Before the apple, they are naked in the garden and unashamed. Not innocent in the childish sense. Present. There is no gap between them and the moment they are standing in. Then Eve takes the bite, and the next line says: their eyes were opened. Not opened to new facts about the world. Opened to themselves, watching themselves, judging what they saw. They cover up. They hide. They blame each other. In one bite, a straight line appears between two people who were simply there together and two people who are now managing how they appear to each other.

That is not just a story about forbidden fruit. It is a story about the moment the mind, information and ego climbed into the driver’s seat and asked us to move farther back in the bus.

Here is the distinction I keep coming back to. We all have a mind, and it is an extraordinary one. It remembers, compares, plans, solves, worries, judges. We are not our minds, though. We are the ones who notice it working, when we are aware. There is the thought, and there is whatever in us is aware enough to catch the thought passing by. Think of the mind as a tool, maybe a bus. It can take us extraordinary places. It has given us medicine and agriculture and Burgundy and the phone in our pockets. Somewhere along the way, though, most of us stopped being the driver and started being passengers who forgot we ever had a seat up front. We let our minds, egos, and the endless flood of information become an autonomous driver. We often, unconsciously even, let it decide the destination. Some days we forget we were ever the driver at all.

That is the chasm the garden story is pointing at to me. Once the mind/ego autopilot starts running the show, unedited, unwatched, the ease that comes from simply being present disappears, and something like angst moves in to take its place. What do we do the moment we feel that angst? We reach for more. More information, more certainty, one more answer that might finally close the gap.

We have been doing this for thousands of years. The printing press, then radio, then television, then the internet, then a device we all now carry that puts more accumulated knowledge in our hand than every library in the ancient world combined, and now a layer of artificial intelligence stacked on top of that. Each time, the promise is the same. This will be the thing that finally gets us back to the garden. It never quite does, because it was never a knowledge problem to begin with. It’s an awareness issue. We are mistaking information and knowledge for consciousness.

I will admit I love the coincidence sitting right in the middle of this. The most recognizable piece of technology in the history of the world is named after a fruit, and its logo has a bite taken out of it. Nobody at Apple was making a theological point. Somebody just handed us a very good metaphor anyway.

Here is what I do not think the story is telling us. It is not telling us to put the fruit back on the tree. I am not interested in an argument for ignorance, and neither, I think, is the story. The mind and everything it has built, including the phone with the bite out of it, are tools. Extraordinary ones. The problem was never that we have knowledge or information. The problem is the order we reach for them in. Presence first. Then intention, a deep internal sense of what actually matters right now and why. Then, from that seat behind the wheel, agency in choosing which tool actually serves this moment. Knowledge and information come after that, layered on top when we choose them, not as a substitute for showing up in the first place. Reverse that order, and you get a very busy, very informed person who has not actually been present for some time, and a world being driven by information instead of intention and consciousness.

This is exactly the same mechanism at work in appreciation, which is the thing I actually sat down to write about.

You can know a great deal about a wine before you ever lift the glass. Where the fruit grew, who farmed it, what happened in the cellar, how it compares to the vintage before it. I have spent a good part of my life learning those things and I still love learning them. None of that is appreciation, though. Appreciation starts the same place presence always starts, before a single fact gets involved. You look at the color. You bring the glass close and actually smell what is there instead of naming what you expect to find. You taste it and notice your own honest reaction before you reach for anyone else’s, including the label’s. That pause, that few seconds of simply being with what is in front of you, is the whole practice. It is you climbing back into the driver’s seat, if only for the length of a sip. This is the garden. The more time you choose to spend here, the deeper appreciation will become.

This world of appreciation is open to any conscious human being, regardless of knowledge or experience. Adam and Eve lived there for a while. Let that thought ferment a while.

Yes, then, if you want, the knowledge can come in. It almost always adds something. Understanding a place or a season or a winemaker’s choices can turn a glass into something layered and specific. I am not arguing against any of that. I am only saying it belongs second. It is dimension added onto presence, not a substitute for it.

That’s what a glass of wine has been offering all along, underneath every conversation about vintage and region and score. An invitation, a few times a week, to put both feet back in the garden for a minute. or longer.

Wine also offers an opportunity to practice the art of being conscious, to tell the mind, ego, and all that information to stay behind the yellow line, because this space is reserved for the driver, and we’ll take it from here.

Possibly wine’s greatest contribution.

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Thank you Dolly Parton.

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Today I want to talk about how we build that playground.

This one is for the wine lovers. The curious ones. The ones who want to know what’s actually in the glass and why it matters. Stick with me, because this story starts with a kitchen and ends with something I’ve spent forty years trying to understand.

I’ve answered the question a thousand times. Maybe ten thousand.

“How do you make your wines?”

People lean in like I’m about to whisper the coordinates to buried treasure. I’ve given the full sermon, the vision, the strategy, the protocols, the alchemy of fermentation and oak and time. I’ve charted the aging curves, broken down vineyard blocks, explained clone selections and yeast strains like I was reading from sacred scripture.

I’ve explained Po·​lyph·​o·​ny, our flagship Pinot Noir at La Rochelle, more times than I can count. A wine made from blending flavors and textures from multiple vineyards. A contradiction to Burgundy’s thousand-year gospel of singularity and site. There, one vineyard, one parcel, reigns supreme. A Grand Cru sits on a throne, and a vineyard fifty feet away is a peasant. That’s just how it is.

Who the hell was I to rewrite that chapter?

I used to joke that making Po·​lyph·​o·​ny was like tearing pages out of the Old Testament and scribbling in the margins. Blending Pinot Noir from multiple vineyards? Heresy. A wine from nowhere, some would say. A mutt, an orphan, a Frankenstein stitched together from noble parts. If vineyard is the currency of Pinot, I was running a counterfeiting ring.

Except it isn’t that. It is something else entirely.

One afternoon I was explaining it all to a visiting chef. How we take fruit from Van der Kamp on Sonoma Mountain, Lester in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Tondre in the Santa Lucia Highlands. Different clones, different yeast strains, different barrels from different forests. The whole mad orchestra.

Here’s what that actually looks like in the cellar.

Take Tondre Grapefield. We source two different clones from that vineyard and split each one into separate fermentation lots. Each lot is fermented with a different yeast, and each yeast creates a completely different wine, developing unique flavors, textures, color, depth, and tannin from the exact same fruit. From the same clone, picked from the same vineyard on the same day, we end up with wines that are as different from each other as a piece of meat that has been smoked, braised, or served raw. From the Dijon 943 clone alone, we produce three completely distinct wines before a single barrel is involved. Then those wines go into barrels from different French forests, Allier, Tronçais, Nevers, each with different toast levels, grain densities, and personalities. Some barrels soften the edges. Others pull out the spice. Some cradle the wine like silk. Others push it toward the edge of its complexity.

That’s how we build complexity, age ability, and balance in a single vineyard wine.

