“Dave’s calling me, what a great surprise,” I say as I turn to Rachael, who’s staring deep into the eyes of her second Liverpool pint of the morning. “Hey Dave! How are you?”
“Good mate, great to hear your voice. What are your plans for next week? I've got a proposition for you.”
“Not much, we haven’t booked anything beyond Liverpool yet, but we’re planning on going to Ireland at some point,” I respond as Rachael darts her eyes towards me suspiciously.
“First of all, why the fuck are you in Liverpool, I’ve never even been there and I was born in the UK. But never mind that, come join me in the South of France, I’m going to a charity event adjacent to the Cannes Film Festival. My friend Richard is hosting!. It’s sure to be quite fun, and well, if not, there’s sure to be enough rosé to occupy us for weeks.”
“It’s hard to turn down that offer, send me the details, I’ll have a look and let’s be honest I’ll probably see you there,” I tell him as I hang up the phone and look at Rachael who’s been listening closely, and nodding fervently at the idea of never drinking another lukewarm beer again.
In the next two hours, we got the details for the event, RSVP’d yes, and then quickly charted our path to the small coastal town of Antibes, just outside of Nice on the French Riviera. The route would take us through Paris, where we’d stay for three nights, from there we’d take a quick flight to Nice, and an even shorter train ride along the coast to Antibes, where we’d stay for three nights. This gives us one full day on each side of the event, where we’d be helping raise money for the development of a new pediatric cancer center at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, and then finally a flight to Bordeaux, because why not finish a trip to France with some red wine on the bank of the Gironde. Once the rush of booking a ten day trip in two hours wears off, we look at each other dumbfounded, wondering how we keep finding ourselves in these situations. Yet another ridiculous opportunity plucked out of thin air, and this time it’s even better because we get to reunite with friends we haven’t seen since our wedding!
The trip didn’t disappoint; I can’t stop smiling as I think about everything we had the chance to do, but among fleeting thoughts of the sunset over the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, Rosé du Provence on the beach in Antibes, and 10am glasses of merlot in St. Emilion, I keep thinking about alternatives to American capitalism, obsessed with perpetual growth at all costs. Something I hadn’t pondered before because I was too entrenched in it, and too controlled by it.
This first took over my brain when we were in Bordeaux, our last stop in France, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more it colored the entire journey. Bordeaux is a medium sized city of about 250,000 people in the southwest region of France. It’s nestled in between two large rivers, the Garonne and Dordogne, which historically made it an incredibly important economic port and trade city that changed hands many times over its history, and it wasn’t until the late 19th century that the world realized its geography made it an excellent locale for producing wine. There are six primary Bordeaux grape varietals: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petite Verdot, Malbec and Camenere. The city and region is split into two sections known as the Left Bank and the Right Bank, where the bank in reference is the Gironde estuary which is where both the Garonne and Dordogne rivers meet and feed into the Atlantic Ocean. There are many distinctions to these regions, but the simplest and most prominent is that on the Left Bank, Cabernet Sauvignon is king, whereas on the Right Bank Merlot is the dominant grape.
Rach and I have long been wine aficionados due to our long standing proximity to Sonoma and Napa where we’ve spent many weekends overindulging in tastings and joining a stupid number of wineries’ quarterly allocations. That means we came into the trip with at least some knowledge about wine - or at least how to look good drinking it, but that said, the world of French wine expanded our horizons quite a bit, and we learned a ton. First, is that wine tourism in France is quite different from what we were used to in Napa. It’s much less of a party where people seek to get drunk in beautiful, outdoor settings and bounce from vineyard to vineyard buying tastings, and the occasional bottle. Instead, it’s much more about learning how the terroir, or landscape, affects the grapes; it’s about the history of the region, the history of the winemaker and the processes they use to differentiate themselves from the winery next door. Each trip has to be deliberately planned with reservations and guides procured in advance, unlike in Napa where we’ve often wandered from location to location asking if there was availability at the moment.
This was yet another lesson we learned the hard way. When we tried to book an all day wine tasting excursion the day before we wanted to go, we got stone walled. There wasn’t a single option for us, and when we spoke with the concierge at our hotel they laughed at us for considering the prospect of trying to book on such short notice, so we took the only option available and booked what seemed like a relatively cheesy, half-day group tour of St. Emilion, a winemaking town that included a wine tasting. We got picked up in a sprinter van along with a family of Canadians and a couple from one of the Carolinas at 8am – prime time for wine tasting. The driver even made a couple alcoholic jokes to us in broken English as he boarded us and drove the 1.5 hours to the beautiful Chateau Franc Mayne in the French countryside. Maybe it was the combination of early morning, group tour and wine, but the group turned out to be hilarious, eccentric and wonderful, and the connection kicked off when the Canadians had the audacity to ask if we’d heard of Wayne Gretzky. I took off my sweatshirt to reveal my LA Kings shirt, and boom we were instant friends. We started talking about wine, and our proximity to Napa and they in turn, educated us on the intricacies of Canadian ice wine, which we’d never heard of. Apparently it’s incredibly sweet, and really boozy. Perfect for getting them through their brutal, Waterloo winters.
