How many times do you read something, hear something, talk to someone, and the subject comes around to passion. I'm not talking about some arm-in-arm torrid romance that is splashed all over the screens, large and small. No, I am thinking of something a little more internal. And what I often hear is that someone is finally going to follow their passion. When I first heard it, years ago, I bought into it. Then after years of chopping in the woodshed, I realized it is balderdash! Passion isn't something you follow. Passion follows — and it usually follows after years of painstaking and drudgery-filled labor, the 10,000-hour kind.
I wasn't lured into the wine trade because of passion. It was an accident. I needed to make money to support a small family. I started out in the restaurant business, as a server, and then eventually became a manager of a wine bar. Then I moved on to wholesale and distribution, importing, and the worlds that enveloped that. I spent more than 10,000 hours, and I didn't take a test or receive any medals or post-nominal titles. I simply plied my trade.
I did find out, after a few years, that I had a reasonable aptitude for wine, and I naturally gravitated to Italian wine, because I was interested in Italy and Italian culture. This happened way before I knew anything about wine. But the intersection of my interest in my family's culture and the business of wine provided a throughway to what eventually became a passion. But I didn't follow anything. It unfolded.
Along the way, looking back now, there was a lot of heartbreak. People I thought I knew and cared for used me, and others, to get fame and fortune. It wasn't about passion for them. There was greed, surely. Power was a big draw. Fame? Maybe for some who thought those post-nominals would usher them into a life of privilege and access.
There were also some pretty amazing people, starting at the farm level, or the vineyard. The growers, the cellarmasters, the folks who invested their life and their family's future, and for some, a small (or large) fortune. On a bet. But passion cannot be scaled to size. It is the yeast, not the grape — the small, nearly invisible thing that turns labor into something alive. Leave it out, and all that careful farming, all those years in the dirt, never becomes anything more than very expensive juice.
Absolutely!
In addition to that, what I have found, in my case, is that what we wrap ourselves up into, our "identity," is often about something outside of ourselves. Call it work, profession, livelihood, career, whatever. But when that career has run its course, who are you? What do you have left? The fumes of passion?
You wonder why some people die not long after they retire. Aside from maybe not being in the best of health, or not having been dealt the best set of cards — or chips — with which to play the game of life, did they maybe identify a little too closely with something that is fleeting and mutable?
I hear people talk about a day job and a night job, as if there were two selves living inside one calendar — one paying the bills, one waiting its turn. I never found the line between them. The hours I spent pouring wine for strangers, hauling cases, making shelf talkers at midnight, learning which importer to trust, weren't separate from whatever came after. They were the whole of it. There is no other self waiting in reserve, patient and undiluted, ready to finally take the stage once the clock stops. There is only the one life, and what you did with all its hours — the ones that felt like drudgery and the ones that didn't, indistinguishable at the time. Passion, if it comes, comes for the whole of it. Not some reserved little part of yourself that is waiting in the wings for their moment to shine. The yeast was always going to find the sugar. But there is no fermentation, wild or otherwise, without the years it took to grow the grapes worth crushing.
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