Now multiply that across four vineyards in widely different appellations, each with three to four clones, each clone fermented with multiple yeasts, each wine aged in multiple barrels. The result is a plethora of flavors and textures that would be impossible to achieve from any one place. That is what makes Po·​lyph·​o·​ny truly unique.

The chef nodded slowly, a small smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Ah,” he said. “You’re making Ratatouille.”

Ratatouille?

“Isn’t that just roasted vegetables?”

The look he gave me, somewhere between pity and tragedy, was the same one you’d give a grown man who asked if Beethoven was the guy from the dog movies.

“No,” he said. “Let me explain how to make real Ratatouille.”

And then it was his turn.

You could throw vegetables in a pan, roast them together, and technically, sure, you’d have ratatouille. But that’s like tossing Pinot in a bottle and calling it wine. The real dish, the one that brings people to tears, is made with devotion. The idea is to take humble ingredients and cook and combine them in a way that creates a different experience with every bite. Simple eating turns into an adventure.

You cook each vegetable differently. Carrots? Roast some. Shave others raw. Braise some in ginger ale for sweetness. Pickle others in white wine vinegar for zing. Eggplant? Fry some, bake others. Tomatoes? Confited, sun-dried, blistered on a flame. You cook each piece separately, coax out every hidden nuance, build flavor, texture, contrast, and then you layer them together, creating a dish so complex, so alive, no single bite is the same.

It’s not just vegetables. It’s an ode to humble ingredients elevated through obsessive care. It’s chaos and harmony on a plate.

It’s a message that tells the person eating it,

I love you.

“That’s what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re making wine like Ratatouille.”

That metaphor is now my standard explanation for how we make Po·​lyph·​o·​ny.

And like a great Ratatouille, every element matters. Every vineyard, every barrel, every decision made in the cellar adds a new layer. It’s all there, even if you’re just sipping casually and smiling over dinner. The complexity is present whether or not you’re paying attention to it. When you do pay attention, when you slow down and actually sit with what’s in the glass, the layers reveal themselves one by one. That’s when the wine stops being a beverage and starts being a conversation.

Po·​lyph·​o·​ny didn’t start as a philosophy. It started as an experiment. We wanted to know if a wine crafted from the prime blocks of the best Pinot Noir vineyards in California could achieve something a single vineyard couldn’t. The answer, after twenty years of making it, is yes. Not in spite of its complexity, but because of it. It has become the most elegant, age-worthy, expressive wine we create.

It started as an experiment. It became a responsibility.

When it works, when all those voices find each other in the glass and the person on the other side of the table goes quiet for a moment, sets down their fork, looks at whoever they’re with, that’s not an accident. That’s the whole point. That’s the playground we’re building.

It’s not a wine to impresses. It’s a wine that touches.

As the chef said, it tells the person experiencing it,

I love you.

That’s Po·​lyph·​o·​ny. And I’ve never looked at roasted vegetables the same way again.

For more on Po·​lyph·​o·​ny and the vineyards behind it, visit lrwine.com.

Ted Lasso was talking about people when he said, “Be curious, not judgmental.” People had judged him without ever being curious enough to really see him.

The words go deeper than that.

Eckhart Tolle writes that attention means bringing the feeling of the moment into our awareness. Then he adds something easy to overlook: full attention also implies acceptance.

To truly experience this moment, stop judging what it should be. Feel what is actually here. Wallow in it.

Curiosity says, I wonder what is here?
Judgment says, I already know.

Presence begins with curiosity. Acceptance is where presence lives.

More on that in a moment.

It turned out to be my own lesson in Love Is a Flavor. Food and wine, at their best, are not really about food and wine. They are about what happens when you create the right conditions for people to show up fully — to each other, to the moment, to the table. I believe that with everything I have. I have written about it, talked about it, built evenings around it for forty-six years.

Last Saturday night, I watched it happen in a way that opened a new door.

The plan was pizza. A ridiculous number of toppings, a dozen sauces, enough cheese to stock a small fromagerie, and enough dough to feed a small village. I had also made a salad — one of my favorites — because I figured after all that pizza, people were going to want something fresh and light. I had spent the better part of a week on the logistics, making it easy for people to build something good without chaos and explore their own creativity. My measure of success going in was simple: good pizza, happy people, a good time.

What I didn’t account for — and probably should have known, given who my friends are — was their overwhelming desire to add to the moment. To bring their own gifts to the table. To leave the evening knowing they had given more than they received.

They may have shown up thinking they were coming for pizza. Their natural instinct to contribute, to care for the people around them, couldn’t be held back. Most of us carry that instinct — it just needs the right conditions to surface. The moment they walked into a space with no agenda, no formality, nothing to perform, it woke up. Once one person offered something of themselves, it moved through the room like a current.

Everyone found their lane, and here is what I noticed about that. The joy in the room wasn’t just coming from the food, or the wine, or even from being on the receiving end of someone else’s warmth — though all of that was wonderful. It was coming from the giving. From having a place to put what they had brought with them. People were full before they finished their first slice, and it had nothing to do with pizza.

Someone was pouring. Another was explaining a topping combination to a stranger, suggesting something unexpected and delicious. Conversations were flying across the table — recipes, projects, stories, offers of help. New friendships were forming in corners over things I never caught the details of. Nobody was waiting to be entertained. Nobody was standing back. Every single person had found a way to give something to someone else, and the room was running on that energy.

I had prepped thinking I was creating a pizza night. What I had actually done was build a playground. The moment people walked in, they started playing — and a room full of people like that, given the space to be themselves, is a remarkable thing to witness.

Now. The salad.

I had made one of my favorites — the kind people always ask about, always want the recipe for. In the beautiful chaos of the evening, the flurry of plates and conversations and laughter, I forgot it completely. It sat in the refrigerator all night, patient and undiscovered, waiting for a moment that never came.

The next morning I opened the refrigerator and there it was, staring at me. Judging me, honestly. All that crisp, dressed, perfectly seasoned righteousness, just sitting there.

Here is what Paul Harvey would call the rest of the story. Two of my guests had such a good time they invited the whole group back to their place for dinner the following night. The love from Saturday hadn’t finished — it had simply moved to a new address. I showed up with the salad like a proud parent delivering a child who had missed the school bus the day before. It finally got served, one night late, at someone else’s table, to the same people, still going. The salad had its moment. We all did.

What happened instead of a simple pizza night was a two-day love fest where contribution fed contribution, generosity sparked generosity, and people’s cups ran so full they spilled straight into the next evening.

My Love Is a Flavor lesson from all of it: the contentment in that room wasn’t in the pizza or the wine. It was found in the opportunity to give — a story, a laugh, a piece of advice, a genuine moment of attention, an invitation extended to a new friend. That is what filled people up. Not what they received, but what they were finally able to offer. Contribution is not the generous impulse we extend after our own needs are met. For most people, it is the need.

