Wine is one of the basic economic and cultural modern trends.
The wine market, as well as the stock market, has been growing since World War II for largely the same reasons: spreading affluence, availability of disposable income, leisure time and education. More and more people want to play a game of wine.
But how to do it?
The wine game lies in a quiet intellectual process of pairing wines with appropriate food and company. To a novice wine seems infinitely mysterious and complex.
It's often a subject of speculation and a sign of intellectual superiority and affinity.
Sometimes wine holds a maddening fascination for wealthy people. It gives them leisure time employment too. They pose as connoisseurs using a great deal of details, terms, metaphors but mostly talking nonsense, and mostly in French.
The wine market is great for wine growers, wine distributors, wine collectors and publishing houses that print hundreds of books cluttered with a profusion of specifics: villages, vineyards, years, vintages, regions, etiquette and protocol.
Of course all this information may be useful to a merchant or a collector, along with supporting details, relating to wine's history and folklore.
But most of us are involved in a different kind of business: the business of choosing the right bottle of wine, a bottle that will fit a specific occasion and not put us at risk of a personal financial collapse.
A sound approach to wine, as well as to any business or life situation, consists of three elements, defined in the famous Harward Business School decision making process:
• know what you want
• know how to get it
• know what to do with it after you have it.
In our next episode we will try to answer the question WHAT!
