Knowing Enough to Drive Off A Cliff

When I was a fledgling wine steward trying to earn my wings, my wine director, aka my boss; aka "such-a-character-he-merits-his-own-book," told us in a wine consultant meeting about this occasional specimen of humanity that comes into ones wine department and plays "Stump the Wine Guy." Being as green as I was all those years past, I felt my defenses go up as I knew my relatively new confidence was held ever fragile by my passion to learn. At this point, I knew I would not be ready if I found myself thrust into a situation where I had to defend my wine knowledge and recommendations.

That gave me the drive to seek out more knowledge and information about wine because as fearful as it made me, I was also excited at the prospect of meeting this challenge. I imagined the sense of pride if I would have felt if I could defend my positions like a debate team creaming their opponents; with methodical, precision strikes and yes, glee. Sadly or I should say, fortunately, I have never had to go to those extremes. The customers I have served since have been a wonderful lot and were eager to learn what I had gleaned from wine makers ,books and the internet.

I have since developed a more mature approach to my methods often giving the customers the benefit that I may also learn something through my discourse with them about wine. It has proven very useful as until now I find that I still can learn one or two new things every other day from my customers.

It was shortly after noon on Wednesday 2/24/2009. GM, I'm sure it wasn't his real name or it was haphazardly abbreviated) walked into my store almost with his chest stuck out (although I think his pot belly was doing a better job) and his hands in his pockets. He was man of average height with a heavy build in his late 40s dressed in an old work shirt and even older blue jeans. He had a bright red baseball cap on, the ones you get when you attend a company function. I saw him from the other side of the store but I did not think much of him as I was heading up to the office to finish some paper work.

In the midst of my tasks, I was paged to come help a customer on the floor from one of the staff. GM was holding a bottle of Beringer White Zinfandel 1.5L. At first, I greeted him cordially and asked how I could be of assistance. The first thing I realized about GM was that he comes uncomfortably close to you when he shook your hand, barely gets your name when you give it and he tells the story of his name like he had rehearsed it a thousand times and still get the punchline to the joke wrong. ("Like General Motors" was the punchline) Okay. sometimes we get drunks here and this guy definitely fit the bill. But instead of removing him from my store, which was well within my rights, I allowed this conversation to continue.

What I thought was a normal request for my assistance turned out to be long drawn out Q&A session about tannins, how blush wine is made, dryness levels, health from wines and other minutia that will test the most patient Buddhist monks. The sad thing about it was that it wasn't even a real intellectual discussion more like a "look-what-I-know about..." while claiming to have had what he thought was rare and expensive wine. (Chateau Greysac is not rare and expensive wine, though it is a good one. I think it was one of the few wines he could remember). He even told me that I was not the wine guy and that I want to be the wine guy. At which I promptly corrected him and proved it by answering two more wine questions he threw at me. The last straw was when he told me the Mouton Cadet had nothing to do with Barone Phillippe de Rothschilde. I went into overdrive and explained the connection and differences between the Pauillac property, Mouton Rothschilde and the Bordeaux AOC Mouton Cadet. I bitched slapped this guy's ignorance to the ground and body slammed his ass out of the ring, metaphorically anyway. Mind you, all this done with a smile on my face masking seething rage at this guy's audacity to come into my workplace, take up almost 30 minutes of my time exclusively (there were other customers waiting), insulting my professional credibility and not having the decency to admit to his own flawed logic.

He did eventually make a decison and bought a Lindeman South Australia Cabernet Sauvignon 1.5L and seemed happy about it. I, on the other hand felt that this was not the "victory" I had wanted to realize when I was staring out in my career in this industry. It was an unfair match-up and GM was outclassed.

It did, however, impressed upon me (after I had calmed down later) the need to educate everyone about this subject. Not just the completely new but this lot which I like to call the KEDOC customer or the "Know Enough to Drive Off a Cliff, the one who is not completely ignorant of wine but has enough information to be dangerous as he can lead others to the join him over that cliff.