A room full of people who understand that, given the space to act on it, is capable of something close to miraculous.

So. I’m sorry about last Sunday. Truly.

Though if you could have seen that room, you’d forgive me immediately.

Now go invite a mob of people over for Pizza Night.

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He’s been gone for twenty-six years, yet I still find myself hearing his voice with surprising regularity. Because the lessons he taught me continue to reveal themselves. Some of them made perfect sense when I was young. Others have taken decades to unfold and understand.

The interesting thing about wisdom is that it often arrives disguised as a simple sentence. You hear it, nod politely, and move on with your life. Thirty or forty years later, after enough success, failure, heartbreak and joy, you suddenly realize what those words actually meant.

As I thought about my dad on his birthday, four lessons came immediately to mind. They have become foundations in my life, my work and, perhaps surprisingly, the way I think about wine.

Mom & Dad on their wedding day

1. There Is No Such Thing as Fair

My father would often say, “Remember Rule #1. There’s no such thing as fair.”

As a kid, I hated hearing it. It sounded harsh, especially when my brother got the bigger piece of cake.

As an adult, I realized it was liberating.

The desire for fairness is completely understandable. The expectation of fairness, however, almost guarantees disappointment. Every time we say, “That’s not fair,” what we’re really saying is, “That isn’t the outcome I wanted.”

Life doesn’t negotiate with our expectations.

People get opportunities we don’t. Good people suffer. Less qualified people sometimes succeed. Storms destroy one vineyard and spare another just a few hundred yards away.

None of it is fair.

Accepting that doesn’t mean we stop pursuing justice or treating people fairly. Quite the opposite. It simply means we stop demanding that life continually conform to our expectations before we’ll allow ourselves to experience it.

That lesson has saved me countless hours of frustration because it reminds me to let go of what I cannot control and return my attention to what I can.

2. It Isn’t Whether You Win or Lose. It’s How You Play the Game.

My father loved that saying, but he always added an important footnote.

“Always play to win.”

When I was pitching in college, hoping one day to play professional baseball, I trained constantly. Running before sunrise was part of the routine.

If I slept in on a Saturday morning, my dad would casually walk past my bedroom and say, “I wonder what the other guys are doing right now.”

If I cut a long training run short because I had other things to do, he’d simply say, “That’ll show up in the late innings.”

He wasn’t trying to make me feel guilty.

He was teaching me something much more valuable.

Looking back, I don’t think he cared whether I became a professional baseball player. He cared that I understood the relationship between preparation and opportunity. The outcome would never be entirely mine to control, but my preparation always would be.

You don’t control the outcome.

You do control your preparation.

Winning isn’t guaranteed, but preparing well dramatically improves the odds.

Life works the same way.

Do everything within your control. Then let the outcome take care of itself.

3. The Most Powerful Word in the English Language.

This is the lesson I think I’m only now beginning to deeply understand.

One day my father asked me, “Do you know what the most powerful word in the English language is?”

I had no idea, but I knew from his tone it would be a gem.

He smiled.

“Let.”

At the time, I had no idea what he meant.

Now I think I do.

You can’t force many of the best things in life.

You can’t make trust, love, great friendships or a wine mature before it’s ready.

You give them your all. You pay attention. You remain open. Then you let life unfold.

This doesn’t mean becoming passive. It means recognizing the difference between effort and control.

Effort belongs to us. Outcomes never completely do.

The older I get, the more peaceful that distinction becomes. It “lets” me put my energy into the things I can control and not waste energy and emotion on worrying about everything that can go wrong.

4. Focus on Your Contribution

This may be the lesson that has shaped my life more than any other.

My father once told me that most people spend their lives asking what they should do to earn a living, to make money to provide for themselves.

He thought that was the wrong question.

Instead, he encouraged me to ask, “How can I contribute?”

How can I use whatever abilities I’ve been given and how can I develop those abilities to leave the world better than I found it? “We’re here to leave a mark,” he would say.

That question changes everything.

When contribution becomes the focus, success becomes a byproduct instead of the objective.

There is one caution, however. Never keep score.

If you contribute because you’re expecting something specific in return, you’ve quietly returned to Lesson One. You’re expecting life to reward you according to your own accounting system. It won’t.

Sometimes your generosity will be returned immediately. Sometimes never.

Sometimes a, what seems as a undeserved reward, arrives from a completely different direction months or years later.

The actual reward is in the contribution, not the return on investment.

Your purpose is to simply contribute. This is the unconditional in unconditional love.

What Does Any of This Have to Do with Wine?

Everything. Wine has quietly reinforced every one of these lessons for me.

Nature isn’t fair. The vineyard rewards preparation.

The finest wines can’t be made. They must be allowed to become what they are capable of becoming. Perhaps most importantly, every bottle represents thousands of acts of contribution by people who may never meet the person eventually enjoying what’s in the glass.

Maybe that’s why I’ve loved this business for so many years. I’ve been practicing what my Dad taught me.

Happy birthday, Dad.

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Who wouldn’t take advise from a man, who’s first job was helping the man who went through the neighborhood, taking pictures of kids on a pony? If you’re old enough, you’ll remember this!

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Steve Jobs stopped by. Nietzsche came to the winery. Of course, neither actually happened, which is probably why I got to ask all the questions I wanted.

I’m beginning to think of these conversations as a series: A Person Walks Into a Bar.

The premise is simple. If I could sit down over a glass of wine with some of the great thinkers who have shaped the way we understand ourselves, what would I ask them? More specifically, what might their ideas tell us about the place wine can have in our lives today?

For this conversation, today’s visitor was Alan Watts.

We sat. I poured us each a glass of Pinot Noir and got right to it.

“Alan, the wine world is going through something of an existential crisis,” I said. “I’ve spent most of my life in it, so I know what the wine business thinks the problems are. I’m more interested in what you see. You spent your life thinking about human behavior, our relentless pursuit of happiness and our difficulty simply experiencing life as it happens. Another generation seems to be having a difficult time seeing how wine could contribute anything meaningful to their lives. I know from my own experience that it can, in ways that are almost impossible to measure. How do we help them recognize that?”

Watts tasted the wine and considered the question.

“Perhaps,” he said, “you’re trying too hard to convince them that wine needs to produce something for them. Human beings have become remarkably preoccupied with outcomes. Will this make me healthier? Happier? More successful? Will it improve me in some measurable way? Even happiness has become something to accomplish rather than something we occasionally experience.”

That interested me because I’ve been thinking about the same problem from another direction. I have nothing against happiness. I highly recommend it. What strikes me as absurd is the idea that happiness should be our normal state and that a successful life is one in which we’ve somehow learned to maintain it every minute.

I told Alan that the problem seems to begin when we start measuring every moment against that expectation. Instead of fully experiencing dinner with someone we love, a difficult afternoon, a beautiful walk or even grief, part of us stands outside the experience asking whether it is making us happy. If the answer is no, we begin judging the experience itself as somehow deficient.

