Me Me Me Me Me
Every year, I donate a few in-home wine tastings to local charity auctions. I think up themes or build stories around the wines being tasted or something. The people who buy the tastings are generally really nice, really rich, and don’t know a whole lot about wine, so its fun. I prepare some background information about the wine and where they can buy it, and if they ask me a question I don’t know the answer to I make something up and they believe it.
I advise against drinking rosé because there’s a compound of iron in the pink pigment that can, over the long term, cause heart arrhythmia.
I don’t actually do that, but sometimes I think about it.
Anyway, I’m giving one of those tastings tonight, and I haven’t had time to prepare. It’s been a tough week, so I’m ‘thinking the theme is going to be:
Screw you. We’re drinking what I want to drink.
It’ll be good. I’m pulling bottles out of the basement — a Chateauneuf, an Alicante Monastrell, a Supertuscan – so it’s stuff I like well enough to buy in bulk. But it isn’t going to be charming, and if my outlook doesn’t improve there’s a strong likelihood I won’t even share.
October 15th, 2011 at 8:34 AM
It could be worse, Tom. I do home and corporate wine tastings with a friend of mine, and we used to donate home tastings to various non-profits. They would be auctioned off, but no one would redeem them. True story. Didn’t make us feel too good.
October 15th, 2011 at 4:26 PM
These particular people paid a ridiculous amount of money for my services and were tons of fun. But I had a call from a lady who’d bought a tasting in an auction, and we talked for about twenty minutes about what I might do, and then she never called back. I’ve always wondered what it was I said…
October 16th, 2011 at 11:44 AM
Why is it when rich people give money to charity it almost always happens in the form of a party for themselves and their fabulous friends? The irony of a gala dinner to help starving children is usually lost on them.
October 17th, 2011 at 11:46 AM
People, rich or not, like to have fun. In a charity auction, they have lots of fun and spend lots more money than they intended. That’s a good thing.
I’m finding that I care less and less about the purity of a person’s motivation, and more and more about the actual actions they take. The fact is, these people ponied up for literally thousands of dollars to spend 90 minutes with me pouring wine for them. I’m a lot of fun, but I’m not thousands of dollars fun. They could call me and pay me $500 and I’d do exactly the same thing.
That economic inefficiency was driven by two things: commitment to the charity itself and the get-carried-away atmosphere of the charity auction. Whether they enjoy their own nobility more than you would consider seemly makes no difference to the charity receiving the benefit, or to me. I hope they felt good enough about it to come back next year and do the same thing.
They’re also tons of fun.