How to drink wine and influence people

The room was sardined with people, and I couldn’t move more than a few inches at a time. I was trying to buy wine, and I had also turned up at the birthday party of a woman I didn’t know. An African-Italian man was trying to open a bag of tomato-flavored chips (which they have in Italy, and which are delicious) while asking me a question, but he was so extraordinarily drunk that he could neither tear the plastic bag nor comprehend I didn’t parlo italiano. The brunette was behind the counter as usual, watching us both and laughing; then, a man who is perhaps 6’4” and who might be the owner of the wine shop charged through the crowd and greeted me with his ever-laughing eyes. He filled my bottles with wine, not bothering to ask what I wanted, and then leaned against the taps and told me how he got from France to Boston to Singapore to Italy, “all because of a woman.”

And I couldn’t help but feel that this was the sign that I had really and truly arrived in Bologna.

A long time ago, I read On Becoming A Leader by Warren Bennis. In it, he wrote that a strangely high percentage of the leaders he had met over the years had grown up in one place, then lived somewhere else for an extended period of time. Then, they either moved back to their origin or stayed abroad. He didn’t know why living in two places might contribute to leadership potential - he just said it was one of the things he found was a commonality among top leaders.

Just after this, I read an article about a study done on the brains of New York and London taxi drivers; the brains of London drivers were far more developed in some ways than the brains of New York drivers. The theory was that sequential street naming (First, Second, Third, etc.) and the grid system in New York made it easier to navigate and required less spatial navigation, whereas “The Knowledge” of the twisting, changing streets of London forced cabbies to be able to map things in their minds.

Putting the two together, I thought: perhaps they are related. Perhaps when you only have to navigate a single place, your brain’s structure is literally wired as a reflection for that place, whereas when you have to get to know a new city or country or culture, your brain is ripped apart and re-created, forming new connections and internal maps to reflect the external ones. Perhaps, then, this allows leaders to better understand others, to be able to get into other peoples’ heads and see things from their perspective; Bennis had just written his observations thirty years before a potential explanation had been shown using MRIs.

I thought of that study every time we got to a new city. Every time we arrived somewhere, we would be faced with a new terrain to learn; by the end of our stay, we could be placed virtually anywhere and find our way home without any problem by finding the church with the facade that they never fully finished, or the square where the homeless man danced, or the square with the benches that were completely covered in the sticky drippings from the flowering trees.

But at the start of our trip, I needed help. Two bottles of Milanese wine had miraculously lasted through my first two nights in Bologna. On the third day I rose, rinsed out the empty bottles and loaded up the address of the Vino Sfuso shop into Apple Maps. I followed the street right, past the trash bins, then left past the sandwich shop, right past the ancient towers that had been closed because they almost fell over, left at the fork in the road near the Flying Tiger where the kids would soon buy gliders, left past the grocery store with the good olives, then right on the quiet street with the garages all lined up in a row. I slowed down at the shoemaker; the brogues in the window made me salivate and the workshop, visible in the back, made my heart ache, knowing I would never have the understanding of a physical material to produce anything so beautiful. I passed a small construction site with a sleeping yellow digger, made a quick left, a quick right. Two men were holding hands and speaking Australian English in front of me. I tried to walk around them, but the sidewalk was narrow, the street was buzzing with cars, and the men were oblivious in the way tourists can be when they believe that everyone around them is also on vacation, and my watch started stuttering, telling me I had veered off course. I stopped, drew close to the wall, and the pin glided along the tiny map to show me that I had gone fifty metres too far. I went back along the sidewalk, checked my wrist, and realized that reception was not so good here in the middle of the city; I’d somehow passed it again. I made sure that I was on the right street and then got old-school: I walked slowly, looking at the actual buildings for actual street numbers, because in Bologna, it seemed, technology could only get me so far in my quest for wine.

There: a dimly lit storefront in a corner under a portico. It looked more like an understocked gift shop than the only vino sfuso place in town. I walked in, and, sure enough, two women were speaking near a row of taps on the right. I smiled, bowed my head and shoulders, and took a step backwards, trying to signal that I was in no hurry and would wait for them to finish their conversation. After a few beats, one of them looked at me and smiled back and asked what was my desire. As in Milan, I said: please, a red and a prosecco, please. Where are you from? California, and now Scotland, the United Kingdom. Ah, California! They had something to say about California, but I couldn’t quite understand what it was, so I just smiled like an idiot, nodding and raising my eyebrows in gratitude for their warm words.

The proprietor - shorter, with brown hair - pointed to different taps and explained that there were a few different reds, and only one frizzante. She started to fill my litre bottle with fizz while she described the red varietals. The other woman - not a worker, just a friend who had stopped by for a drink and a chat - cut in to say that the sangiovese was the best that they have, and I should get that. The proprietor agreed, but she was hesitant to recommend it because it is up to me what I prefer. It amazed me how much Italian wine talk I could understand knowing a small amount of Spanish and French. She produced two small cups as the prosecco bubbles settled and gave me a taste of two of the reds, and I agreed that the sangiovese was much nicer. I got a half-litre of that, and paid €4.80. Grazie mille, ciao grazie, and I walked out, liquid confidence in my hands, now able to get back to Alice and the boys through my strengthened neural map.

