Old wine

When we lived in Chapel Hill, an obstetrician named Vern Katz delivered our daughter. Subsequently we became friends with Vern and his wife, Debbie, who was also an obstetrician. One day when they were at our house for dinner, Debbie told us that after they delivered a baby, grateful parents would occasionally give them a gift. Vern said that one time he was given a bottle of champagne. He and Debbie drank a glass each, then tossed the rest down the kitchen sink. Afterwards, on a whim Debbie looked it up and found that the champagne sold for well over $100. Oh no, she’d said ruefully to Vern, what have we done?

I thought of this story when I recently opened a bottle of 1996 Saint-Julien (Chateau Ducru-Beaucaillou, in case you wondered). I bought it more than 25 years ago to be stored, according to wine maven Robert Parker, until it peaked between 2018 and 2035. So it patiently rested on a wine rack under the stairs for the requisite passage of time and the right occasion. Which turned out to be my birthday. Before I uncorked it, I looked up how much it was going for these days. To my surprise, many high end wine shops still had it in stock. The price varied over an astonishingly wide range, from a low of a mere $235, to a top price of $998.99, plus $50 for shipping.

I opened the bottle with great anticipation. The cork crumbled slightly, but I managed to extract it with only a few crumbs falling into the bottle. Then I lovingly poured the wine into a decanter, which was given to me years ago by the same daughter that Vern had delivered. Next, like a knowledgeable consumer, I let the wine sit in the decanter for several hours to “open up.” Then I poured some wine into my class, carefully swirled it, and took a sip.

So how was it? I think I’d rate it as pretty good. Whaaat? you say: A thousand buck bottle of wine was just “pretty good”? Well, it did have a somewhat complex nose, and the taste was multilayered. But ruefully, I have to report that as much as I wanted to love it, it didn’t really knock my socks off. And the rest of the family with whom I shared the bottle (including the Vern-delivered daughter) agreed. Maybe it wasn’t kept at the optimal temperature for the quarter century I’d stored it. Or maybe (in fact, probably) my taste isn’t all that discerning. But whatever the reason, to be perfectly honest I have to say I’ve enjoyed some less than 10-dollar bottles of wine more (like the one on the right in the photo). But knowing the price of this precious Saint-Julien, we drank every last drop. And savored it as much as we could. I admit that if it were an eight-buck bottle of wine I could even imagine that I might have emulated Vern and Debbie by pouring the last bit down the drain.

But when you think about it, didn’t Vern and Debbie actually do a sensible thing? If they’d had enough to drink and weren’t particularly enamored of the taste, why should the price tag matter? Maybe they were sensible not to be influenced by the cost, and just do what felt right.

When we lived in France, we fell in love with a Chagall lithograph displayed in an art gallery in our village. Feeling extravagant, we bought it, and were supplied with fancy documentation proving that this was a very limited-edition lithograph, and indeed by Chagall. But it occurs to me, what if the lithograph was a forgery and the documentation faked? If we knew it was a counterfeit Chagall, would we like it less? Theoretically no, since it would remain the exact same piece we bought and loved. Why should its provenance matter? A bit more subtly, would we perhaps have been less drawn to it in the first place if it were by some unknown artist rather than Chagall? I must admit, probably so.

Which brings up the issue of intrinsic versus extrinsic value. I believe that our subjective response to something is informed to a greater extent than we’d like to think by our awareness of its value. For example, knowing the rock on the ring is a diamond rather than a rhinestone surely enhances its perceived beauty. And it seems quite likely that we would be less reluctant to admit that we didn’t particularly like that thousand-dollar bottle of wine or the painting by Picasso or that book by Philip Roth than if we didn’t know the cost or the artist or the author.

So maybe wine should be tasted without knowing the price, paintings be displayed without the artist being identified, and novels read without disclosure of the author. Doing so would allow us to evaluate these things without prejudice. This is the same principle as in clinical trials of experimental drugs–something that I’ve spent much of my life designing. Because knowing the treatment assignment has a powerful effect, the trial must be “double blind,” meaning that the drug and the placebo pills look identical and are coded. This prevents the response of the subject or the evaluation of the physician from being influenced by knowing what treatment the subject was randomized to.

Perhaps the same principle should apply to the way we regard people we’re meeting for the first time. Arguably, our impression shouldn’t be influenced by their degrees or their accomplishments or their net worth. But simply by the way they act and what they have to say. I don’t know how one can “blind” details of someone’s background on the first meeting, especially when we already know about them, or they’re introduced by an admiring friend. But I suggest we should consciously try to minimize the influence of their resumes on how we feel about them. Maybe this can be done to some extent by an act of will—we should focus on what they are saying and how they are behaving, and try to keep at bay the knowledge of their credentials. With this approach, someone whose pedigree is equivalent to a 1996 Saint-Julian may turn out to be less interesting than a person whose background resembles a humble ten-buck red blend.