine topic at hand, if the people continue to ignore our beloved “Buy American” think and continue to aimlessly spend their dollars on the value propositions meted out by big-box purchasing agents, we domestic winemakers have to do things differently. (So I am.) Is a “value wine” necessarily going to be the $3 whatever-stuff? Is it really? Value, I propose, is not embodied in the cheap but rather the bang-for-the-buck coupled with quality. I can’t realistically seek a wine value, spend $5, drink some, and go to bed without a sidecar of Alka-Seltzer. I can’t. I’m a wine nerd, but I promise you, you can’t either, unless you repeat this insane exercise a few times and subsequently determine that you’re just not much of a wine drinker. And if that’s the case, you’re not a Regularian, but thanks for reading anyway.

A wine value is – and I do not need to apologetically qualify this statement as “just my own…I’m sorry but…what do I know…” – this is just empirical! – a wine value embodies great quality and fair price. Note the use of the term “fair price” rather than “deeply discounted” or “rock-bottom”. Wine producers are, more times than not, pouring their entire resources into what they do, and their families are as well. Show me a 3-buck bottle that’s tasty and worth the carbon footprint it took to procure it and I’ll show you a 3-mile bridge I built that I’ll sell you for $100.

For those that just want an alocoholic beverage made from grapes that’s cheap, good on ya. Get the South American stuff at your local grocery store and tell yourself you’re a connoisseur of the finer things, knowing all the while that it’s just another ___mart way of being, that your wine was made by robots and filled with chemicals and that it’s nothing more than “a product” or “a SKU” or “a certain number of inches of shelf space”. But if you’re just out to catch a certain flavor of buzz, please be a productive member of society. For those that seek something special that delivers a lot of value and is in touch with the costs of bringing that wine to your table while maintaining a reasonable grip on economic reality, welcome to the world of Wine Regularians. We are unafraid to pair our wines with pizza. We don’t drive 50 miles for a jar of mustard. We like independent arts as much as Hollywood eye candy. We will pay $100 for $100 worth of wine without haggling. We will share our findings when we encounter ridiculously affordable wines also. We spit when we taste, and we thank the winemakers who share their “babies” with us for free. And we don’t say, “Fill ‘er up; red, white, I don’t care.”

Namaste – and organic wines to all. Thanks for stopping by.