Once we arrived, fully acquainted with one another, the graduate-level wine courses began. Our guide, Michel, a local of St. Emilion dove into the depths of the French wine industry, and its intense regulations. The group in charge of this regulation is the Appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC), which is effectively a classification system to ensure quality by maintaining close control over origin, style, and quantity of different products, most notably wine and cheese. For wine, the AOC has created four primary rankings attainable for each wine producer, and every ten years, they meet to assess the standards and award rankings to each. The four rankings from highest esteem to lowest are: Grand Cru, Premier Cru, Vin de Pays, and Vin de France. In order to achieve the highest rankings a winery needs to follow a ton of rules, but the two most interesting were that the grapes need to be grown within a certain radius from where the wine is made, and the plot of land growing the grapes cannot exceed a certain size (some number of hectares), thus limiting production volume.
Essentially, this system forces an emphasis on quality of wine produced rather than quantity. The vast majority of wines that come from these vineyards never make it to a commercial market, they are sold direct to the consumer from the winery or to local wine shops. During our wine tour, someone asked about merging vineyards to increase the production, and our tour guide scoffed and said “that is such an American question!” He then paused to explain, and went into the brand equity that each winemaker builds over years of testing methods of fermentation, aging and mixing. He also explained that the system forces the wine producers to specialize in a single type of wine. The limitations on plot sizes don’t allow winemakers to grow different types of grapes, and therefore each year, these wineries pump out one single wine with the grapes that are best suited for that soil type and climate. This is a massive shift from what we know in the US where each brand puts out a wine for every individual grape in an effort to increase revenue streams at all costs.
We were blown away, the game here wasn’t about building an empire or taking over the other winemakers, or getting rich. It was simply about making amazing wine and being recognized within the community for the hard work and dedication to the craft.
Since that day, I’ve been thinking about this system regularly. Everything I’ve known in the professional and cultural world has been about growth for the sake of growth. Capitalism meant to create perpetual competition measured almost entirely by financial outcomes. All businesses I’ve been engaged with or have experienced are forced to grow or else they lose funding and eventually are forced to shut their doors, which creates an exhausting race to the bottom for almost everyone involved. Employees burn out because the competition never stops. Customers are convinced to keep spending via relentless marketing schemes (much of it done by yours truly), creating a world where possessions and vanity are valued over relationships and community, and until this moment, I never really questioned it. I assumed this was the way the world worked and had to work as I blindly subscribed to the system. I’m not ready to reject the system entirely, because there’s so much I love in the idea of open competition and an allegedly open playing field, but I have found myself thinking about ways to create a sustainable version. It’s about time to give Grapes of Wrath and Le Guin’s The Dispossessed another reread anyway, who knows, maybe this time I’ll fully convert.
If wine-making and communist slanted literature are on one side of the capitalistic spectrum, then surely the Palace of Versailles is the marquee at the opposite end. Last time Rachael and I were in Paris, we didn’t have the chance to visit the Palace, so I made sure to prioritize it on this trip; I bought tickets well in advance, and made sure it was the focus of one full day. I was enamored by photos I’d seen of its flippant frivolity and its status as an everlasting monument to the power, wealth and stature of King Louis XIV, the Sun King. A truly marvelous moniker, that earned him a spot at number one in my “Top 5 Kings” list in a previous post.
Aside from the spectacle and beauty of the palace and its grounds, it’s also an incredibly rich museum with unbelievable amounts of information about French history, the reign of Louis XIV and his successors. As a quick download, Versailles was the home and seat of power for Louis XIV, who was France’s longest ruling sovereign. He sat on the throne for 72 years! Of course, the early stages of that were not entirely his doing as he ascended at age five, but as he’d assert for much of his life, his rule was divinely anointed and deserving of the crown even at the unripe age of five. Thus it was his duty to unite and expand the French nation into a true absolutist monarchy, with a single unified religion - Catholicism – and an entirely obedient nobility and military force apparent from his military conquests in the Franco-Dutch War, the War of the League of Augsburg, and the War of the Spanish Succession.
