I spent three years at Harvard in the Society of Fellows. I had no obligations there except to spend my Monday nights eating fancy meals in the company of some of the world’s most brilliant thinkers: Nobel Prize-winning scientist Amartya Sen, philosopher Robert Nozick, etc. Dinner was always accompanied by expensive wine from the society’s wine cellar.
Photo: Rhett Redelings
I have an extremely underdeveloped palate. I’ve never liked wine much. Given the choice between gourmet cooking and fast food, I’ll usually take the fast food. While the Society of Fellows was an incredible experience, it wasn’t a particularly well paying one. As poor as I was, it didn’t make sense to me to be drinking $60 bottles of wine that I didn’t even enjoy.
So I suggested that perhaps there should be two tracks: one that drank wine and one that didn’t. Those of us who agreed not to drink wine could perhaps be paid in cash some portion of the savings from our abstinence. My suggestion was not viewed kindly.
So I tried to make my point in a different way. On Tuesday afternoons we had wine tastings. I asked if I could be allowed the opportunity to conduct one of these wine tastings “blind” to see what we could learn from sampling wines without first knowing what we were drinking. Everyone thought this was a great idea. So with the help of the wine steward I selected two expensive bottles from the wine cellar and then I went down the street to the liquor store and bought the cheapest bottle of wine they had made from the same type of grape.
