Tag: wine

In this office quiet, with now NO sounds but the pushes of these laptop keys, I see the day that takes stage in just under 30 minutes for me, everyone I’m working with.  Counting today, 4 days left in this industry.  FOUR.  Can’t believe it.  What brought me in?  I remember in ’06, just wanting to make a couple extra bucks in a tasting room, I saw literary qualities in what I poured at St. Francis, and started blogging about wine and writing about what I tasted in some poetic and theatrically narrative form, I guess.  But how did I get sucked in?  To wineries like the other Sonoma Valley spot (May 2012-Jan. 2015), the Dry Creek fiasco before that (end ’10-March 2011), and too many more to count.  Guy I work with now I think has been at more wineries than me.  Didn’t think that was possible.  And whether he has or hasn’t doesn’t bloody matter.  It’s indicative of the industry, not him, not me, not anybody.  It’s the atmosphere, the anatomy of wine’s industry and “business”.  What kind of business is so indifferent and eager to let people leave?  I don’t get it, to quote my father, talking to him right after my son was born about how a winery wanted to hire me but refused to meet my wage demands which were anything but painful or unreasonable, and offered no benefits package.  He and I both said, “What’s the motivation for working for a place that does that?  And, in the negotiating parcel of the relationship?” Still don’t have an answer for this one.

Was reading up on Anthony Bourdain the other day, and learned that he wrote some book, a tell-all I guess you could say, about restaurant life.  Do I want to do the same with wine’s industry?  I think so then I back off then I don’t know, and do I want to give them that much of my creative life?  Then another side of my senses set say YES.  Take it all back, all the 12 years you gave to those drones and clones.  Do I start now, and work backward?  Do I start with that first day at St. Francis?  OR, do I start with my first winery memory, driving up that cliffside in Cupertino with Mom and Dad to get their Ridge futures?  Well, I’ll start here, now.  No?  Isn’t hat the most logical approach?  Knowledge in what I’ve seen and lived, heard and felt, feared and overcome since ’06….  Pouring wine, for the first time, just giving the obvious.. something like “Here’s our whatever-vintage Sauvignon Blanc… it has notes of melon, kiwi, honeysuckle, and whatever the fuck…” I don’t talk about wine that way now, of course, just listing “wikipedia descriptors” as I call them.  I go further…. But I don’t want to talk about that.  I will explore what I’ve learned from, in, this “business”.  One blaring bulb of sagacity, all the reasons why you should stay out, and away from it.  Be into wine, don’t be in the industry.  That industry, BUSINESS, has taught me that this is not where you want to be.  12 years of shapely proof and thesis support to put to page…