URSABLOG: The Price of Good Wine

Sitting down at a table for one in a restaurant, I was presented with one of the most astonishing wine lists I had ever encountered: the range and breadth of the wines, the vintages, the logical prices, the curiosity they inspired, both warmed my heart and sent a warning twinge to my liver. The food menu wasn’t bad either.

In recognition that most of us had normal lives and could not simply suspend time itself indefinitely to enjoy the restaurant’s hospitality, there was a tasting menu that matched a series of dishes with different glasses of wine. The cost was reasonable compared with the à la carte menu, and saved ordering a bottle (or five) of separate wines. I had, however, already spotted a particular wine I had never seen anywhere else except on my table (I had once bought three bottles en primeur) and I was immediately placed in a moral dilemma. Despite common sense and rationality, something deep inside me prevented me from going with the tasting menu. I decided on à la carte, justifying it by making mental adjustments to my routine in the months ahead: eat only beans, drink only at home. I needn’t have bothered; it was already inevitable. I ordered the wine.

But was it stupid? On the face of it, yes. I paid more for less, and in the end only drank three quarters of the bottle anyway. I had also shut myself off from an opportunity to taste new wines, explore new foods. I was being supremely selfish: I was indulging only myself, not sharing anything with anyone, not the food, not the wine, not even the experience. I wasn’t even showing off to anyone, or trying to seduce them, emotionally or professionally. Obeying no known law of economics, I had ignored the simplest of cost-benefit analyses. Yes, I was not only stupid, I was crazy. There was simply no justification.

Or maybe not. Crazy is not the same as stupid; there is method – and genius – to be found in madness, as anyone who has followed – and competed in – competitive ship sale and purchase negotiations will know. And stupidity is a lot of the time tied up in moral subjectivity: somebody doing something stupid can simply be the opinion of an observer who would never – for reasons of predjuice, envy, or cowardice – do themselves. And anyway, since when was acting rationally – in the economic, or even the moral sense of the word – always the right thing to do?

Human beings are complex beings, differing from each other in many, sometimes baffling, ways. Society – however organised, however large or small – has to adapt to its members just as much as the members have to adapt to that society. No societal unit is a morally simple place where one specific value – let’s say the optimisation of utility – can serve as the moral compass for everyone.

Each one of us has different histories, motivations, temperaments and desires. If we long for life to be simpler and have a society that is organised – laws, institutions, practices, everything – to one end, whether that end is capitalism, utilitarianism, egalitarianism, utopianism, libertarianism, socialism, or whatever, it would sooner or later turn out to be a world in which complex human beings would not wish to live. Such structures sooner or later  collapse as the members of the society revolt against the shackles put on them, or have their heads turned by the proponents of another point on the moral compass, or simply choose to leave.

I am inconsistent – much to my own irritation, much of the time – and some things I value highly are inevitably in conflict with and contradict other values I may think I have, especially at the planning stage. I don’t think I am completely devoid of ethical or moral values however, it is just that I am not a one-dimensional self-interested “pleasure machine” (although sometimes I sincerely wish I was; it would probably save everybody a great deal of trouble). I admit I suffer from moral dilemmas, but I must also admit that I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t.

We all have different values, and these (according to Landier and Thesmar) can be narrowed down to a core of six: “compassion, liberty, loyalty to the in-group, fairness, authority, and sanctity.” These are not mutually exclusive: all of them matter to all of us to a greater or lesser extent at various times. For each of us some are of greater import than others, and because they change and develop as we move through life, their relevance and importance to us varies as time passes too.

This is inconvenient, and inefficient, for us, our families, the people that we work with and for, and the governments that seek to serve us. But whilst efficiency may be more useful and profitable, it is also unsustainable because for individuals, companies and even countries, pure efficiency is soulless, without depth, and erodes the human spirit. I firmly believe that the human spirit needs freedom: freedom of thought, of expression, the freedom to breathe, the freedom to make stupid mistakes. But we are always already in the world from the moment we are born, and just as we are formed by our environments, we are also agents of change, wittingly or otherwise. We can only live in the place where we happen to be at the time.

We reject the well-meaning initiatives and interventions of others – often made with the best intentions to help us live better lives – most of the time simply because they are not ours. We resent autonomy being taken away from us and are suspicious of change from without. Consequently, we do not always maximise utility when given the choice to do so.

Even in shipping (and especially in tramp shipping) our behaviour is not always simply transactional, despite how it may appear on the surface. All of those six core values come into the picture some way or other. We may prefer a tried and trusted counterparty over a flashy new kid on the block. We may walk away from a deal simply because it doesn’t feel right. We may stubbornly stick to a minor point which suddenly becomes a deal-breaker because we want to make a point. Those who work in the industry know this instinctively (and sometimes play on it to their own advantage). Those outside scoff, or accuse us of having no moral compass whatsoever, or of causing collateral damage, but those outside are usually speaking from a position of ignorance, pomposity or prejudice, of a combination of the three. Life, even in shipping, is not a purely transactional activity. Which brings me back to that bottle of wine.

What was it about that bottle of wine that caused me to rip up the script? Was it pure self-indulgence? I knew it was a great bottle of wine, I had tasted it before, even that particular vintage, but that was not the whole story. Without getting all Proustian about it, memories are important. This memory – although accessing it again was proving to be very expensive – was important. I remember that particular bottle of wine because of where I was, who I was with, the food we had, why we opened it (because it was there, and that it was time for it to be opened) and how it smelt, and how it tasted.

Simply noticing it on the wine list had stirred emotions in me that I thought had long died; it turned out that they were very much alive, but had just been buried. By ordering it, I accepted that they were still there, and still real. Smelling the small drop that they poured for me transported me back through time. By the time I was actually tasting it, I was no longer in the room I was in: I was somewhere else, somewhere happy, somewhere easy, some other place where I thought I belonged.

Was it worth it? Was it worth the cost, both in terms of money and the emotional cost of revisiting, again, what I had lost? Yes, and yes. That time had mattered: it wasn’t just the time, or the wine, it was everything that was wrapped up with it too. It was important. And it was gone.

Did drinking the wine make me happy? Well, it depends what you mean by happy. Certainly the taste was still amazing, it was a wine that I was glad I had chosen in the past, and drinking it again was further affirmation of my choices, and confirmed my memories. But there were other things at play: the wine sent me off, again, in search of times lost, and of lost times. They were wonderful times: full of mystery, laughter, conversation, love and adventure. But by drinking the wine, by myself, I was accepting that those times were gone; we can live in such beauty, but all beauty must pass. And a melancholy ache enveloped me, an ache that can become almost pleasurable in its complex bitter-sweetness, especially when accompanied by exquisite wine.

So, in the final analysis, was it the right choice? Again, yes. I tasted wonderful wine, I relived beautiful times, I regretted the mistakes I have made, I accepted myself in the present, not only as someone who could afford such a wine, but who – through experience – was open to all the wisdom and truth it could bring. Self-indulgent? Certainly. A waste of time and money? Absolutely not. Most things of value are impossible to measure, which makes their loss unaccountable. I paid the price, and willingly.

Simon Ward