Why is it so much harder to achieve small goals than big ones?
I moved to Madrid more than two years ago now and my Spanish is still awful—mi español es fatal! So awful, in fact, that a Spaniard recently asked me if I was German!!!
Learning Spanish isn’t a small goal except, perhaps, for an Italian. Even if I learnt it perfectly, I’m expected to because, well yes, obviously, the languages are so similar, the cultures so similar...
The problem is that achievable goals are terribly unromantic.
When I was learning Mandarin—oh, the thrill of understanding one sentence the bus driver in Guangzhou said to another Chinese person ahead of us! Never mind that I remained almost completely deaf to the tones and could identify only a handful of characters in the metro station. The point was that I was attempting something gloriously disproportionate to my abilities.
Big goals, difficult goals, unlock something within us—a better future perhaps, a better version of ourselves? They allow us to draw from a deeper well.
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Last year I visited Argentiera in Bolgheri, and it became apparent that its owner, Stanislaus Turnauer, has made a number of serious investments since taking over in 2016 — in the cellar, in the vineyard, in the whole bloody enterprise. So I asked — what’s his goal with all this? What does he hope to achieve?
Their team told me their ambition is to become Italy’s number one winery within ten years.
This left me dumbfounded, but I managed to ask, eventually, “In what sense, sorry?” They replied, “In every sense.” I’m sure I sneered, looking like one of those veteran bores who has seen too many ambitions come and go. (Mostly mine, I suppose.)
When I reported this exchange to someone else in the industry, they said what I’d been thinking the whole time — that it’s hard, especially to overtake a name like Sassicaia, that there’s brutal competition at the high end of the price scale, and on and on… All of which we know. It’s hard to make great wine, and that’s not even the beginning of it.
And after all that rational thinking, I arrived at the conclusion that what Argentiera is doing is exhilarating. Isn’t that thought appealing? Isn’t it exciting that someone is taking on a bloody and impossible challenge, putting the money behind it, hiring an ambitious and smart team, investing at a moment like this?
One cannot achieve all one's dreams, but it feels great to have fought for them. More: it’s great to have them in the first place.
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Another story about ambition and wine was told, sometime last year, by Tim Atkin in his weekly Friday newsletter (to which you should subscribe, if you don't already).
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Why am I telling you this? What has it got to do with wine, or charts, or data?
It’s just so unbearably hot here in Madrid that I can’t think about any of that; I’m dreaming of clouds and rain and greyness and winter and trench coats, and all I can do until the temperature drops below 30 degrees is stare at the blue sky and think about the ambition it takes to make truly great wine, and all the thoughts we need to fill our heads with to create something out of nothing—and how sometimes we need to say these things aloud, just to have someone sneer at us for it.