“Precisely,” Watts said. “You aren’t merely experiencing the moment anymore. You’re evaluating whether the moment is giving you what you believe it should. The pursuit of happiness can therefore separate you from the very life in which happiness occasionally appears.”

I took another sip, enjoying the wine as I considered his point. There was an uncomfortable parallel sitting right there in my glass.

“We’ve taught people to do exactly the same thing with wine,” I said. “Instead of experiencing it, we immediately start judging it. Is this good or bad? Do I like it? Is it worth the money? What score did it receive? Am I tasting what I’m supposed to taste? In the worst case, we don’t even use our own measuring stick. We borrow somebody else’s opinion and compare our experience against theirs.”

Watts seemed amused by that.

“So you’ve managed to make the same mistake twice,” he said. “You judge your life against an idea of how it ought to feel, and then you judge the wine against an idea of how it ought to taste.”

“Apparently we’re very consistent.”

The more I thought about it, though, the more important the connection became. The alternative isn’t to stop thinking about wine or learning about it. Knowledge can deepen an experience enormously. Knowing something about music can make listening more interesting. Understanding art can change what we see in a painting. Knowing the people, place, vintage and history behind a wine can transform what is happening in the glass.

The difference is whether the knowledge opens the experience or replaces it with judgment.

“That’s where I think wine becomes much more interesting,” I told Alan. “Its contribution isn’t simply that it tastes good or makes us happy. Wine gives us something unusually rich to become absorbed in. In fact, I’m starting to think of it as a kind of playground.”

“A playground?”

“Yes. Think about what a playground is for. Nobody goes to a playground because they’re trying to arrive somewhere else. Children aren’t training for some future championship in swinging or sliding. They’re completely absorbed in what they’re doing because doing it is the whole point.”

I picked up the glass.

“Wine can be like that. You smell it. Experience it. Notice the texture and the way it changes. You become curious about where it came from and why it tastes the way it does. Eventually the experience can lead you into the vineyard, the weather of that particular year, the people who grew it, the meal you’re eating and the person sitting across from you. There is no finish line. The deeper you go, the larger the playground becomes.”

Watts smiled. “Now you’re getting dangerously close to saying wine has a purpose.”

“I think it does.”

“I suspected you might.”

I knew perfectly well that Watts had spent much of his life questioning our compulsion to give everything a purpose, particularly when purpose means sacrificing the present for some imagined payoff in the future. That is exactly where I part company with him, although perhaps only over the definition of the word.

“I think wine can give us a practice of experiencing what is directly in front of us,” I said.

Watts raised an eyebrow. “Practicing for what?”

“Nothing. That’s the point.”

I explained that perhaps we’ve narrowed the meaning of practice too much. A physician practices medicine. That doesn’t mean she’s rehearsing medicine today so that someday she’ll finally be ready to become a physician. Medicine is what she practices. A musician can have a musical practice. Buddhists speak of meditation as a practice. In each case, practice can describe an ongoing engagement with something rather than preparation for some future event.

“We’re not training for the Olympics of life,” I told him. “We’re already in them. Every day. Maybe practice is simply another word for being absorbed in what we’re doing while we’re doing it.”

Watts took another sip.

“Then perhaps your playground is a better metaphor than your practice.”

I thought he might be right.

A playground doesn’t promise self-improvement. It doesn’t ask you to become enlightened. There is no test at the end. Nobody hands you a score when you leave.

You play.

Music can provide that playground. So can painting, cooking, gardening, reading, conversation, walking through the woods or becoming completely absorbed in making a lasagna for someone you’ve never met.

Wine happens to be one of mine.

It is an extraordinarily deep playground because there is almost no end to what can be discovered within it. Flavor leads to place. Place leads to geology and climate. A vintage leads to weather and time. A bottle leads to the people who farmed the vineyard and made the wine. Opening it leads to food, conversation and the people with whom we choose to share it.

None of those experiences needs to make us happy to justify itself. They only ask us to experience them.

Watts mentioned something the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki once wrote: “Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.”

That seemed remarkably close to what I was trying to describe.

We tend to imagine presence as some elevated state we need to achieve. Perhaps it is much more ordinary than that. A bottle is sitting on the table. You pull the cork and pour the wine. Nothing miraculous has occurred.

Then you pay attention. The experience begins to open.

This is why I don’t want present wine as some self-improvement program. I don’t want anyone drinking Pinot Noir because they’re practicing being present today so that five years from now they’ll finally become a wonderfully enlightened human being.

There is no future payoff required.

The practice is the experience.

If you’re completely absorbed in experiencing the wine, you’re already there.

The same is true of music. You don’t listen carefully to a piece of music because you’re preparing for the day when you’ll finally know how to listen. You listen because listening is the experience.

Perhaps that’s what we’ve misunderstood about happiness too.

I want plenty of happiness in my life. I just don’t want to spend my life standing outside each moment measuring whether it’s producing enough of it. Some moments will be joyful. Some will hurt. Others will be ordinary Tuesday afternoons that don’t seem particularly important until years later when we’d give almost anything to have one of them back.

Maybe the better invitation is simply to experience our lives while they’re happening. That is the contribution I believe wine can make. Not escape from the present moment or a shortcut to happiness. Wine is not another substance whose primary purpose is to change the way we feel.

It’s a beautiful endless playground in which we can become absorbed in flavor, place, people, time, conversation and whatever else we discover while we’re there.

I poured the last of the Pinot Noir into our glasses.

“So,” I asked Alan, “can we agree that wine has a purpose after all?”

Watts looked at the glass and smiled.

“I’ll give you your playground.”

“I’ll take it.”

We raised our glasses.

“To what?” I asked.

Watts thought for a moment.

“To spending more of our lives on the playground.”

That’s a purpose I could live with.

What surprised me wasn’t the delivery. It was the making of the lasagna.

As I worked on the recipe, trying to make it just a little better each time, I realized I wasn’t just cooking. I was pouring a little bit of myself into something I hoped would make another person’s day a little easier.

That’s when it hit me.

I wasn’t delivering a lasagna.

I was delivering love.

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What does it mean to live well?

He wasn’t asking how to become wealthy, famous, or powerful. He wasn’t even asking how to become happy. He was searching for something deeper, something he called eudaimonia, often translated as human flourishing.

That idea has stayed with me because it points to something we rarely talk about anymore.

We spend an enormous amount of time trying to improve our standard of living. We spend far less time thinking about how to improve our capacity for living.

Those are not the same thing.

Somewhere along the way, our understanding of success began to shift. We became remarkably good at measuring outward progress because outward progress is easy to see. A promotion can be announced. A larger home can be admired. Financial success can be calculated. Recognition can be counted. None of those things are unimportant. They often represent years of sacrifice, discipline, and hard work. The problem begins when those measurements quietly become our definition of a successful life instead of remaining what they were always meant to be: tools that may help us live well.