When we walked through the palace, and learned about his expansion of the nation, and ascension to French superiority in the continent, we felt it in the walls, we felt it in the scale of the architecture, and even in the tranquility of the gardens on the property. This was clearly the point. To show to the world, and to the people of France that he could not be contained in a normal property. The two most memorable, and frankly absurd rooms in the building were the Hercules Room and the Hall of Mirrors. The former is a grand drawing room that connects the Royal Chapel with the apartments of the royal family, meant to host and awe guests as they are welcomed into the private quarters. There are two fireplaces, one on each side of the room, and above them are two step-back sized Renaissance era paintings, easily twenty feet across. Beyond that, the floors are of a luxuriously veined marble, the walls are gilded with elaborate wainscotting and other enamorations that I can’t name, but all of this is fluff compared to the ceiling. When we walked into the room, it was impossible to not notice the ceiling immediately, because there were 200 people inside, all craning their necks to look directly up. The ceiling is a Sistine Chapel-esque oil painting of Hercules’ rise to Mount Olympus after the completion of his Labors. He’s greeted by the entire retinue of Gods, nymphs and other mythical beings and it’s hard to miss the symbolism that King Louis wanted to hammer home here. Like the intention for nearly every square foot of the palace, this painting was here to remind those looking upon it that they are beneath the King, that they are not befit for such grace and beauty, and only he could withstand such divine scrutiny.
Since leaving Versailles, I’ve often wondered if the Sun King dealt with what we call Imposter Syndrome today, or did he believe so deeply in his god-given right to the throne that he’d scoff at my conjecture? I have no facts to justify this, but based on everything I’ve learned about myself and assumption of authority, I’m willing to bet he went to bed with some crippling anxiety almost every night. Given this personal anxiety, and the tumult of the political landscape in Europe in the early 18th century, he had to keep building his image and proving to those looking up at him that he was worth the throne. At a certain station it’s hard to empathize and understand what would drive someone to continue to relentlessly pursue more power, more wealth. I’m guessing it’s inertia, fighting to keep the power, wealth, status, etc. that was thrust upon him by god (as he believed). We spent much of the ride back to Paris talking and laughing about the political pendulum that always seems to collect its due. It wasn’t long after the Sun King died that the French Revolutionaries decided it wasn’t quite fair to some to live so large, while the masses lived without.
The rest of our time in Paris was a blast. We walked the streets frequenting patisseries and brasseries, alternating between espressos, afternoon beers and evening red wines. We did every touristy thing you could imagine from taking pictures under the Eiffel Tower to walking the Seine to visit the Notre Dame. The final task before we got on our way to the southern edge of the country was to find ourselves outfits for the charity event that matched the theme of Riviera Chic. At this point, my suitcase was filled with shorts and bar t-shirts, while Rachael’s is packed with leggings, party pants and more bar t-shirts, so we actually had to shop. It turned out to be a mostly painless endeavor, thanks to the fact that the man at the department store was Greek! He spoke to us in English at first, but Rachael heard a familiarity in his voice and asked him where he was from while I was in a dressing room, and he responded that he was from Thessaloniki, in the north of Greece. Luckily, I overheard, and in my most confident Greek, came out of the dressing room hurling Greek at him which earned us an infinite amount of street credit and got us under his wing, and away from the persnickety, staring eyes of the hip Parisians in L’Avant Comptoir du Marche.
When the day of the event rolled around, we woke up in our hotel room on the peninsula of the small town of Antibes, and to the entire town’s dismay, an unrelenting three-day rain storm had arrived. The temperature was beautiful, a nice 72 degrees F, but it was wet, and when it wasn’t coming down from the sky, the air was damp, and the clouds threatened to clap thunderously at any moment. The crew was quick to throw up a tent on the grounds of the Rivieran Villa where the event was to take place, and even quicker to ensure every guest had a glass of rose in their hand, and before we knew it, we were off.
As we walked in, we were handed three things: first a name card with our table assignment, each table was aptly named after a Palme d'Or winning film, we were seated at The Pianist despite having not seen it; second, we received an agenda for the day which was broken into three main sections – drinks + dinner in the villa, live auction, after-party – and finally, we were handed a glass of rosé, poured from the most ridiculously sized bottle I’ve ever seen.
After making it in, we were quickly reunited with our friend Dave, who was dressed quite chicly in a cream colored linen suit, and some lovely blue loafers plus one of his trademark watches that was the interest of many hungry networkers. It was absolutely lovely to see such a close friend after being on the road for so long, and in fact, this was the first person that was meeting the two of us on our journey. It was almost miraculous how quickly my heart warmed, and incredibly unsurprising how the three of us picked up our friendship like we’d gotten dinner the night before. After we finished our several minutes worth of hugs Dave waved to one of his best friends, Richard, who we’d met on one or two occasions between London and San Francisco. Richard happened to be hosting the event as one of the co-founders of the Horizon group and close partner with the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. As is his duty, he was busy greasing the crowd, but when he saw the three of us, he promptly removed his business mask, cracked a shit eating grin, launched into three successive bear hugs and told us, “there’s enough rose here to kill us all, so don’t let me go at it on my own.”
