tips. Ones and fives appeared right away, and pretty soon it was just about all fives. The group remained fairly stable, between ten and fifteen people, none of whom were those difficult individuals who insinuate themselves into social events simply to drink for free.
One Friday evening I was pouring for the open tasting when a man from the Elders approached John, who was having coffee with two friends at a table near the cash register. This was where he usually hung out toward the end of the day, relaxing between ringing up folks on their way out and unlocking the front door for them if it was after eight. The coffee was because he didn’t drink alcohol—evidently he hadn’t had a drop since the first of August 1968, the day he had been discharged from the army.
I’d said, “You must have been about twelve.”
“I’m older than I look.”
“That’s because you don’t drink.”
“Oh, I don’t know. For a while I was way ahead of the game. Now I’m probably about even.” He tended to give all the information he was comfortable giving on the first pass. I could see something in his eyes beyond age, maybe evidence of pain he had endured at one time. I had to learn to not ask for details.
The man’s voice didn’t carry over to where I was, but he talked with his hands, gesturing a couple of times toward the wine shelves. John’s hands replied with an assurance that he would look into it. He came over to the regulars and told me there seemed to be a disagreement concerning a certain Leonetti. I said we had a few in the cellar, and if he’d tend to the open tasting I would go down for one.
When I returned, I handed it to him and said it was a hundred bucks. He looked at me, then over toward the man who had asked for it. I told him a hundred was already less than the customer would pay anywhere else. Still he hesitated. I said, “I’ll bet you a nickel they won’t be bothered by the price.”
“These people aren’t bothered by price. But a hundred bucks?”
“More than fair.” I tapped the label of the bottle and said, “That’s what the cellar is for.”
He went over to the man and his wife and showed them the bottle. As the husband reached for his wallet, he looked over to me and gave me a small thank-you nod. I nodded in return. John noticed this tacit exchange as he opened the bottle, then went back over to his friends and sat back down to watch the rest. The husband poured a small sample for each of the Elders. They all swirled and sniffed, swirled and sipped, chatted, then did it again. Then the couple brought the bottle over to us at the open table.
I said, “Well, who was right?”
She frowned. “I think we both missed the point with that other bottle.”
He turned to her. “And it was a little cool.”
“This or the other?”
“The other,” she said. “A little dormant. We should have let it sit more.”
I said, “Maybe it was the food you had with it.”
She said, “Maybe,” and the husband just shrugged. It was the temperature.
The wife set the half-full bottle on our table and told folks to go ahead; she hoped it was a treat.
I said, “Are you sure?”
“We have these other wines to get through, and some of us have to drive.”
After this exchange my situation with John was secure. Before then he hadn’t been clear that in a few years the value of a twenty-five-dollar bottle can more than triple and people will still buy it. Later I pointed out that he wouldn’t buy a top-of-the-line Mercedes, but that didn’t mean the car wasn’t worth the price to someone else. This was another way I got lucky. He was sketchy on selling something at a price he would never pay, and I’d stumbled upon a simple way of making it make sense to him. His understanding had been theoretical—otherwise he would never have hired me—but now he understood it emotionally.
My personal feeling about this whole business is complicated—probably because I haven’t worked it out entirely. It begins with the idea that some wines sell for three hundred dollars a bottle, and even though I have a very good palate, no bottle of wine can give me three hundred dollars’ worth of pleasure. For some people, however, part of the experience is in the payment itself. It’s as if they’re giving themselves a gift: Please, let me take care of that for you, it will be my pleasure. Paying for it is part of the pleasure.
So I won’t apologize for the price of any bottle we carry, and I respect the decision a person makes in buying it.
One day a guy about my age came in, having heard about a Bandol we stocked. He bought a bottle for thirty-five dollars and left. If you calculate how long it might take for him to drive home, open the bottle, and take two sips, this was how long it took for him to phone back.
“I bought the Bandol?”
“Yes.”
“How much more do you have?”
“Three cases plus the bottles on the shelves. Maybe forty-four total.”
“Cool. How much more can you get from the distributor?”
“Maybe six cases.”
“I’ll take those too.”
“I can’t do a discount on this.”
“That’s okay.”
I sold all of it to him for four thousand dollars. It wasn’t a mistake, but I wouldn’t do that now.
In a narrow sense my job is to sell wine. In a broader sense, however, my job is to have a selection of wines available, to be able to go down to the cellar and return with a bottle, as I had done with the Leonetti. If that same guy were to come in now, I wouldn’t let him clean me out. I would retain at least a case and sell bottles out of it one at a time. Toward the end of the case I would treat the regulars to a bottle to show them something special. In this broader description of my job, I was growing into that pesky term on my business cards; I was becoming a Wine Steward.
It’s my guess that with any industry, gaining gravity is a self-propagating condition—the better you do, the less energy it takes to continue doing better. It wasn’t long before the wine reps from different distributors started calling me, letting me know when they would be coming through with samples of their latest acquisitions.
They usually appeared in the middle of the afternoon, our slow time, wearing either a tweed jacket or the London Fog type of raincoat worn more like a robe, complete with the secret-agent lapels and dangling belt. They’d open what was usually a reinforced nylon satchel and set out samples from different wineries, then politely wait until I finished what I was doing—helping a customer or stocking the shelves. Then we would set out our pads of paper and calculators and over the next half hour work up an order. A few days later a dozen cases would arrive. To the uninitiated I might have appeared to be involved with underworld college professors.
There is something of a pattern to my workweek, but it’s not easily discerned, especially when you consider the periodic afternoon drives I make to regional wineries to talk to the winemakers. I don’t get to do whatever I want, but it may seem as if I do. Someone of a different moral structure might use this apparent lack of routine to arrange something illicit, but I don’t have it in me to cheat on Marla. True, I haven’t been tested, but I’ve never had a wandering eye, and things in general have been so tight with her—even during our crisis—that I can’t imagine the circumstances it would take for me to be seduced into any form of betrayal. If this means I lack imagination or creativity, I don’t mind. There are worse things to be known for. Worse things to know oneself for.
The day after the attempted car theft was Sunday, but I called our mechanic anyway. I left a message on his answering machine explaining what had happened. An hour later he called back. Tim