Aristotle saw wealth very differently. Wealth was useful because it made certain things possible. It was never the destination. A hammer has value because it helps build a house. No one mistakes the hammer for the house itself. Yet we often make that mistake with success. We become so focused on acquiring the tools that we forget to ask what we are trying to build.

That changes the question entirely.

Instead of asking, “How am I doing?” Aristotle invites us to ask, “Who am I becoming?” One question measures our circumstances. The other measures our character, and those two paths often lead in very different directions.

A person can accumulate an extraordinary amount and still never develop the qualities that make life deeply meaningful. Another person may possess far less and yet become someone whose presence consistently leaves others stronger, wiser, calmer, more hopeful, and more grateful. Aristotle believed the second person was flourishing because he measured success by the development of character rather than the accumulation of possessions.

He admired the person who had developed the ability to recognize beauty instead of rushing past it. He admired the person who remained grateful when circumstances became difficult instead of becoming bitter, whose integrity earned trust without demanding it, who listened carefully enough that others felt understood, and who transformed knowledge into wisdom, success into humility, and gratitude into generosity. Most importantly, he admired the person whose life increased the flourishing of the people around them.

Those qualities are not commodities that can be purchased, inherited, or acquired overnight. They are capacities that must be cultivated, often slowly, through thousands of ordinary choices that gradually shape our character until they become our natural response to the world around us.

The more I think about Aristotle’s definition, the more convinced I become that flourishing was never intended to stop with the individual.

A flourishing life naturally overflows into the lives of others. Someone who has learned gratitude notices what others overlook. Someone who has learned patience creates calm where there was once frustration. Someone who has learned generosity begins looking for opportunities to encourage rather than compete. Flourishing is not a private achievement. It becomes visible in the way our presence changes the people and places around us.

That realization has also changed the way I think about appreciation.

Many of you know that I write about wine. The truth is that wine has never been the real subject. Wine simply became one of my greatest teachers. It taught me to slow down long enough to notice what I had been missing. It taught me to appreciate the devotion of a farmer, the patience required to grow something worthwhile, the privilege of gathering around a table, and the quiet joy of giving another person an experience they will remember long after the bottle is empty.

Those lessons have very little to do with wine.

They have everything to do with becoming the kind of person Aristotle was describing.

For years I have described the Bon Vivant life as the good life. I have realized that many people hear those words and imagine luxury. Aristotle would have understood them very differently. The good life is not built by surrounding ourselves with extraordinary things. It is built by developing the capacity to recognize what is extraordinary in ordinary life, to receive it with genuine gratitude, to share it generously, and to leave another person’s life richer because our own life touched theirs.

That understanding also sheds new light on something Viktor Frankl wrote many centuries later.

In other words, the things we want most cannot be chased directly. They emerge as the natural consequence of becoming a certain kind of person.

Perhaps flourishing works the same way.

The more deeply we learn to appreciate beauty, kindness, craftsmanship, generosity, friendship, and love, the more naturally those qualities become part of our own character. Eventually they cease to be occasional acts and become our default way of moving through the world. Our own flourishing quietly begins to nourish the flourishing of others.

That may also explain something I have been trying to put into words for years.

Love is a Flavor.

Not because love behaves like a flavor, but because once you learn to recognize it, you begin to notice it everywhere. You taste it in the devotion of a farmer who spends a lifetime caring for a vineyard. You see it in a parent who quietly puts someone else’s future ahead of their own. You recognize it in a teacher, a friend, a neighbor, or a stranger whose generosity leaves another person’s life richer than they found it.

Perhaps love is the fullest expression of human flourishing.

Perhaps that is why Aristotle’s ideas still matter after more than two thousand years. The world around us has changed beyond anything he could have imagined, yet the qualities that make a human life rich, meaningful, and deeply satisfying have changed very little. We still become the people we repeatedly choose to be. We still shape our character one decision at a time because character is formed through ordinary choices, not extraordinary moments.

His question has never gone away.

What does it mean to live well?

Perhaps Aristotle understood that this question can never be answered once and filed away. Every generation inherits it, and every generation must answer it for itself. Our circumstances continue to change, but human nature changes far more slowly. We still choose, day after day, the kind of people we are becoming, and those choices quietly shape the lives of everyone around us.

The more I have reflected on Aristotle’s question, the more I believe that human flourishing is not something we achieve for ourselves alone. A flourishing life naturally enlarges the lives of others. Gratitude becomes generosity because grateful people naturally become more generous. Wisdom becomes encouragement because wisdom shared has the power to change another person’s life. Beauty becomes something we are moved to share rather than possess, and love stops being merely something we feel and becomes something other people experience because of the way we live.

Perhaps that is the answer Aristotle spent his life searching for. To live well is not simply to improve our own circumstances. It is to cultivate the kind of character that enlarges the lives of others through gratitude, generosity, wisdom, encouragement, and love. Those qualities cannot be measured on a balance sheet, yet they have shaped every civilization worth remembering.

Aristotle’s question has been waiting for each of us for more than two thousand years. I believe it is still the most important question we can ask ourselves, because the answer determines not only the quality of our own lives, but also the lives of everyone we touch.

What does it mean to live well?

How will you live well today?

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First, survive the group stage.

Then win your Round of 32 match.

After that, have your leading goal scorer receive one of the most controversial red cards of the tournament.

Welcome to the conversation surrounding Folarin Balogun.

For days, fans have debated every angle. Was it really a red card? Should it have been yellow? Was he simply playing the ball? Did the other player fall into an unavoidable position? Did Balogun have any realistic way to avoid the contact once he was in the air?

I was one of those people asking the same questions.

As someone who is relatively new to soccer, I assumed intent would play a major role in the decision. It doesn’t.

What I learned is that the Laws of the Game are designed around something even more important than intent: player safety. The referee isn’t asked to determine whether a player meant to injure someone. The referee is asked whether the challenge endangered the safety of an opponent.

That philosophy explains why the debate has become so passionate.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether this particular challenge deserved a red card. They can argue whether the automatic suspension should extend into the next match of a World Cup knockout tournament. They can debate where the line should be drawn between protecting players and preserving competitive fairness.

Those discussions have existed for generations and will continue long after this World Cup ends.

The referee and VAR are asked to make the best decision they can in a very short period of time. They follow a process designed to be applied consistently, regardless of the teams involved or the importance of the match.

Whether we agree with the outcome or not, consistency is one of the foundations of the sport.

Then something extraordinary happened.

President Trump publicly acknowledged that he had called FIFA President Gianni Infantino and asked that the decision be reviewed. Soon afterward, FIFA’s disciplinary process resulted in Balogun being declared eligible for the next match.

FIFA has maintained that the decision was made independently through its judicial process. Even so, the controversy immediately shifted.

The conversation was no longer only about the tackle.

It became about the integrity of the competition.

Once people begin asking whether politics, public pressure, or outside influence affected a sporting decision, something important has already been lost.

