Poppin’ Bottles

Back in dental school, there was one class I had to repeat.

Twice.

In fact, the instructor made it a point to (graciously) fail each and every one of us so that we would be compelled to take it again.

OK, it wasn’t *actually* a real dental or medical school class, nor was it graded in any way. But, it was run by one of the medical school professors and we used a lecture room in the university, so technically it was a class in dental school. 

Dr. C, a man whose wife gave him a trip to Italy to stomp on grapes for his 50th birthday, was a well-known oenophile. For the low price of $80, he put on a 6-week wine appreciation class for second, third, and fourth year medical and dental students.

Each week on Thursday evenings, we would pack bags or picnic baskets with bread, crackers, cheese, fruit, wine glasses (they had to be real glass), and those little stickers you use for price tags at garage sales.  Before class began, we were to label the glasses with numbers, usually 1-6 or however many wines we would be trying on that particular evening.

Dr. C gave us handouts and then began his joyous and fascinating lecture on the region of the evening. He talked about the history of wine growing, the weather patterns, the slope angles of the hills. He told us about the types of grapes and the winemaking processes.

And then he would open bottle number one. Once everyone had a generous splash in their glass, Dr. C would walk us through how to evaluate it. We held it up to look at the clarity, then again with a white piece of paper behind it to get a clear idea of the color.

Then came the swirling. We sloshed the wine around in the glass and stuck our noses right in there, describing the various notes we detected.

Finally, came the tasting. Once again, we took a moment, considering the flavors, the mouthfeel, the level of acidity, and tannins.

We tasted each wine in turn, being careful to leave a little for the last tasting portion of the class.

For the finish, we would taste the wines in comparison to one another. We were supposed to take individual notes here. Writing down the elements that we enjoyed, or noting things we disliked. Making descriptions using the wine aroma wheel, we clarified our instincts with specific profile notes.

I should point out here, that we knew nothing else about the wines other than the country, region, grape, and winemaker.  We didn’t see the label or the price. We had the tools to evaluate elements of quality and we had our own tastes and opinions.

Before closing out the class, Dr. C took a vote.

“Who liked #1 the best?” A few hands would go up, and he would tally the numbers.

 “What about wine #2?” more hands.

He would write down the class favorites, and then came the big reveal.

The name and the price.

A vast majority of the time, I didn’t appreciate the most expensive wine. In fact, some of those were at the very bottom of my list. I most often enjoyed the $15-20 bottle, finding I didn’t always like the $50-70 bottles. 

The biggest shocker came when we did a champagne night. And it turned out that I had had the privilege of drinking Cristal (!!!!). When I looked at my notes after the big reveal, I had written that it had an animal quality…like cat piss. 

I have never listened to a rap song in the same way since.

I am sure that Dr. C hosted these classes from his shear enthusiasm for wine. But I also think he was teaching us an incredible lesson about value. He was teaching us that the price of an item does not always indicate its particular value to you. He was teaching us to develop our own method of valuing something, in this case wine.

Developing a personal sense of value isn’t always easy. There are many ways we make assumptions of value based on cost, even if we don’t personally confer as much value as everyone else.

And this is where I think the FIRE crowd really excels. As a community, we’ve determined that we value things like having our time back rather than a fancy new truck or a 5000 sq ft house in the bougie school district. We can decide for ourselves whether or not the cost is worth it, whether or not it holds value for us.

And, sometimes it does. Sometimes we get value from a high-priced item. Sometimes the expensive wine is your favorite.

The trick is, what Dr. C taught me, is to have a way of personally evaluating something.

-Have you defined it? Do you know the essential elements of what you need?

-Does it meet your requirements?

-Even if it’s not the “coolest” or the newest or the most expensive, does it provide you with what you are looking for?

-If there are more expensive/fancier/higher cultural value alternatives, do they meet your requirements, or are you going along with them because that’s what’s in style?

To be honest, there are many times that I thought I needed to choose the higher cost item because of the value I thought it held. For example, when we returned to the Midwest, we considered buying a house in the “better” school district. Locally, people “like me” (doctors, professionals) tended to live in that area, and the public schools were known to be great.

After searching around, we decided that we would keep our smaller house in the “OK” school district. The value to us was in having the time to actually spend with our kid rather than in living in an expensive neighborhood and needing to work all of the time to afford it. 

We defined what was important to us, not just what everyone else said was important.

Lately, I’ve been checking out Ramit Sethi’s YouTube channel. He has a lot to say about this very thing. That living a “rich life” is an individually curated affair. Nobody else’s definition of a rich life is likely to be the same as yours.  

So, what do you truly value? It’s ok if you love boxed wine and couldn’t give a hoot about the growing region.  I toast you with a reasonably priced (but delicious to me) wine in the backyard garden of my small house in the wrong school district.

And smirk smugly to myself anytime I hear someone talk about poppin’ bottles of “Chris”.