Days of wine and marriages

An odd way to begin a new month, a new week, and a new morning: to write a blog post about a story from last month’s Wine Spectator.

It all, however, makes sense. I have been up since dawn clearing the stack of accumulated bills and magazines from February in what has become a monthly ritual (first day of each month) of bill-paying, grumbling about paper waste and junk mail, and in general, snarling at every window-envelope that crosses my path. I am almost done with the stack and am celebrating with a quick post on an article I paused to read a minute ago.

The article is about Gavin Newsome, obviously written before Mr. Newsome put himself on the map by permitting gay marriages in the city where he is mayor (SF). My Berkeley-residing mother had already alerted me to the fact that he is an ambitious individual (somehow when she says this it always sounds like a pejorative). The WS article, similarly, is not blind to Newsome’s ambitions. It starts out with the following:

Garvin Newsome seems to have it all—a successful business centered around wine, restaurants and resorts; good looks, charm and sophistication; a wife who is a former model turned city prosecutor; a politically connected father [later on we find out that his dad is a retired state appeals court judge]; and a billionaire family friend and financial backer [that would be Billy Getty, son of billionaire philanthropist, Gordon Getty]. Now, at age 36, he is also the new mayor of SF and a rising star in the Democratic Party. Newsome…says he always tries to set ‘big, hairy [??], audacious goals’ for his business and for himself. ‘I don’t want to have a modest goal and then reach for it,’ says the entrepreneur, whose innovative businesses include a fine dining restaurant that sells wine at retail prices [this is unheard of: our trio of top-of-the line restaurants in Madison marks up at 2 -3 times the retail price, which always makes me ill] and a winery that puts screw caps on a $100 plus cabernet [way to go! Cork spoilage is the single biggest reason why nice bottles of wine sometimes taste like bird bath water; even when the wine survives an imperfect cork, it may still be in some way affected by it. A good way to satisfy yourself that this is true is to blind-taste wine from many bottles coming from the same case, same cellar, same barrel—they wont all taste the same; how can that be? Obviously cork impact].

Stories of this type of energetic enthusiasm for bold reform are rare. Newsome’s ambitions appear to be targeting even higher goals for the future. Can he sustain his fervor for affecting change? He says of himself that he “lives in exclamation points!” How refreshing. I’m such a fan of this type of passion and zest. Surrounding yourself with images of (and contacts with, if you're lucky) people who live “in exclamation points," as opposed to between anti-smiley faces such as this :( , has to be the healthiest way to proceed and create (whatever it is that you are destined to create).