Several months ago, I bought tickets to Quidam — one of the Cirque du Soleil shows. Because I happened to buy the tickets through Ticketmaster, I ended up on some mailing list. One of the ads that I got in the mail was rather enticing (at least it seemed like it) offer for wine. It was an offer to WSJwine. At first, I thought it a bit strange to be considering buying wine through the Wall Street Journal (clearly not one of their core competencies!), but some of the wines in the list sounded pretty tasty.
I did the math on the number of bottles of wine I was going to get (15) and the price I was to pay ($69.99) and it came out to less than $5/bottle. As there were at least half of the wines in there that I was interested in trying, I thought it was a pretty good deal. (This amounted to paying approximately $10/bottle for the bottles I wanted to try and I was comfortable with that.)
As I said, about half of the bottles I wanted to try, while the other half were just icing on top. After drinking a few of the bottles that I knew (or thought) I would enjoy, I thought it might be time to try one of the bottles I was less sure of. In fact, one of these bottles was a Merlot. I didn’t remember liking Merlot (I have a tendency towards Italian wine — maybe it’s because of my heritage), but since I had the bottle and these wines were supposed to be award-winning, I thought I’d give it a try. (Note: this is different from the sunk cost fallacy. Had I taken a sip and not liked it, but continued to drink, that would have been the sunk cost fallacy. Simply having a glass from a bottle of wine that I was unsure as to whether I’d like is more along the lines of ‘openness to experience.’)
After pouring the glass and taking a sip… I liked it!
I was pleasantly surprised. I used to remember not liking Merlot, but it’s possible that my experience with it was when I was younger before my wine palette had developed. I’m certainly no sommelier, but I’d like to *think* that I’ve developed a sense for the kind of wine that I like and don’t, which I *think* is reasonable even taking into account some of the research that may run counter to that.
~
My point in telling you this story is that I tried something new (or at least something that I was unsure as to whether I’d like). What have you done lately that’s new and different? What have you tried recently that has expanded your horizons (even if it’s only slightly)? If the answer to those questions is nothing, then might I encourage you to step out of your comfort zone and try something.
Jeremiah Stanghini 