I returned a couple of days later along a slightly different route. This time, one of the shoemakers was sweeping up shavings on his workbench and nodded to me through the window, and I bowed my head, holding it for that split-second extra to change its meaning from acknowledgment to respect. The woman smiled immediately when I walked in. There was a tall man with her this time, and she explained to him that I was an American, that I lived in England now, and I loved wine. I was instantly reminded of The Sun Also Rises, when Jake Barnes is in the Hotel Montoya and the owner is explaining to someone that Barnes was a bullfighting aficionado. “They were always very polite at first, and it amused them very much that I should be an American. Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have aficion. He might simulate it or confuse it with excitement, but he could not really have it. When they saw that I had aficion, and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent, there was this same embarrassed putting the hand on the shoulder, or a ‘Buen hombre.’” But I didn’t feel like I loved wine any more than anyone else, just that I wanted to learn about it. Anyway, she said I loved it, and my mind brought me to Spain in 1924 and then back to now in a flash. The man had a face that looked like it could only laugh, the eyes forever turned up at the corners. He turned to me and, in a strange accent, started speaking English.

Only later, at the party, would I find out that he was from France, then met an Italian woman who, in his own words, is far more accomplished than he will ever be; they married, had children, and moved around the world to promote her career in some vague international business. They finally settled in Bologna, where he became involved with wine. He had invested in vineyards and a winery, and has some sort of undefined connection to the wine shop. His reticence, and his easy charm, made me think that he must have actually been the owner of the whole operation, and that he was being modest because he did not want people to try to flatter him for favors. Later, I would wonder if it is actually that he had virtually no power in the organization and was just trying to use innuendo to increase his perceived importance. It’s funny how both modesty and bravado can swing either way.

But that would come later. Now, he filled my bottles and, as in Milan, he believed me when I told him I would like to drink everything they had on tap. The wines he gave me this time would be not what I like. The red coated my mouth with a gritty iron film that stuck to my teeth, and the white tasted like the color green, as if I’d stripped new springtime branches of their bark and started chewing on the pith.

They were not what I like, but they were delicious, and I drank them both completely.

I went every few days, each time going a different way, meeting someone new - a friend, a neighbor, a partner - and getting different wines. Then, on my last visit, I went on a Friday to stock up for the trip to Pisa. Instead of going broadly in the general direction, as I normally did, I walked sharply to the north-east, then worked my way over, trying to figure out if I could get to the wine shop from a completely new direction. I could, easily, and when I arrived, the shop was surrounded by a mob of people. At first I worried that there was a problem, but everyone was talking and laughing and drinking from the clear plastic cups. I walked up, and people looked at me and smiled the uncertain smiles that mean they don’t want you to stay if you are not one of them and they don’t want to offend you if you are. I wove my way through the fringes and angled my body to slide between a foursome at the door, and then I was inside.

I made eye contact with the proprietor; her face lit up and she said, “Aiiii!” and raised her glass to me. An African man was immediately in front of me. His hand pecked at a display until his rubbery fingers managed to pick up a bag of chips; he tried to open them, but his fingers just kept sliding off of the plastic. He started talking to me; he was looking just past my left temple, and I saw that he thought he was looking me square in the eyes. I looked past his right ear at the proprietor; she threw up her hands and laughed, and I grinned.

I helped the man open the bag, and he took out a single, perfect chip, holding it carefully between his fingers. He tried to look at it closely before delicately placing it whole in his mouth. His jaw stayed open as his lips closed, and I knew he was using his tongue to crush it against the roof of his mouth, savoring the texture. Then I heard a guffaw, and the possible owner, Eric, lunged forward, people squeezing against the taps and tables to let him through. He filled my bottles, I paid, and then we talked. Why all the people here? A woman, a friend of his, had rented out the shop for her birthday; the shop was not supposed to actually be open to the public, but (and he held his hands up and shrugged his shoulders) I was not the public. I did a quick calculation: if she paid €200, then her guests could drink 50 litres of wine (maybe two litres per person) and the shop would still make money. He told me his life story, then, and we talked about vino sfuso - and about how it is not available in the UK. How strange that is! He suggested that I might want to open a vino sfuso shop in London? I still hadn’t corrected the woman from the first night, when she had told him I was living in England. He also said that, if I wanted, he would love to meet me at the vineyard and show me around; I thanked him, but we were leaving in the morning. Just in case, we exchanged phone numbers. He introduced me to the birthday woman; ah, the Californian, I heard about you, you are very welcome at my party, thank you so much for coming. I thanked her, and wished her a very happy birthday, but I had due bambini and a need to return. She understood very well, and raised her glass to me.

Outside, the extremely drunk tomato chip man was standing, looking out into the street, his left hand on his left breast pocket, an unlit cigarette between his lips. I opened my Zippo, flicked a flame, and held it in front of his face. He leaned forward, sucking in, and I closed the lighter. He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, considered it closely, and said something to me; there was something in his demeanor that made me think that either he had sobered up immensely in the last few seconds or he had not actually been as drunk as he had seemed. I shook his hand and he held it, squinting slightly at me, this time meeting my eyes without problems. If I’d stayed longer, I suspect he would have spoken English to me, but I really did have two kids to get back to, so I said ciao to him and walked back, the direct route, just one of many valuable connections I’d formed in the last few weeks.