How retirement ignited a new profitable passion
Transitioning from technology marketing to wine has been smooth—as have been many of the wines.
BY » Trevor Burton PHOTOGRAPHY BY » Trevor Burton
O
ne view of retirement is that it is a simple act of dropping out of formal, professional involvement in the economy. Rather, dropping out to a life of late breakfasts and reading long-unread books. I have a fundamental problem with that. It leaves a lot of tremendous value sitting on life’s table—value in the form of a reservoir of accumulated wisdom. Over a lifetime spent in any kind of endeavor a person accumulates more than simple skills. The lessons he or she learns go much deeper than that. There’s an understanding of what works and why and, maybe more important, what doesn’t work and
why. I’m sure all of us have cracked a wry smile when some young person, confident as ever and wrong as usual, steps in to save a project. Been there, smiled at that.
A fulfilling career
Here’s my story. After years of developing wisdom (and scars) in the information and communications technology world, I formed a consultancy that helped clients market their technology products. Our work dealt with the golden fleece of any technology sales manager—how to get the attention and action of senior executives in a customer’s organization. We applied basic competitive marketing methodology. We differentiated our clients
by communicating two things. First, we reoriented messaging around the strategic value that technology brings to an enterprise—as opposed to the usual message of reducing costs. Second, we did that by focusing, fiercely, on what technology does and not on how, breathtakingly and wonderfully, it operates. That’s what gets senior executives excited. Our approach worked quite nicely.
Enter . . . wine
During this time, I developed an interest in and a taste for wine. In any wine lover’s journey, there’s an “aha!” moment. Mine was in Paris. A business partner took my wife, Mary Ellen, and me to a wine pairing
dinner at one of the City of Light’s best restaurants. I tasted the first red wine of the evening, bells rang, and lights flashed. It was a wine from the Burgundy region of France. That was the moment that I felt compelled to discover more about the world of wine. The very next day, my wife and I rented a car and headed to Burgundy to dig a little deeper. We ended up in a local restaurant and ordered a bottle of wine from the region. Bells and lights, again. It tasted similar to, but better than, the wine in Paris. We asked the proprietor of the restaurant where she procured her wine. She pointed us in the direction of, what looked to us, a modest house in the village of Gevrey Chambertin. A modest LimitlessMagOnline.com | April 2020 25