This isn’t because anyone has proven improper influence.

It’s because the appearance of fairness matters almost as much as fairness itself.

Every championship depends on the belief that every competitor plays under the same rules.

If that belief begins to erode, the victory itself becomes vulnerable.

Even if the eventual champion earned every minute on the field, there will always be people who wonder whether one decision changed the course of history.

Championships should never leave room for that question.

That is why I believe the United States has been handed an extraordinary opportunity.

Before I offer what I think the United States should do, it’s worth recognizing something that may have been the most impressive moment of the entire World Cup.

After the match, Folarin Balogun didn’t storm off the field. He didn’t point at the referee. He didn’t make excuses. He walked over, looked referee Raphael Claus in the eye, and shook his hand. Later, Balogun explained why.

“There are lots of people we’re inspiring, boys and girls watching, and we have to show them the correct way to handle things, even when you think it’s unjust.”

Think about that for a moment.

Here was a player who believed the decision was wrong. His coach believed it was wrong. His teammates believed it was wrong. Millions of fans believed it was wrong.

Yet he chose respect over resentment.

He understood something bigger than himself. Millions of children were watching. They weren’t just watching how he played the game. They were watching how he handled disappointment, frustration, and adversity.

That is leadership.

That is sportsmanship.

That is what winning looks like, whether your name ends up on the scoreboard or not.

His captain, Christian Pulisic, responded with the same quiet dignity. Rather than fueling the controversy, he simply called the situation “so unfortunate” and made it clear the team would rally around Balogun.

I have to admit, moments like these make me stand a little taller as an American.

Not because we won the match.

Not because I think every call went our way.

Because the people representing our country represented something even more important than soccer.

They represented character.

When we stand up straight, accept disappointment with grace, treat officials with respect even when we disagree, and refuse to let anger define us, we remind the world who we aspire to be.

That is a victory no referee can award and no trophy can measure.

Now… Imagine if the team announced:

“We appreciate FIFA’s decision. We appreciate the review process. We also entered this tournament expecting to play under the same rules as every other nation. Out of respect for our opponents, the officials, and the integrity of this competition, Folarin Balogun will not dress for this match.”

Not because the team believes the original red card was correct.

Not because it agrees with the suspension.

Because our integrity is worth more than any competitive advantage.

Think about what that would say.

It would tell the world that there will be no asterisk beside any victory. No lingering question. No debate decades from now about whether special treatment influenced the outcome.

The United States would be saying, “If we’re going to win the World Cup, we’re going to win it under exactly the same standards everyone else accepted.”

Then imagine one more remarkable act.

Belgium responds by saying:

“We don’t want to advance because your best player isn’t on the field under controversial circumstances. We want to beat your best team, or lose to your best team. If the rules permit it, we’d welcome him onto the field.”

Would that happen?

Probably not.

Would FIFA even allow it?

Probably not.

That isn’t really the point.

The point is that both gestures would declare something far more important than who advances to the quarterfinals.

They would declare that character still matters.

This World Cup has already reminded us of something beautiful. Millions of people from every corner of the globe have gathered in homes, restaurants, stadiums, and public squares. People who disagree about almost everything have stood shoulder to shoulder cheering for something larger than themselves. Opponents have embraced after matches. Fans have celebrated extraordinary performances regardless of which flag was on the jersey.

For a few weeks, the world has looked a little more like the world many of us wish we lived in every day.

Let’s not lose that.

The old saying tells us it isn’t whether you win or lose. It’s how you play the game.

I would take that one step further.

The greatest victory may not be lifting the World Cup.

The greatest victory may be leaving the world with absolute confidence that the game was played with honor, integrity, and respect for every competitor.

If the United States were to choose integrity over advantage, or if Belgium were to respond with equal grace, neither nation would simply be remembered for winning a soccer match.

They would be remembered for showing the world how champions behave.

That is how you truly win a World Cup.

The phrase, often attributed to Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto after the attack on Pearl Harbor, came to mind as I watched this World Cup.

For most of my life, the United States has never really been a soccer nation. We have always loved sports, but our attention belonged to baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Soccer was there, but it was never quite woven into the fabric of our culture the way it has been in so many other countries.

Something has changed.

Over the past few weeks, millions of Americans have discovered the beautiful game in a way they never had before. Restaurants have filled before sunrise. Watch parties have sprung up in every corner of the country. Families have planned weekends around kickoff. Children have memorized the names of players they had never heard of a month ago.

We have also discovered something else.

We have witnessed extraordinary skill, relentless determination, breathtaking teamwork, and a level of sportsmanship that reminds us why competition can bring out the very best in people. We have watched players collapse in disappointment, only to embrace their opponents moments later. We have watched entire nations celebrate victory without forgetting to honor those who came up short.

It has been impossible not to be inspired.

There is little doubt this tournament will change the future of soccer in America. Thousands of children will ask for a soccer ball instead of another toy. Youth leagues will grow. High school programs will become stronger. The level of play in this country will continue to rise because an entire generation has seen what is possible.

That alone would make this World Cup unforgettable.

As exciting as that is, I don’t believe it is the biggest story.

I believe the biggest story has very little to do with soccer.

For weeks, we have watched a country that so often describes itself as divided gather around a common purpose. Complete strangers have celebrated together. Families, friends, coworkers, and neighbors have gathered in living rooms, restaurants, and public squares, all hoping for the same result. They laughed together, celebrated together, suffered together, and believed together.

For ninety minutes at a time, something remarkable happened. The differences we spend so much time talking about simply faded into the background. Our attention was somewhere else. It was focused on a shared goal, and for a little while, that was enough.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve witnessed something that doesn’t fit the story we’ve been telling ourselves. If we’re as divided as we sometimes believe, how do we explain what we’ve just experienced?

Perhaps the answer is simpler than we think.

People have always been willing to work together when they believe in something larger than themselves.

Our ability to unite around a common cause may be the real sleeping giant.

Not our ability to play soccer, but our ability to unite behind a shared vision.

This tournament did not create that ability. It revealed it.

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”

Henry Ford

Watching this World Cup, I realized he could just as easily have been talking about a soccer team as a business or our country. Every great team is made up of different personalities, different backgrounds, different strengths, and different opinions. They don’t succeed because they all think alike. They succeed because they share a purpose that is bigger than any individual.

What if this World Cup gave us more than a new appreciation for soccer? What if it reminded us what becomes possible when millions of people choose to pull in the same direction?

We will always disagree. We should. Healthy debate is part of a healthy society. Different ideas make us stronger. Yet disagreement doesn’t prevent us from pursuing the same destination. The greatest teams don’t eliminate their differences. They channel them toward a common purpose. Every pass, every sacrifice, every sprint, and every celebration serve something greater than the individual.

Imagine what could happen if we approached the challenges facing our communities, our country, and even our world with that same spirit. Imagine what would become possible if we spent less time defining ourselves by what separates us and more time rallying around the things worthy of our collective effort.

