World Peace and Early Retirement a Possibility?

An unfounded “YES!” says a former wine columnist and sommelier

Who needs plowshares? We should be pounding swords into corkscrews.

[Gil Kulers is our guest writer for this week’s post. Gil and I once worked in the same news room when such things existed and also once lived so close that I could pilfer his wifi signal.]

I recently read a memoir of a writer and editor who emphasized that writers should not preamble and “get to the point.” Back in my days as an eagle-eyed journalist, this was called “burying the lead.”

To all budding journalists out there, this is sound advice.

So rather than prevaricate around the bush any longer, let’s move on to the topic at hand: world peace.

Why a former columnist/sommelier/maître d’ needs to be called out of retirement to solve BIG problems is anyone’s guess. But, since Daren (this Substack’s docent) is a good friend and has promised lucrative compensation [Editor’s note: It was liquid, not lucrative] , here we are: your wine guy in the street solving the age-old question of why we all can’t get along.

My solution: stop yelling, shooting, punching, criticizing, stabbing, bombing, annoying, shouting at, mooning and/or provoking each other. There. Problem solved.

Seeing that I’ve still got 800 words to fill out this column, I guess I’ll get to the other question Daren foisted upon me: Why did I go back to work after I officially retired?

Currently, I work Thursdays at a wine shop in Atlanta even though I retired four years ago. I’ll be honest, I don’t love roaming the aisles of a wine shop as a wine consultant. I do like it, though.

Why I like it requires a multi-faceted answer. An answer I began to ramble on about to this Substack’s main author over drinks at a local watering hole (hey, kids, that’s how your grandpa refers to a bar.). Anyway, besides solving the world peace thing, he said I should write about working during retirement so he doesn’t have to write a column for his readers this week.

(Being the aforementioned eagle-eyed journalist that I am, I can say that I made up the part about Daren slacking on this week’s Substack installment. Although, here I am writing this column and all Daren is doing is hitting the publish button.)

I went to a pretty fancy cooking school in Upstate New York while my wife and I were having our first child and after I already was a fairly well-compensated writer and editor. (Writers and editors once were well-compensated. I’m not making that up.) We’re talking major league sacrifices on everyone’s part for me to cash out on a burgeoning career to follow my dream of becoming a great chef. I did well at school, but maybe I did a little too well in its excellent wine course. They sent me to Bordeaux on scholarship to study that region’s wines.

When I got back to Atlanta, I received offers from two people:
1.) A sommelier who managed perhaps the best wine collection in Atlanta.
2.) A desperate publisher who needed a little help getting his wine magazine off the ground.

FYI, nobody who asks for a “little” help ever wants just a little help.

Unwisely, I said yes to both. Over the next decade, this decision about killed me. At my desk at 8 a.m., editing, writing, making story and photo assignments, dealing with a nincompoop publisher until 1 p.m. Then a shower, shave and put on that dining-room monkey suit. I’m in the dining room by 3. I polish a thousand wine glasses. Finish service around 10 p.m. I’m home by midnight or so. Still in my 30s, I actually thought I was having a heart attack one day. (It was just a little “shpilkes” and I was fine, but oy vey the thought…)

Tuesday through Saturday, every week. Sunday and Monday let me catch up on magazine deadlines, meet with the printer and other glamorous publishing stuff.

While I was with the magazine, I (again unwisely) started down a two-year path to become a Certified Wine Educator. Turns out I’ll do anything for a cool lapel pin and certificate printed on fancy paper. (Maybe it was a heart attack?)

What is a CWE certification? In short, it’s a bitch. The international certification program hinges on its three-part exam: blind wine identification, blind wine fault identification and a super-easy written exam. Super easy if you can memorize everything that’s ever happened to a grape in the past 8,000 years. The recommended reading page just had one word: EVERYTHING. I passed the wine ID and fault parts, but stumbled on the super-easy written exam. (There were questions on Bulgarian wines. Yes. Bulgarian wines.)

Anyway, nine months later, I flew up to Washington, D.C. to re-take the written exam. There were no Bulgarian wine questions, but I passed anyway with the highest score in the United States that year.

The wine magazine expanded out of Atlanta and into Birmingham and Charlotte. I took an ownership position in the company. All seemed mah-velous until the magazine and pretty much the entire publishing industry took the fanciest dive into the toilet. During this time, I also wrote a weekly wine column for a major daily newspaper. Cool, right?! That slowly and painfully hit the shitter, too.

