ConVivio Fiction: Imagining an Alternate History — A Teaching Job
“Have you ever imagined a day that might have put you on a different path — not necessarily a better path, but one that might have been . . . well, interesting.”
Napa Valley Wine Country, California —
“Welcome. I’m happy you could come.” Here at ConVivio Winery, I like to make our visitors feel like invited guests rather than customers. The public tasting room is to the left of this brightly decorated lobby, but these guests had paid for my 3:00 pm. “Estate Tasting”; so I usher them to the right — to the richly appointed Estate Room.
Four couples select high-back oak chairs around a long oak table. I had set each place with six large-bowl wine glasses, a small water bottle, a few apple slices, a salad plate arrayed with wedges of three different aged cheeses, and a dollop of minced garlic/mushroom/olive pâté — all selected to cleanse the palate and provide transition between the wines I will offer them to taste.
Taking my place standing at the head of the table, I wait for my guests to be seated and present the six breathing bottles on the table before me with a practiced flourish. After the first few dozen times, it has become fairly routine and sometimes my mind wanders. As my guests get comfortable in their seats, I flash back over some years to the day that started it all.
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I came to this valley for the first time on a bus from a lesser-known winemaking region: the Santa Clara Valley. My degree in English literature from Santa Clara University had nothing to do with wine but it did prepare me for three important aspects of this job — writing, speaking in public, and teaching. Growing up, I had acquired from my dad an appreciation for good red wine and a flair for storytelling. Even today, when I wave my hand at the vines and refer to them as precocious youngsters, I realize that I am still my father’s son. After graduating and starting the obligatory search for a career in the local schools, I really just stumbled into the winery business.
Late that graduation summer, three of my buddies persuaded me to tag along on one of those wine-tasting bus tours of the Napa Valley wine country. There was little doubt that the objective was to drink as much free wine as possible without having to drive.
During the first couple of winery tours, I found several wines I liked but the uninspired guided tours, along with the alcohol, made it hard to stay awake: “Yes, here are the oak barrels,” I mimicked on the bus between wineries, “there are the stainless steel fermentation tanks, this is the bottling line, and, oh yes, here is the tasting room. Be sure to check out the gift shop.” I heard myself say, just a bit too loudly, “You know, even I could do better than THAT!”
As fate would have it, the next stop — ConVivio Winery — began as an even bigger disappointment when we piled out of the bus and no tour guide showed up to greet us. The bus driver went inside to check and came out with the news: “Sorry folks. They say the tour guide quit this morning; so there’ll be no tour. But the tasting room’s open.”
Inside the tasting room, I looked up from swirling my glass and noticed my three friends staring at me over their Zinfandel.
“What?!”
“You said you could do it, eh? ‘Better than the others’, you said.” “Well?” The voice trailed off into an accusing silence.
“Come on, that was just . . . you know . . . “
So, “I dare you” was followed by a conversation with the manager, a job application, a few phone calls and an interview over the next week; and three Saturdays later I found myself standing in front of the oak barrels teaching a group of tourists about the art of winemaking.
The job started out to have two major components. I began as the weekend tour guide and, once I learned the vocabulary of the wine business, I was responsible for writing the brochures describing each new vintage, maintaining the ConVivio website, and composing the marketing blurbs that enticed people to sign up for the guided tours and estate tastings.
After the first few months, I began to consider the job to be a teaching job and I thought I was getting pretty good at it. During the week, I took every opportunity to learn the details of the business — I talked to the grower about the vines and berries, quizzed the winemaker about blending and chemistry, and listened to the business manager talk about profit margins and market share. Being the newest employee, I often found myself unloading crates and restocking the gift shop shelves at the end of the day.
Each weekend buses would arrive, tourists would file out, my commentary became more detailed, and my “performance” became more animated. After my first harvest, I came to the conclusion that I really was good at this job and my boss, Umberto di Calabrese, seemed to agree — judging at least by the standard that he kept me around. By the time of my third pruning-to-harvest cycle, I was given the chance to conduct some of the private estate tastings offered by appointment for a fee. Soon, before I knew it, this job that I had taken as a lark was developing all the markings of a real live career.
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Waking up and focusing back on the long oak table, I took my first real look at the never-quite-the-same-but-always-no-different faces arrayed behind the wine glasses. “My name is Daniel. It is my privilege today to introduce you to some of our favorite wines here at ConVivio.”
During my first few tastings I tried to stick to the “lesson plan” I had prepared. I found I could squeeze quite a lot of information between the pouring and the swirling, the sniffing and the sipping. One Sunday afternoon near the end of a particularly lively session, my boss — Mr. Di Calabrese himself — came into the Estate Room and listened to the last five minutes of my “spiel.” I tried to appear not to notice him as I thanked my guests for coming and began clearing away the last of the glasses and half-empty bottles.
‘Berto, as he was called, had been born in Manarola, a small fishing village in the Cinque-Terrre on the west coast of northern Italy. He had been raised tending the terraced vineyards along the steep slopes of the coastal winemaking region famous for its Sciacchetrà — a sweet white wine typical of the Cinque-Terrre appellation. A California education had bleached out all but the barest remnants of an Italian accent and helped him graduate to the robust dry red wines that he was so proud of today. He poured himself a glass from the last of the Zinfandel and sat down at the end of the long table. “So, Daniel, what did you learn today?”
I lifted a blank look from my tray of glasses.
“Learn?”
“Yes, what did you learn? Who were your guests? Where were they from? What did they like? What did they pour out? What questions did they ask?”
I set down the tray. “Well, the couple who sat here bought a case of the ’04 Cab. The man with the German accent bought a bottle of the Merlot.”
