Scott Holliday

“What you chose to eat for breakfast is a political act. What shoes you buy is a political act.”

October 1991, orientation day for my first restaurant job in Cambridge and although I didn’t realize it at the time those words had just bumped my life off course. I considered that job (as I had all restaurant work up to that point in my teenage and then “adult” life) just a way to pay the bills. Waiting tables while waiting for my real life to begin. At the time restaurants had already paid for my first bikes, first tools, first cars and first boat; it paid for college as I earned the degree in biochemistry I wasn’t sure I wanted and then for an extra year to earn the minor in Russian language I had thought would surely be the answer. But first I needed this one last restaurant job …

Needless to say restaurants went on to be significantly more important than my 20-something self could ever have imagined.

Paddling, sailing and most especially riding bikes has taught me the value of patience, efficiency and thoughtfulness along the way. That over time, small choices make big differences.
That “last job” led to others and to more “important” positions: general manager, director of operations, partner and eventually in 2015 to Mise Wines. Along the way I’ve always been a proud advocate for those whose craft made possible everything I’ve served or sold: from the fish on the plate to the firewood used to cook it (delivered and stacked Saturdays at midnight by Maine woodsmen).

Wine, of course, has been a constant fascination and muse. It is at first glance tantalizingly comprehensible; as if some Grand Formula might be discovered into which one need only input the “known knowns” of biology, geology, geography, history, chemistry, climate, vintage, grape, etc.
And yet, the idea of it brings to mind the saying about he who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.  Because, in a way I’m sure I tried to find that formula and because I’ve come realize – to insist – that true wine haunts us in ways that data cannot describe. It has regularly humbled and inspired me – from the first wine list I wrote in the 1980’s, when Zinfandels were white, to the last in 2014 when Malvasias were sometimes orange – and throughout, it has reminded me of the good to be found, and done, in the simple choice of an honest glass of wine.

Or as Walter Scott wrote, ” It’s no fish ye’re buying, it’s men’s lives.”