“How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one,” tweeted Elon Musk shortly after buying Twitter, and I felt like we ought to sue him for breach of copyright. It’s not that I didn’t have somewhere in the back, back of my mind that the quip is out there, but the wine business uses it so regularly, and so predictably, it must have at least some claim to it. If you spend enough time listening to wine people, recounting the latest winery failure with the matter-of-factness of a mortician who likes their job a tad too much, you would be excused for thinking that this is a venture only for the blissfully ignorant or the inanely optimistic.

One of the best things about the wine world is how many late-joiners it has, and it is often the pedigree of those that is used as Exhibit A for the difficulty of the endeavour. Here is this successful banker or oligarch or tech bro, and here lies the carcass of their wine business. If it stumped such a genius, then this wine thingy is extraordinarily tricky, is it not? Well, yes and no. We are conditioned to make too much of past success, none more so than the successful person themselves. It is human nature to attribute successes to personal virtue, and failures to bad luck. The fact that the opposite is more likely to be true carries the subliminal but intensely acute terror of the randomness of life.

Yet, the banal fact is that lightning rarely strikes the same place twice. You might land one Facebook, and still all the ideas you will ever have after will be Metaverses and Meta AIs. Financiers obey their legal advisers and dutifully put “past performance does not guarantee future results” in their marketing material, but somehow never actually believe it applies to themselves. Weirdly, neither do most people around them. A coherent narrative is so much more satisfactory than a dice-rolling universe.

Now, if repeated success is rarely guaranteed in the same domain, imagine starting anew in another. No network, little in the way of name recognition, and an entire skillset attuned to a different pitch. We are told so often that money is the measure of all success, that we somehow think making it is some sort of transferable skill. But if Cristiano Ronaldo started competing in the high jump tomorrow, I doubt many would expect him to land an Olympic medal – or take the lack of such a medal as proof that high jump is a more difficult sport.

Having said that, wine does come with a set of unusual conditions. Starting from a rather peculiar one: not everyone is in it to make money. I am not saying many enter it with a financial death wish; just that, for a certain type of super-rich, a winery is just a nice thing to have. It must be very frustrating to see someone setting up shop next to you, and then not running it as a shop. Realistically, however, those cases are a small, if disproportionately noisy, part of the wine world.

It is not even the objective challenges of the business: the vintage variation, the fragility of the supply chains, the time lags from planting to usable harvest to income. Difficult, for sure, but many sectors are. The real obstacle lies elsewhere: nobody knows exactly what makes a good wine. You can have very solid wine science on the measurable bits, but great wine falls largely in the realm of alchemy. Some people seem to have a knack for mastering the mysterious interplay of vineyard and winery and end up with something that, to a certain type of drinker, feels magical. Faced with the occult, all wine science can do for you is tell you how to make better Australian Shiraz.

And it is not like things get much better if you try the marketing approach either. These are some funny runes to read. Why did Prosecco succeed and Pignoletto didn’t? No idea. Why did Prosecco explode in the 2000s and not in the 1980s? Your guess is as good as mine. Why were the 1990s all about big and bold and the 2010s all about lean and mean? Shoulder shrug. If you are willing to part with a bit of cash, help, of sorts, is at hand. There is a small industry that will offer a reasonably sounding explanation of why things happened the way they did. Like music theorists, their teachings are invaluable in reproducing the trend that just passed. But if you want tips about the future, your local tarot card reader stands a better chance.

I still wonder, however, if the real reason outsiders fail in wine is something much simpler. Maybe it’s because people enter the wine business exactly in order to exit the world of business. They don’t want to run companies, they want to be gentlemen farmers – or at least how they imagine gentlemen farmers to be. After all, Elon Musk didn’t spend $44bn on Twitter out of a desire for political power, or as some 4D chess move on AI, or whatever this week’s post facto rationalisation is. He did it for the plain, simple, and very human reason of, having gone head first down the Twitter rabbit hole, wanting to make sure we all see his tweets all the time. Maybe new entrants to the wine business just get really into wine drinking, and then want to make sure we all drink the wine they make all the time. And, if they have $44bn to spare, they might even be able to afford a mid-sized property in the Côte de Beaune to get themselves started.

Photo by 金 运 on Unsplash