Musings on Ethics, Selling Wine, and New Years Resolutions
(by Joel Mitchel)

  The day of New Year’s Eve is the second busiest day in the store (The day before Christmas is the busiest). We generally do a normal week’s worth of business in one day. Yes, it’s rather hectic. In the middle of it all, an employee told me that a woman in the wine room needed help with a special bottle. We talked. She was going to a big bash where everyone else would ring in the new year/century/millennium (sic) with top quality Champagne. The problem was that she didn’t care for Champagne, but she wanted something excellent to celebrate with. Something big and bold. She was eying a bottle of 1983 Chateau Lafite Rothschild!

    I might have been happy to sell her a $200 bottle of wine and put a nice little profit in my pocket, but doubts surfaced in my mind. I thought about the hoopla of New Year’s Eve as the ball drops on the TV screen. At a party, it’s noisy and bright. People are excited. It can be emotional. I then thought about the Lafite. Big and bold? Never! Lafite is the most delicate, refined wine of the first growths. It rarely stands out in blind tastings. It shows its considerable charms in a quiet, unhurried, less bright atmosphere, preferably over a fine meal, where there is time to contemplate its nuances and subtleties. A New Year’s Eve party? No way! On the other hand, perhaps she would enjoy it more because she knew it was Lafite. Even if it was less appropriate. Still, the thought didn’t sit well.

    I ended up talking her out of the Lafite and into a 1990 Ridge Montebello Cabernet, a big and bold wine of top quality at half the price. I had broken the cardinal rule of selling: always sell up; never sell down. Yet I felt better. But I couldn’t get the incident out of my mind.

    Later that night (much later - I didn’t get home until after 11 PM), I sat with my wife in front of the TV sipping Champagne and munching on the wonderful tray of goodies she had put out. As the time ticked down to minutes, then seconds, I asked her if she had made any New Year’s resolutions. She thoughtfully answered that she had decided to try to be nicer to people. Not in the big ways, which are pretty hard to do. But in little ways. “Little kindnesses” she called them.

    It wasn’t until later that I gave that some thought. And it wasn’t until the next day when I again reflected on selling the customer a more appropriate bottle at half the price that it struck me. Had I inadvertently performed a little kindness? Perhaps it was just exercising my philosophy that if you sell someone a delicious wine at a price at or below their target range instead of trying to get them to spend more, they’ll appreciate it and come back to you the next time they’re looking for a bottle. Or maybe it was just doing the right thing.

    Little kindnesses. It’s hard to be kind when the other driver is inconsiderate, inattentive or downright dangerous; when the woman at the next table in an upscale restaurant is gabbing on her cell phone; when the potential customer just wants to namedrop impossible-to-get wines, shows no knowledge of or appreciation for quality wine, and probably walks out with out buying anything.
    Little kindnesses. Will they make the world a better place? Will they make statesmen out of politicians? Will they reduce racial and other intolerance in this country? Will they reduce the ethnic hatreds we see in Africa (Hutus and Tutsis), the Balkans (Christians and Muslims), and the Middle East (Arabs and Jews)? Probably not, but they are a start.

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