There have been few moments in my life where I’d thrown on a cream colored blazer and wasn’t prepared to soldier through 10-12 bottles of rose in great company, so we let the festivities commence. There were about 100 people in attendance, and the crowd was made-up mostly of 30-something-year-olds plus a good chunk of older folks with a wide variety of backgrounds, but all of whom were in some way or another financially successful in their field. As it goes at these types of events, the crowd quickly intermingles in a combination of genuine interest, drunken frivolity and even a bit of formal networking. We were in phase one of the event, and it became apparent quickly that the goal of this portion was to inebriate people quickly with the infinite quantities of rose that welled up from the bottom of our glasses. During this phase, a band also materialized! They appeared on the balcony as if they were predestined to be there, adorned head to toe in linen, donning a portable snare drum + cymbal kit, a guitar, a saxophone and a massive stand up bass. They kept the mood light and in high spirits to start, playing some tunes you’d expect to hear at a wedding cocktail party, but I could sense they had the party energy in them, particularly the lead singer and drummer who was a dead ringer for Draco Malfoy if he had joined Hufflepuff and befriended Cedric Diggory rather than following his family footsteps.
Soon after, we entered phase two and promptly got into our seats on the main lawn of the villa where there was a bit more space compared to the balcony, and upon this expansion I noticed the breadth of outfits in the building. I was at the boundary of my stylistic range with a cream blazer over a seer sucker shirt, and a pair of blue pants rolled up slightly to reveal uncovered ankles and brown knit shoes, and I was the most forgettably dressed person in the house. There were multi-colored fedoras, matte black velvet shoes adorned with one-inch studs, dresses made entirely of sequins, a knit blazer featuring a printed replica of Michaelangelo’s “Creation of Adam,” there were bright green and pink pants. I couldn’t comprehend the confidence required to wear this stuff in a room filled with strangers, and I quickly realized how boring, and uncool I am. Everyone was excited to show off their interpretation of Riviera Chic as the conversation topics revolved from introductions to work topics, to philosophical topics, and eventually to the present moment and how lovely of a time we were all having.
Once the emcee deemed everyone drunk enough to spend recklessly, a live auction took place and they simultaneously announced the start of a silent auction that would be open for two hours. An auctioneer worked the room, goaded the group to raise their hands for such prizes as a dinner with F1 Driver Charles LeClerq or a private trip to a vineyard in Champagne, France where you’d get a private label of wine with up to 120 bottles. She effortlessly blended the exuberance of each prize with pleas to support the kids and encouragement that each dollar spent would go directly to the cause that we were all here to support. It was a masterclass in persuasion, and the people ate it up. Rach and I, felt a bit out of our depth at the start of the auction, but quickly warmed up and attempted to outbid the masses on a few different vacation destinations, but unfortunately we couldn’t keep up with the rate of spending going on as bids quickly jumped well into the five and six figure range. So we instead we made a donation to the group and felt happy with our ability to contribute what we were comfortable with, all the while getting to experience such a spectacle.
The event eventually cascaded into an after-party at a neighboring villa, which Rachael and I both attended, and then into the after-after party at a nightclub in Cannes called Baoily, about 30 minutes away by cab, which is apparently the place to go and be seen. Rach called it quits and went to the hotel while I decided to press my luck with my new group of friends. When I got to the club, I got singled out by the bouncer and told I was too drunk to go in. Which at the time felt absurd, was I really more noticeably drunk than anyone else I was with? Can’t be! Dave eventually decided to pay off the bouncer to let me in, and I stayed for a drink then called it quits and went home – the scene wasn’t quite for me. The next day over a hair of the dog wine spread, I learned that I stayed inside for maybe 5 minutes, then got my own cab and took myself home. So who knows, maybe the bouncer knew what he was talking about. Sorry Dave, thanks for your unwavering friendship!
Some of the most fun events I’ve been to in my life have been charity events. At each of them, I’ve felt honored to be in attendance, ecstatic to be able to support a good cause and probably selfishly, excited to get a chance to dress-up, eat, drink and dance among some of my best friends. It was the next day, upon this realization of selfishness that I understood, or rather, accepted the fact that I was participating much more for my own benefit than for that of the organization we were supposed to be supporting. I’ve been struggling with this notion, wondering if that’s a bad thing? Do the ends justify the means? I’d certainly love for all good causes to be perpetually funded without the need for some extravagant party that incentivizes people to spend, but given human self-interest and the American ideal of amassing infinitely, is it possible? I’m contending with some antagonism toward capitalism and greed, but am unsure how to reconcile those feelings. It’s something I’ll undoubtedly be brooding over for some time, and when I rejoin the workforce will make it a priority to be intentional about how I show up for myself, for the organization I work with and for all those that don’t have the same opportunities that I have.
keep pushing that stylistic range!
capitalism good