“To what purpose, April, do you return again?” from Spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay
April 2017 marks Mise’s fifth anniversary! A surprising milestone — in the way any reminder that life moves pretty fast is surprising, disorienting — and when considered together with the recent addition of our fifth team member, significant somehow. Or so one hopes. In any event, it has us lifting our heads from the daily grind and noting how far we’ve come and asking how we hope to grow. Or in other words : to what purpose does Mise return this April?
The simple answer here is to announce the Mise Wine blog.
“A blog! A WINE blog! By people who SELL WINE!” An ecstatic internet roars, “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!”
I know. It’s been done before. A lot. All I can say is we might have a different take on things. It could be worth reading. Time will tell.
“A blog? Why that’s very 2009 of you Sully.”
You’re right, blogs are no longer de rigueur for ideas to become read and relevant. Most opinion now is spawned in the scrum of social media whose torrent requires nearly every mention be flushed downstream without note. We will continue contributing to those conversations but we also feel there is value in expressing some ideas in more than 140 characters. Some relevant, fantastic stories won’t fit into tasting notes. Some commentary isn’t appropriate (or welcome) during sales appointments. There is context impossible to sum up at Friday night wine shop tastings within the scripted scene of pour, sip, smile and move along. And while we appreciate a snappy retort as much as the next person, some thoughts that compel us are too complex to be reduced to swaggering platitudes punctuated by “Boom!” At least they shouldn’t be. Not all the time.
Moreover, most conversations at Mise are searching in nature, messy and open-ended. Like you perhaps, we’re motivated by ideas we don’t hear discussed in our daily lives or read in the wine press. These ambiguous subjects are what we’re most eager to explore in this blog (despite often struggling to explain them concisely to ourselves or to our customers). Elie Wiesel said, ‘he wrote as much to understand as to be understood.’ Of course our writings will be infinitely less significant than professor Wiesel’s but I’m inspired to the same purpose: to understand and be understood; through the process of writing and sharing; over time.
Which brings me back to Edna St. Vincent Millay and her jaundiced view of April — a view I’m sure readers will bring to this blog. The poem ends :
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Elie and Edna — carrot and cudgel. While I have been known to babble and am at times I could be described (not inaccurately) as an idiot, I know for the purposes of this blog, babbling and strewing flowers will not be enough.
There you have it – a solemn pledge to keep the quality of our posts above the level of drivel and drool. Boom!
More to come soon. Thanks for reading!
-SMH