I was in my Italian store the other day, straightening up the shelf talkers. A young man was in there and he was looking intently at wines. He’d just passed his WSET level 2. He was so proud he told me three times. Bless his heart! His fiancé (which he told me several times and emphasized w/one “e”) he reported, was encouraging and also proud of him. “Follow your passion!”
Anyway, he was having a pizza party with him and their friends and wanted to have some fun. I talked with him a little but I got the sense that he had everything under control and didn’t need me butting in.
I say it like that because, being the observer, I’m very sensitive to when elders interject their experiences and slants on things to the younger generations. There is this older fellow in the gym who really loves to talk about himself and his life experiences with his trainer. The trainer is very nice to him, but what about the anecdotes will alter the journey of the young trainer’s life? I mean, really!
But in today’s world where the truth is subject to interpretation, I could imagine it would sound like I am bullshitting someone, telling them all this stuff about the place, the people, the wines, the harvests, some going back to 1977. Really, I was looking at a bottle of Copertino and thought about the first time I’d had that wine, straight from the pump into my bottle in Puglia in 1977. Who in hell is going to believe that?
Oh, I could press the issue, on the floor. But that was never my style. I was always a soft sell. Gave the buyer a way out if they wanted/needed it. I’d follow up, follow up and follow up again, until I got the “go” sign from them. No need to press the grapes fully on the first try. I’d get the juice out of them, eventually.
But on the floor of a retail store, where people are hurried and have a thousand things on their mind, they need a fast answer or a quick three-word quip. “Dry, fresh, clean!” that’s all. That don’t want to know when it went from malo to lactic.Right before I retired, I was interviewed (and quoted) in a trade journal for a Prosecco article and in it was mentioned one of the big sellers in the company I worked for. When the article came out, I got an email from the HR dept. The person who sent me the email had a familiar last name for the company. Come to find out said person was a child/grandchild of the men who ran the company. They explicitly told me that in the future, I was not to offer any interviews or information/opinion about any of the wines we distributed without their first consenting to the transcript and the answers. In fact, they recommended I just refer anyone to them for further information. They wanted to make sure no information passed to the press that would send the wrong message (or criticism) about our brands.
As we say in the South, “Well, shut my mouth!”
Mind you, at the time, I was an expert in the particular subject I was interviewed for. I told them “Sure, no problem.” The reality was that I was out the door in a few weeks and nothing further was going to happen in that regard while I worked there.
I decided to check out this person. So, I looked into their socials. On Twitter, this person displayed themself in a rather skimpy and revealing cocktail dress at some fancy bar/ disco, dancing their heart out. I thought it corporately incongruous that this person, while at work, was holding themselves up as some version of the virtue police for the company. But in their private time, well, another story. I passed it off as a bit hypocritical, but seeing as I was dealing with a nepo-baby, par for the course.
All this to say, I’m learning in my private life to shut the hell up and let the others go on about things. My current mantra, given to me recently by a 30-something, is “You don’t know anything about my life!”
To wit, butt out. If they want my advice, I reckon
they’ll ask for it. Of course, that’s if I don’t have my cloaking device on at
the time.
