Flicking through the Telegraph Magazine over breakfast on boxing day brought me face to face with a wonderful article entitled ‘The Merlot Magician’ by Richard Grant; an interview with a garagiste winemaker from Bolinas, California, called Sean Thackrey whose built up a niche wine label from the roots of passion, academic curiosity and a desire for excellence. He was was ex-art collector, now turned wine-maker. Not content with producing world class wines, he is also planning to write a history of the craft of wine making.
It was such a truly delightful article that despite the prospect of a family walk in the English drizzle, it left an immediate and positive impression. This character, achieves instant hero status as far as I am concerned, a man to have around that fantasy dinner table where you can pick ten people, alive or dead, to have at a dinner party with you. Why? Maybe because he is doing what I want to do, maybe because he has shunned the traditional and the corporate routes into wine industry and done it his own way, from the perspective of the drinker not the merchant, a principle that could, and perhaps should, apply to any industry.
The highlight of the article was his criticism of the scientific nature of modern wine-making, whereby technicians and computers monitor the progress step-by-step:
…the absence of defects is not the presence of excellence or anything exciting or unusual, and that’s why there is so much boring wine on the market. There’s a saying I love that only mediocrity is always at its best.
There is a lesson in his words and approach to business and life (two intertwined concepts in his case?) and Thackrey is someone who has seemingly taken a maxim that Hugh MacLeod uses a lot (“be the cheapest or be the best“) and has successfully chosen the later.
Reference: The Merlot Magician by Richard Grant; Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 24th Dec 2005
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I was equally impressed by that article. So much so that I scanned it in and kept it as a PDF file. And now that file has corrupted.
Does anyone have a copy…?
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I do have a hard copy on file (somewhere). Will scan and email it for you.
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