No matter how far the United States advances in this World Cup, I believe we have already won something extraordinary.

The final whistle will blow. The trophies will be handed out. The jerseys will eventually find their way back into closets.

My hope is that the feeling and this lesson don’t.

I hope we remember this World Cup as more than a remarkable tournament. I hope we remember it as the catalyst that reminded us what becomes possible when people share a vision, believe in one another, and willingly work toward something larger than themselves.

The advertisements throughout this tournament have been asking a simple question:

Why not us?

That is a powerful question.

Not just for soccer.

For all of us.

Why not us?

Let’s bring that same spirit, that same determination, and that same willingness to work together to the challenges that matter most?

We have just witnessed what we are capable of together.

How will we choose to use this power in the future?

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I asked Tom to go home and make a list of his top three dream vineyards. I did the same. We’d compare notes in the morning and decide who to approach.

When I got to the winery the next day, before I even saw Tom, there was a message waiting on the voicemail.

“Hey, this is Martin van der Kamp. Some good friends brought a bottle of your wine to dinner last night, and I’d love to sell you some grapes.”

I chuckled. How creative. Tom had gotten someone to call and punk me, and this was his way of suggesting his top pick for a new vineyard. I was almost disappointed in myself for not thinking of the scam first.

As it turned out, the Van der Kamp Vineyard was sitting at the top of both my list and Tom’s.

I called back, half-joking, doing my best Eeyore voice, the kind that says this will never work. “Hey Martin, it’s Chuck at La Rochelle, and I’d love to buy some grapes.”

Silence. I expected to hear laughter, the joke finally landing. Instead, in a very confused voice, he said, “Great. Come on up and I’ll show you what we have available.”

This was no joke. One of the best vineyards on the planet was calling me, hoping I would buy their grapes.

After I got over my embarrassment, I didn’t hesitate. I got in the car and drove straight up to the top of Sonoma Mountain.

Martin walked me through the vineyard, through its long history and its unique setting, and the practices that made the place so spectacular. As it turned out, one of his longtime winemaker friends had recently sold his winery to a larger conglomerate, and the new CFO had called Martin wanting to renegotiate the grape contract. Martin explained that one of the best things about being a grower is choosing who you do business with, and he told the man plainly that he wasn’t someone Martin wanted to do business with. That was the same week a friend had brought a bottle of our wine to a dinner Martin attended. He thought, this is delicious, why don’t I call this guy.

The clones his winemaker friend had always received were some of the best blocks in the vineyard, and that’s what was now available to us. He showed me three different clones that blended beautifully together, each one showing the personality of the place with real depth and complexity. Then he walked me down to an old block, the oldest Pinot Noir planting in California, and said I could have a little of that too.

Feeling like I had won the lottery, that alone would have been enough.

As we walked toward the end of a row, I noticed someone just walking out of a row about ten rows below us.

“Who is that?” I asked Martin. “He looks really familiar.”

Martin smiled. “Oh, have you met Aubert before?”

Aubert de Villaine. The proprietor of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, the man behind the most revered Pinot Noir on earth. When he decided to make wine in California, the Van der Kamp Vineyard was one of his first choices.

I just stood there. In my head… doing my best Jerry Maguire impression, all I could say was, “you had me at hello.”

This wasn’t coincidence, and it wasn’t luck. It felt like two things that had been circling each other, each one clear about what it was and why it existed, finally pulled together by something neither of us had engineered. Martin had been farming this mountain with the same intention for years. We had been looking for a vineyard worthy of replacing Deer Meadows. Neither of us knew the other personally until he heard my goofy Eeyore voice on the phone. That’s not how business usually works. That’s how magnets work, two pieces drawn together the moment they’re both finally clear on who they are.

This was a different world of grape growing than the one I thought I understood. This place had nothing to do with extraction, power, even varietal character. This was heart. This was feeling. The Van der Kamps were here to express love through their grapes, and they wanted to share them with winemakers who could capture it in a bottle.

This was the beginning of a wonderful and life changing relationship with the Van der Kamp family. Over time I got to know the history of the property and how they came to become its stewards.

For years, Martin and Dixie made sparkling wine from the Pinot Noir on the vineyard, purchasing grapes from the gentleman who owned the property. When he became too old to take care of it, he offered to sell it to them.

Soon after they moved in, there was a knock at the front door. It was an elderly Indigenous gentleman. They asked how they could help him, and he replied, I’m here to die.

This may be one of the reasons I love Martin and Dixie so much, because there were many ways to respond to that, and theirs was, come on in, tell us your story.

He asked if they knew the history of the property. They said they’d been buying grapes from there for a long time but told him to share what he knew. He said, you know the story of Noah’s Ark, that it rained for forty days and forty nights and there was a great flood. Our people have a similar story, except we weren’t in an ark, we were in canoes. When the waters receded, this mountain, this property, is where we landed. It’s where life began again. This is one of the most sacred places for our people. We’ve been coming here for hundreds of years. I’m absolutely not the first, and I can guarantee you I won’t be the last.

Martin and Dixie were enthralled. Over time they became part of that community, welcoming visitors with open arms. They built a sweat lodge on the property, open to Indigenous people from around the world. Celebrations and gatherings are held there regularly, and people come and go as they please. Martin and Dixie don’t see themselves as owners of the property. They see themselves as stewards, with a responsibility to take care of it and share it with others.

Which leads me to one of my favorite stories. It’s one that tells a lot about this place, this family, and a way of appreciating wine that often gets lost in all the terminology and analysis.

Over the years, new people I hired would generally ask for tasting notes. The idea was that everything visitors needed could be listed on a sheet of paper. Brix at harvest. Percentage of new oak. Date of harvest. All measurable information. I’ll admit I became fairly militant about not having tasting notes. My question to them was always, what could possibly be on that sheet of paper that would tell someone whether the wine was going to be good or bad. Let’s start with Brix at harvest. Say it was 22.8 Brix. Does that tell you the wine is going to be good or bad? The truth is, nothing on a tasting note could tell you whether you were going to have an enjoyable experience, or what the wine was actually going to taste like. I started to feel that listing all that information was really us saying we don’t know what we’re talking about, because we think this is the important stuff. It isn’t.

One morning, as we were setting up for a wine club event, I noticed Dixie wandering through the vineyard with a basket, collecting things as she walked the rows. I knew exactly what she was up to. I called the team together. Hey everyone, gather over here, Dixie’s going to take us through the tasting notes.

I got immediate looks of confusion. Tasting notes? We don’t do tasting notes. Dixie walked up with a confused look too, because she knew exactly what she was about to do, and it had nothing to do with tasting notes.

She explained that years earlier, the spiritual head of the Shoshoni nation had visited the property and identified one particular spot as the center, the core, the place that connected everything together. They had built a small fire pit to mark it. Dixie explained that when wineries pick their grapes, she walks through the vineyard afterward and gathers what’s left from the rows that had just been picked. These particular grapes were from the rows La Rochelle had picked just two days earlier.

