Lawyers Just Wanna Make Wine (props to Cyndi Lauper)

I've been a practicing attorney for 30 years now. It is for me a gratifying and intellectually stimulating career. But it is a world of abstraction and symbols. For the most part, when the legal work is done, the papers are signed and filed away and everyone hopes it is not necessary to pull them back out.

Making wine couldn't be more different. I can't think of anything more tangible than wine (well, maybe one thing but unlike wine if you pay for it in 49 states you can go to jail). Taste, touch, sight, smell and, yes, even hearing get engaged. If it is good wine and you are present with the wine, these senses can be really engaged. And if you have some powerful good juice going on in the glass, it will command your attention. I don't suppose the Zen Masters had wine in mind when speaking of mindfulness, but I don't think there is any question that good wine rewards mindfulness.

Combine this sensory engagement with how wine is produced, the sheer physicality of the making of wine. And then combine that further still with the rootedness and struggle of the vine, the prodigious fertility, the historic methods and traditions of juice becoming wine, the sacramental role of wine, all inextricably tied to the endless cycle of nature itself. Clearly, there is some big time mojo at work here.

At its core, winemaking hasn't changed in 7,000 years. One historian joked that maybe winemaking is really the oldest profession (and again, having the distinct advantage of being legal in all states). To top off all of this, the end result, what is in the glass, is deeply connected to that entire process of earthiness, richness, ripeness, rootedness.

No wonder so many winemakers and winery owners are lawyers. It is the opposite of words on paper. It is as real as real gets.

Think I am wrong on this? Well, for starters, how about Robert Parker, the most influential wine critic in the past quarter century? He is a co-owner of Beaux Freres in Oregon. Jess Jackson of Kendall Jackson fame. Tom Stolpman of Stolpman Vineyard. Ross Stromberg, a health care business attorney who poured his wine for me at a lawyer conference and unknowingly started me on this journey.

Many, many others, some famous and some just making a little wine on the side. More than a few are what the French call garagistes, the cars parked in the driveway, the garage chock full of fermentation tanks, barrels and presses.

My takeaway from all of this? Love what you do and do what you love. And, because you will do that 40 hours a week for 40 years, find the opposite of that and love that too.

Cheers,


Dave
Calicaro Wine