at the wine shop

When I need wine for a dinner party, I walk into a wine shop recommended by a friend.  I ask for help.  I always begin with the true statement that I do not know anything about wine, or very little.  The only opinion I can say is my own is that I prefer dry over sweet.  Unlike pizza or apples, which you only have to taste to know if you like it, or if it qualifies as “good”, with the likelihood that others would agree, I have observed that opinions about wine do not come immediately.  I know I could become more educated.  I believe in forming opinions about things I consume.  It is only for an unexamined reason that I remain located on day one of Wine Appreciation 101. It is too easy to head to a store and rely on an expert.

So it was, recently, that I walked into one of those boutique wine shops.  They are reliable for friendly staff who seem genuinely happy to dispense knowledgeable advice.  I looked around for a salesperson.  I saw it was going to be either the white guy or the Asian guy. I headed for the Asian guy.  He solicitously asked if I needed help.  I used my opening line and stated my price limit of twenty dollars.

Without looking disappointed at my budget, he starts asking me about my preferences, but I have none, so I borrow someone else’s, like those I have heard from my son (giving him credit of course), who has more informed and committed taste.  

My helper gets a burst of energy, “Oh, okay! Let’s see…”  He starts to scan the shelves, because now I have been helpful in return and have given him some direction.

He pulls a bottle off the shelf, pauses to consider other bottles on display, and then pulls another.  He begins to describe the first wine while pointing to its label and holding the bottle up to the light:  Velvety red color, rose-like bouquet…sweet on the attack…something or other on the nose…fruity with a hint of almond…long dry finish…balanced minerality…earthy…lively....  To be honest, I do not remember what he said.  It is difficult to remember something just said if one does not know the language.

Listening to these descriptions always reminds me of reading an account of last night’s Red Sox game.  If one’s interest in baseball leans more towards the evocative metaphor of it being the only game where one journeys out in a circle around the wide open field and returns home again and less towards the actual game rules, statistics, and technicalities, the game report reads like code.  I have figured out that it is not the individual words that are unfamiliar, but the way they are put together that makes the meaning drop out rather than reveal itself into a context that would help me understand.

But I could allow that a game involving physics and complex rules takes some study to understand.  I know that all kinds of fields develop their necessary jargon. But I simplistically put wine in the category of “food and beverage”,  a category we live every day from infancy onward, and therefore I should be able to understand a description of it.  I know this only betrays my ignorance.  I am aware that the process and history of wine-making is rich with delicate and complex variables interacting with hard science, exemplifying an artful balance of exploiting and celebrating nature.  I circle around to the fact that I really should deepen my knowledge, my appreciation.  I owe it to the artisanal wine makers.  Plus, I wouldn’t have to repeatedly copy someone smarter in this realm, like my son.

As my wine helper is speaking, I try to imagine the taste he is describing, and I give up.  But I remain attentive and know right away that I am going to buy this bottle he holds in his hand, because he selected it off the shelf first, and his description is so convincing, even if I do not understand it.

But the point is not my purchase of the wine but rather that during these long minutes I am preoccupied by the fact that I am listening to an Asian person confidently using the language of wine tasting notes, and it is not Chinese wine.   Incidentally, while I am listening, I am determining whether or not he is in fact Chinese, like me, although I pretty much had decided that he was when I walked in.  I am no longer thinking about the goal of buying a bottle of wine.  I know I will accomplish that.  Perhaps that is one reason my knowledge does not increase.  Faced with the opacity of wine language, my mind wanders to other topics.

Somewhere in the conversation (I must have led him into my distraction), this very genial sales person mentions he had had a job in tech but decided he wanted to pursue his nascent interest in wine, and, since he had hefty MIT graduate school loans to pay off, he started working in a wine store.  I note that he selected a boutique, where customers expect every clerk to manifest an impressive education about the products.

I fought cognitive dissonance, stereotypes, bias, proclivities towards my own affinity group, and tried to put the picture together:  young Asian man, dressed in hip-casual; calm, open and friendly, understated; fluent in American English as he would be if he was born here; and using sophisticated arrangements of words to describe a syrah or pinot blanc. 

All of these descriptors would have been ordinary to me except the last one. Chinese people don’t do this. He was breaking character!  I felt a jostling in my brain.  Why did he veer off a career path in science to become fluent in wine lingo?  I thought of my eldest brother, who, in spite of his Ph.D. in engineering, was passionate about music (practitioner and listener) and gourmet cooking (practitioner and diner – French, Indian, Mexican, for example).  Maybe he, too, struggled to navigate his internalization of expectations. Maybe now, a generation later, it would have been easier.

I followed the salesperson to the register counter.  I took out my phone to pay for the bottle.  He apologized for not knowing if they took Apple Pay; he was a new hire.  I continued to chat small talk while he figured it out. I wanted to know more about him without seeming weird and intrusive, but, in the end, I said little, probably because I was trying to compensate for what I knew was an outsized fascination with him that had more to do with me than with him. I complimented him on his knowledge, a comment I probably would not have made had he not been Asian. He was bashful and said he was learning and needed to get better.  I thought, so he really wants to do this.  I was happy for him, following his bliss, resisting norms.  And he was definitely breaking my stereotype of my own people.

Why wasn’t an Asian guy who sells fancy wine just normal to me?  I was reminded of the Japanese woman I once knew who was studying the saxophone at Berklee College of Music.  She told me it was not common for a Japanese woman to play the saxophone. If you are Asian, especially if you are female, you play a string instrument (but not the double bass), and you study to play Beethoven or Mendelsohn, not bluegrass or jazz.  She had picked up a cultural knowledge similar to what I had acquired during childhood, when there were few Asians around me. I did not want to be a Chinese girl carrying a violin to school, even though I was.  I did not want to look Chinese, even though I did.  If you are white and carry a violin, you are just a kid taking violin lessons. If you are an Asian kid with a violin, you are a dead giveaway.  You are one of those.  If I had been carrying a tuba, I would not have been one of those; I would have been a different kind of one of those.  But that’s it, right there.  My family would never have suggested I try the tuba.

I left the wine shop, bottle in hand, but my mind was still on the Asian guy.  I wanted to know about his experience being Chinese (assumed) in the U.S.  I wondered how much he thought about other people putting him into boxes of expectations, the expectations of the dominant culture, which has such a hard time allowing you to be what you want to be if you do not fit the canon.  But also, those expectations of people like me, his own kind.  Yet, my mind insisted, it was indeed unusual.  Surely the guy must have thought about this, in the same way that the female Japanese saxophonist was aware of going against broadly held assumptions in Japan.  Just like chef Ivan Orkin knew he was an odd phenomenon to be a New York Jew creating a star ramen restaurant in Tokyo.

So, I interrogated myself: Do Chinese people make good Engineers?  Do Chinese people make good sommeliers?  I knew those were useless questions embedded in false notions, and it was more complicated than that, but the fact remained. The guy in the wine shop was breaking stereotype for everyone who walked in. I was glad for that. A reason for optimism. 

. . .