(I know what you’re thinking: Is he ever going to explain why he went back to work after retirement? And what the heck does prevaricating even mean?)

I can only answer the first question.

Somewhere in the middle of all that my health—mental, physical, familial—suggested I give up the sommelier job. You have to understand what I put my wife, my two children and myself through before I walked into my general manager’s office at the age of 57 to say, I’m done. I did give Gary 13 months’ notice. Fair enough, I think.

“You put us and yourself through all that, so you can just sit on your ass?” a concerned spouse could reasonably ask.

To which a mutually concerned spouse might answer: “Hey, let’s go to France and Scandinavia for a month!”

I missed so many Thanksgivings, Mother’s Days, Easters, Friday and Saturday nights with friends, swim meets, dive meets, gymnastic meets, school concerts and so on over the past third of a century. Turns out these things matter more to me than advancing my career. Maybe things might be different if I worked a 40-hour week.

So that, friends, is the long-winded reason why I laid down my quill and tastevin when I could live a less frantic existence.

Why go back, then?

My last job was as a sommelier/beverage manager/maître d’. It was the best job in the world. I got to explore the wine world differently than as a wine journalist. I got to use my culinary training for fab-u-lous wine dinners. I learned a ton about beer and cocktails. I worked with mostly (mostly!) great folks. I loved most (most!) of my guests. It gave me great joy to help people fall in love with wine, food and the dynamic combination of both.

Yeah. Good times.

Oh, wait. That’s right! I also had to deal with incompetent wholesalers, some (some!) idiotic co-workers and a scant few (few!) insufferable guests. I had to hire people. I had to cover up for servers who harbored demons so they wouldn’t get fired. I had to fire people. (I once had to get a court to issue a restraining order for a bartender who, ahem, vociferously disagreed with my decision to let him go.) During the holidays, there were the 70-hour, seven-day, bonkers workweeks.

Yeah. Not so good times.

Now, I work one day a week. More if the shop needs a favor. I still love interacting with customers who are baffled, interested, misinformed and otherwise curious about wine. Or, perhaps, they just want to “win” their dinner club with the most awesome wine selection. (Awesome wine choices. It’s what I do best.)

Maybe world peace is overrated. Inner peace—and peace with the world right around me—beats the heck out of ambition and trapping some version of success.

My wife, who, by the way, still works, is comforted by my… let’s call it “retirement light.” I also have a lot more time to prepare great dinners and desserts for her and friends. Did I mention I went to a famous cooking school to become a great chef but never really tapped into all the culinary training I received inside and outside the classroom?

I don’t have anyone to fire now. I also don’t have to hire anyone, which wasn’t the worst. I did hire a few folks who are doing great things in the hospitality industry. And I did give a bunch of writers their first writing assignments. Several of them have published books and gone on to write for international publications. Those are things I cherish, but the training and managerial stuff not so much.

Working out the nuances and strategies of solving humankind’s inability to be nice to one another takes time. Retirement frees up my schedule to work out the details with a friend at a local watering hole.

And all that work I put into to become a wine expert? I still get to use that. If you’re not using your accumulated knowledge and experiences, you’re losing them. That would be a shame. I get to explore that knowledge with every customer’s question and curiosity. This brings me great satisfaction, although as yet no inquiries on Bulgarian wines.

So, Daren, that’s why I still sorta work even though I’m sorta retired.

One more thing on the subject of world peace. A good first step toward all of us getting along would be for everyone to stop driving slow in the passing lane. C’mon, people, I gotta get to work!

Song of the Week

[This is still Gil, BTW]

I discovered jazz guitarist, Pat Metheny, when I was working at Sam Goody’s record store in White Plains, NY. This was during my wilding period between a stint at Northeastern University and getting my journalism degree from New York University. While I was a print guy, I was fascinated by electronic media. TV news was king in the 1980s and I considered a path down that road. That didn’t happen, but I always fantasized directing a national nightly newscast. If that ever happened, my first order of business would be have Pat’s “(Cross the) Heartland” as the show’s introductory theme. Its staccato notes and urgent pace always reminded me of a busy newsroom full of tap-tap-tapping typewriters. Even the title is perfect with its uniquely American theme. It’s the opening track of the Pat Metheny Group’s 1980 album American Garage and I’m sure it created a lot of fans of his music and jazz fusion.

Gil Kulers lives in and putters around his house in Avondale Estates. He can be found at Tower Liquors on Piedmont on Thursdays, where he’ll find an awesome wine from Bulgaria for you.