Unlearn Pomp and Circumstance: Learn Being Rich Toward God

Chapter 4, Part 1, The Art of Unlearning

This week’s post is the current first half of chapter four of The Art of Unlearning. Subscribers are invited to offer all comments, and I’d be eager to get your feedback as this is very much a work in progress. Later this month we’ll also have our zoom call where your verbal comments and feedback would be welcome as well.

Unlearn Pomp and Circumstance:

Learn Being Rich Toward God

Some dear friends of ours took Lisa and me on a canal cruise through the Burgundy area of France. Our friends are “foodies” in the restaurant business, so they were particularly excited about visiting a vineyard where the grapes for the most expensive wine in the world, Romanee-Conti, are grown.

For context, I know as much about wine as I do quantum physics, which is to say, nothing. So the romance of the moment might have been lost by the skepticism of my mind.

We drove up to the rows where Romanee-Conti grapes are cultivated. There was a dirt road, maybe eight feet wide at most, dividing the rows where grapes for Richebourg wines are grown.

Romanee-Conti is such an exclusive wine that in order to purchase some you often to have to first buy a case (twelve bottles) of Richebourg wine. Romanee-Conti can set you back eight thousand euros a bottle, though some have been sold at auction for over $20,000 a bottle. Richebourg seems like a bargain in comparison, typically going for around one to two thousand euros a bottle. In that case, you have to spend around fifteen to twenty thousand dollars in order to “get” to spend another ten thousand dollars for that one precious bottle of Romanee-Conti wine.

While our guide was talking, Doug (our restaurant owning friend) wandered off and came back to me with a nudge. “Here,” he whispered. “It’s a Romanee- Conti grape.” I don’t think you’re supposed to pick them, but it was already picked, and Doug, a math whiz, had calculated that that grape alone was worth about twenty dollars (when you factor in how many grapes it takes to produce a bottle of wine that expensive). I’m not the kind of person who throws that kind of money on the ground.

It was a very good grape. I don’t think I’d pay twenty dollars for it, but it was certainly tasty.

However, the taste didn’t overcome my skepticism as I looked at how close the Richebourg fields are to the Romanee-Conti fields. “You mean to tell me,” I asked the guide, “that the grapes right here” pointing to Romanee-Conti “are eight to ten times better than the grapes that are there?” (pointing eight feet away to the next row).

“Well,” he admitted, “the grapes on that end vine may not be all that different from the grapes on the first Richebourg vine, but remember, they’re cultivated from the entire field and mixed together, and there really is a difference between the middle of the fields.”

I’ve driven through vast swaths of Texas and Montana and have seen fields of corn that could have accommodated a hundred fields of Romanee-Conti grapes. The vineyard we were standing in wasn’t that big, making me think the difference couldn’t have been that huge. Not eight times better, anyway.

But those distinctions are defended with zeal. We met a woman whose family owned two rows of the Musigny vineyard (also in Burgundy). Vineyard ownerships are mostly divided by rows, or even partial rows. Musigny produces a highly coveted grand cru wine, so this woman’s family was offered four million euros for two rows of the vineyard. Two rows will cultivate enough grapes to produce about two barrels of wine a year. There is no way that amount of wine could generate more than four million euros during their entire lifetime but owning part of a prestigious vineyard isn’t always or even mostly about the dollars and cents.

“It’s a family thing,” she said, explaining why the offer was refused.

This kind of phenomenon fascinates me, which is why when we returned from our trip I did some research and found a psychological study explaining why our brains think expensive wine is better than cheap wine (even if it’s the same wine). Knowledge of the price literally impacts our brain’s processing of the experience. In this study everyone judged the most expensive wine to be the best wine, which makes sense to me. If I had convinced myself to pay eight thousand euros for a single bottle of wine, I’d want it to be the best wine I’ve ever tasted, too, lest I think of myself as a foolish schmuck.

If you’re a true wine aficionado, you may have already lost all respect for me at this point, but that experience led me to ask the question, are the “finer things” in life actually “finer?”

Or do we just think they are?

I have no doubt that to a trained palate a glass of Romanee-Conti wine is a significantly different experience than sipping from boxed wine purchased at Costco, but remember that one study: if you took a bunch of normal people who aren’t wine aficionados and told them the boxed wine was more expensive than the Romanee-Conti, they might even prefer the boxed wine over the world’s most expensive wine.

So it’s a fair question: are all the “finer” things in life really that much finer? Or do we just think they are?

In the same way, are we living life seeking things that, in the light of eternity, aren’t only not superior, but perhaps, even in some ways, inferior to other things we might pursue?

How do we unlearn a false definition of the “finer life,” and how do we learn life at its best, particularly when it comes to appearances? We need to unlearn the immediate allure of pomp and circumstance, and learn instead the wealth of a life that is rich toward God.