“But that’s not what I asked you. Some people feel obligated to buy something after taking up your time, so that doesn’t tell you much. What did they think of the meritage?”
“I told them it was 60% Zin and 40% Cab Franc.”
“How did they think it compared to the ’05 or the ‘04?”
“Well, they didn’t say. I gave them a lot of the chemistry. I mentioned your barrel rotation strategy.”
During a long pause, ‘Berto looked at me, down at the wine in his glass, then back to me. His expression was kind, but I had the feeling I had said the wrong things. “Why do you think we offer these Estate Tastings? What’s in it for us, dyathink?”
My grin was my best attempt at a look of wisdom. I said, “Two reasons: to teach the tourists about our wines and to earn the thirty dollars we charge them for the tasting.”
Albert smiled a smile that DID convey wisdom and said, “When I was your age, that’s what I thought. The thirty dollars doesn’t even pay your salary and they can read the information you tell them in the brochures you write. We hand them out in the lobby, right? We do not offer the Estate Tastings to teach them anything. We offer the tastings to LEARN from them.”
Albert savored the last swallow of the Zinfandel in his glass. While I tried to hide my embarrassment, the old winemaker got up to go with a look of pleasure on his face. “Be patient with yourself. It took me ten years to learn what you learned today.”
That is my story; and some of it is true. 
A captivating story. To listen and learn–what a concept. I might even try listening to my sons instead of working so hard to help solve problems. I might learn something from them . . .
Ah yes, to learn from our students, such a valuable lesson! I hope to attend one of your wine classes some day – I’ll be an eager student for sure, and an appreciative one. Congratulations on the launch of your site. It will be fun to follow!
I imagine an alternate history all the time, and although I wouldn’t change the past for knowing my son and husband, there are days when I long for that alternate reality.
Dorty, your comment about learning from students reminds me of a story about Dan’s and my high school drama teacher, Mr. Beagle. I hear echoes of both Dan’s father and Mr. Beagle in Mr. Di Calabrese.
Mr. Beagle was not a very verbal man, and most of the words out of his mouth were questions, followed by a quizzical look. If a student didn’t understand where he was going with his question, he would not clarify, he would just intensify his quizzical look and silently wait for you to think it out yourself.
Mr. Beagle spent many hours in the evenings and weekends coming to the theater so the students could work on sets, props, lights, etc. for the 4 plays a year we performed. At Dan’s prompting, I started a year before high school one day, helping Dan to paint sets. Then as a sophomore I answered another classmate plea for help with running lights, changing plugs in a patch panel behind the scenes.
Mr. Beagle would show people how to do things and then leave them to do it. When I started, Mr. Beagle was the director and the set designer and the light designer and the technical director. Over the three years, I gradually advanced from hanging lights to light design to technical director, gradually having more and more responsibility for talking students into getting involved.
When students had to go home to dinner or whatever, they would inform whoever they were “working for” of that. Over time, I noticed that it was hard to get them to come back because they never felt like their work was appreciated. Mr. Beagle’s philosophy was that they weren’t there “for him”, they were there for themselves, so they shouldn’t need any appreciation from him. Talking to fellow students, who didn’t understand Mr. Beagle’s questioning approach, nor his notion of why they were there, I learned that they interpreted his silence as negative feedback. As performances approached, we would have to spend late hours with few people trying to get the work done.
As I advanced in responsibility, if someone was “working for me”, i.e., working at my direction, I became the person they said goodbye to and I would simply say “Thank you” to give them just a bit of positive feedback. (I wasn’t a whole lot more verbal than Mr. Beagle at that point, but have overcome that — primarily as a result of becoming a teacher myself.) But if students were “working for Mr. Beagle” they wouldn’t get that feedback, although I tried to jump in anyway with my own “thank you!”.
One day, I saw this happen as usual and said to Mr. Beagle: “They need to know that their work was appreciated” and he replied his usual “They’re not here for me, they’re here for themselves”. I objected “but they don’t know if they’ve been helpful — all they need is to be told ‘Thank you’ as they head out that door and they’ll come back again.”
Mr. Beagle gave me a thoughtful variant of his quizzical look but did not otherwise acknowledge my point. But from that day on, Mr. Beagle always answered a “Goodbye” with a “Thank you” as students headed home. And students started coming back. By the end of my senior year, we had doubled the size of the drama club (okay, we also threw some of the best parties around!).
And students were sticking around long enough to become set designers or even the director of a one-act by their senior year, and they were teaching the younger students how to do things so that Mr. Beagle didn’t have to do all the designing and all the teaching. So the plays were truly being done by the students and for the students! Mission accomplished!
Thank you for listening!
Joe (and Dorty), Today Gretta and I went to the “Hess Collection” Winery and Art Gallery up in the Napa Valley and went on their winery/vineyard tour. During the tour and tasting, I was watching our tour guide, Larry, to see if anything he did or said tracked with the story I wrote on that subject. As an amateur winemaker, I found myself asking a lot of questions about managing the vineyard as well as the winemaking. As he led us out of the vineyard, he stopped, turned around, and said, “I appreciate your questions. It lets me know what your interested in.” I was thrilled! I guess Mr. Di Calabrese had hired him, too. By the way, I highly recommend Hess Collection as a destination for a winery tour, a visit to an interesting contemporary art collection, and some VERY good red wines! The wines they offer at the tasting room are not available in stores and are more reasonably priced (especially to wine club members) than comparable wines in the Napa Valley. They are located at 4411 Redwood Road, Napa, 94558. I learned today that the Hess winery is using the buildings and vineyards that housed the original Christian Brothers Winery.