First, she said, I lay the grapes out in all four corners, because we want to touch everyone. After adding some tobacco, some sage, and a few other items, we say a prayer. A prayer for everyone who has ever taken care of this land, the people who gave of themselves to make it what it is today. Another prayer for everyone who worked this vintage, growing these grapes and tending them to this point, and for their families, that the work and the contribution here will nurture and take care of them. Then a prayer for all the wineries that source their grapes from this place, that they can capture the essence of it, create beautiful wines, and provide for their families too. And finally, a prayer for everyone who will eventually drink these wines, that they can enjoy the experience, share it, connect with the people they love, and feel all the love and hard work and passion that went into the bottle in front of them. At the end of harvest, once all the grapes have been picked for every winery and this fire pit is full, we come up here and light the whole thing. To release all that love energy back out into the world, so it can be shared with everyone.

There was a long pause. Silence. My team was looking at each other, speechless. I couldn’t resist the opportunity. I said, “So, does anyone have any questions about the tasting notes?”

The point is that all the decades of work, passion, and love that go into creating a vineyard, tending it, making the wine, aging it, all of that love energy, when it’s done right, is captured in the experience. There is no way to list that on a tasting note. Love is the most important ingredient. The one that, when it’s present and noticed by the person paying attention as they drink the wine, is everything.

Love is a flavor. It is the universal ingredient in wines that touch people. It creates an emotional response, a sense of awe and wonder.

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We spend so much time looking for extraordinary moments that we overlook the ordinary ones that are quietly waiting to become extraordinary. Wonder isn’t rare. Attention is.

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Years ago I was watching Anthony Bourdain and José Andrés having dinner at El Bulli. They were talking about what separated a place like El Bulli from every other restaurant in the world. José was describing the precision, thoughtfulness, and obsessive attention to detail that seemed to find its way into every dish. He summed it up with a single word.

“Finesse.”

Bourdain thought about it for a moment and then translated it into something everyone could understand.

“What does ‘finesse’ translate to? It translates into giving a shit.”

I’ve never forgotten that exchange because I don’t think they were really talking about food. They were talking about care. They were talking about the difference between doing something and pouring yourself into it. Every once in a while you encounter a place where you can feel that difference, where every detail seems to have been considered not because someone had to do it, but because someone genuinely wanted your experience to be better.

For me, that place happens to be Golden Bear Station, although the truth is that this story isn’t really about a restaurant.

It’s about Heidy.

Golden Bear Station is simply the canvas she works on.

Most of us choose restaurants by asking a simple question: What am I in the mood for tonight? Maybe it’s Chinese food. Maybe it’s Italian. Maybe it’s pizza, tacos, or a burger. We scroll through menus, compare reviews, and decide what sounds good. The older I get, the more I think that’s the wrong question because the menu only tells you what a restaurant serves. It doesn’t tell you how much they care.

A restaurant looks like a restaurant looks like a restaurant from the outside. One place has short ribs on the menu. Another place has short ribs on the menu. One place serves a salad. Another place serves a salad. One place may charge a little more and another a little less. We spend a lot of time comparing ingredients, prices, and reviews when the most important ingredient is often invisible. The better question might be this: Who do I want taking care of me tonight?

That is where Heidy enters the story.

Calling Heidy the owner of Golden Bear Station is technically accurate, but it misses the point entirely. Host, guide, caretaker, conductor, and friend all get closer to the truth. She seems to possess an almost supernatural ability to read a room and understand what people need before they know it themselves. Golden Bear Station may be where the experience takes place, but Heidy is the force that shapes it.

You can watch it happen if you pay attention. A couple sits down for dinner and within a few minutes she seems to know whether they’re celebrating something, reconnecting after a long week, or simply looking forward to a quiet evening together. Nothing feels scripted and there is no sense that someone is working through a checklist of hospitality techniques. Instead, there is a feeling that she is genuinely curious about how to make the evening better.

A small bowl of cacio e pepe might arrive between courses, not because anyone ordered it, but because she senses that it will enhance the moment. The conversation around the table is already flowing and now everyone has something new to discover together. The bowl gets passed from person to person. Opinions are shared. Someone closes their eyes after the first bite. Someone else immediately asks what makes it so good. What appears to be a simple pasta dish becomes another layer of connection added to the evening. The kitchen has been working on perfecting that cacio e pepe for months. There is pride behind it, not the pride of showing off, but the satisfaction that comes from creating something that brings people joy. The greatest compliment isn’t when a guest cleans the bowl. The greatest compliment arrives a few weeks later when they return and ask if they can have another bowl because they’ve been thinking about it ever since their last visit.

A taste of champagne may appear when Heidy senses a celebration unfolding. A different wine might find its way into a glass because someone at the table is clearly enjoying the spirit of discovery. None of these gestures are extravagant on their own. The remarkable thing is how perfectly timed they feel. Each one arrives at precisely the right moment, almost as if she is quietly reading the emotional rhythm of the room and asking herself how she can make the evening even better than her guests expected.

Watching her work reminds me of watching a great musician. Plenty of musicians can play the same notes. What separates the great ones is knowing exactly when to play them and exactly how much is needed. Too much and the moment feels forced. Too little and something is missing. Heidy seems to possess that same instinct. She reads the room, understands the emotional rhythm of the evening, and somehow finds the right note at exactly the right moment.

The remarkable thing about Heidy’s canvas at Golden Bear Station is that the food is genuinely extraordinary. I still think about a short rib I had there. I still think about a bibb lettuce salad that had absolutely no business being as memorable as it was. Six weeks later everyone at the table was still talking about that salad. Lettuce is not supposed to occupy that much real estate in your memory, yet there it was, becoming part of the story long after dinner had ended.

Thomas Keller once said that hospitality exists when something happens for you rather than to you. Maya Angelou expressed a similar idea from a different direction when she said that people will forget what you said and forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel. Great restaurants understand this. Great wineries understand this. Great teachers understand this. The deepest gifts are rarely found in the product itself. They are found in the feeling that accompanies it.

The whole idea behind Love is a Flavor is that human beings can feel the care, attention, and passion that go into creating something. Wine may be one of the clearest examples, but it certainly isn’t the only one. Every once in a while you encounter a person who pours so much of themselves into their craft that the product becomes inseparable from the person behind it. The food becomes an expression of the heart behind it. The experience becomes the gift.

The next time you’re deciding where to eat, perhaps ask a different question. Instead of asking what you’re in the mood for, ask yourself what kind of experience you need. Ask yourself who you want taking care of you. Every once in a while we all need a reminder that there are still people in the world who care deeply about what they do and about the people they serve.

Heidy is one of those people. One of the good ones.

Golden Bear Station is simply where she shares that gift with the rest of us.