I was never a fan of “complicated” math. However, as a youth, I kept up with the Joneses (my friends and fellow students) in realms academic. Why? Because it was the thing to do, because a psychologist told me to, because my high school guidance counselor urged me to – and, ultimately, because I thought that since I’d been clinically proven to have a left-oriented brain, I’d surely better inundate myself with the math-n-science rigors prescribed by those wiser than myself. One thing about an IQ test or any of the numerous aptitude batteries “on the market” is that, like the written word published online, you can’t believe everything you see. Perhaps the accelerated math-science track I put myself on represented a motivational effort, or maybe my potential, but tell you what – it was so boring to me that I imposed a learning block upon myself all throughout the torment. Given the choice between a calculator and my beloved typewriter, between memorizing the periodic table and penning tomes about Carl Sandburg, you can guess which way I pointed my compass. As humans, we just prefer to do what we love, right? So, as a result, I was a B student – my right brain earned me the A’s and my left brain saddled me with C’s.
Now, C ain’t bad, they always said. It implies that you’ve mastered 70-79% of the material, or at least have found a way to regurgitate it with 70-79% accuracy. That can be construed close enough for jazz. (Jazz, incidentally, was an obsession for me, consuming 2-5 hours of every day and garnering me some nice accolades in the trombone world. It sure beat inverting cosecant formulas and splitting hairs!) So then, the A is the apex, right, connoting perfection and all that? B is actually very good in the big picture, unless you’re engaging in the brutal college-acceptance wars as I was. Conveniently or otherwise, Cornell/MIT/Renssalaer weren’t on the financial horizon, so my cumulative B was a good deal and got me where I needed to be.
In the wine world, on the continent of acclaim, in the country of acceptance, within the province of viability and tucked away in that tiny village dubbed marketshare lies a hallowed scroll that rests in a gilt leather case. This revered scrap of rice paper has inscribed upon it but one word: CHOICE. What’s to choose? One – a vintner – is to choose whether a score from a wine critic is going to be a self-identifier or a piece of leverage. Will it toll the death knell? For some, the poor score has, but within that conundrum is the decision about who you’re asking to review your wine. You have to watch what the critics publish, learn their styles, who their heroes are, what paints their wagons red. If you come home with a crappy grade, or what your peers say “nyah-nyah” and claim a crappy grade is based on the fact that they avoided being thrown under the bus, your choice doesn’t have to be whether to go back into government work eat a can of worms. You can look at the score and remember that C ain’t bad (we’re assuming you were able to pull a 70, though I’ve only given one of those once myself as the critic you never heard of) and that this number doesn’t encompass who you are as a beautiful person who seeks justice and love and enjoys riding horseback in the silvery moonlight. You can “go git ‘em next time” if you want to. BUT – if you manage to ace the test, remember this as well – it was one critic who handed you a nice rating, and if you’ve done your homework prior to submitting your baby (bottle, that is) to her/him, you will recognize that a 90 one day could have been an 85 the next, or a 94 the following week. Every critic is human, and if you’re in the right place at the right time, that human can brighten your day just as much as if you’d never submitted wine to her/him in the first place.
So, thank you to Meridith May of the Tasting Panel Magazine for giving me a 90 on the Simple Math Cellars 2008 Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon. If there’s any left in the near future, let’s share a bottle. I look forward to reading your insightful words in the July issue. Cheers, Christian
