Of Floss and Vines

The Napa and Sonoma valleys are home to the highest concentration of retired dentists and orthodontists found anywhere in the world*.

Tooth-care professionals from all over the country, after decades surrounded by cavities and canines, flock to these rolling hills and verdant valleys to spend their hard-earned retirement on a new kind of filling - that of barrels and bottles. Root canals give way to rootstock, plaque gives way to Phylloxera, and these orally-oriented oenophiles hurl themselves into growing grapes and making wine.

But why?

The question has dogged me since I first uncovered this pattern, traveling the Silverado Trail during my undergrad FRENLANG 60D: French Viticulture (read: wine tasting) class field trip. One winery after another, owned and operated by a periodontist-turned-vintner. Having just learned to taste the rich cabs and tropical chardonnays of the region, but yet to have tasted the day-to-day grind of the working world, I was perplexed.

I finally have a hypothesis to this crushing conundrum.

With apologies to any aspiring dentists: You don't get into dental work because you love teeth. You get into dental work because it’s a well-paying, high-barrier-to-entry, recession-proof, automation-proof job. It’s honest work. It’s stable work. It’s practical.

Wine is impractical.

Making wine is an insane endeavor. It requires growing millions of delicate tiny grapes on wildly expensive dirt, purposefully pruning and throwing away a huge portion of the crop, painstakingly hand-harvesting, and sorting, and crushing, and fermenting, and filling a thousand-dollar wooden barrel, and bottling, only to let those bottles sit in your basement for a few years in the hopes they might get a little better.

Even enjoying wine feels like a small act of rebellion. In an age of multitasking and attention-hungry notifications and instant gratification and SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS, taking the time to sit and savor and contemplate something complicated and subtle and old, even for a second, is an escape.

The Dentists have it right, almost.

After spending a career in a field that makes sense, one must crave a slightly nonsensical next chapter. To trade headgear for Healdsburg, molars for merlot, must be to rediscover some dormant, youthful, vigorous freedom.

But the Dentists fail on one point, that so many of us fail on, that I so deeply fear I will fail on as well:

We wait too long to do the things we love.

Perhaps leaping into the wine industry isn’t a crazy an endeavor as it seems. Perhaps there’s a way to find that perfect blend of the rational and irrational, of dispassion and passion, of business and pleasure, that will balance and harmonize and bring out the greatest parts of each. I hope just maybe I can find such a path in this class - if not even to take myself, but at least to know it can exist.

* [Citation Required], but seriously there are a ton of them.