Aaron Shields’s Mind Terroir

Achieving greatness through failure

“We can only win across the board if we accept the risk of losing everything.”
- Count Alexandre de Lur Saluces, ex-manager of Chateau d’Yquem

Many companies claim to support risk taking, but few truly embrace it. This lack of willingness to give risk a great big bear hug stems from the fear of failure. Having failure as a possible outcome is scary, but the willingness to have failure be an option is a key to achieving excellence that leads to true business growth.

If the Hand of God came down to cultivate grapes and transform them into wine, I imagine the result would be pretty close to Chateau d’Yquem. There is probably no other wine in the world that is as well made as Chateau d’Yquem. Over 140 pickers pass through the vineyard selecting individual grapes that are in the proper condition to make the wine. They don’t pass through the vineyard just once, but up to 10 times throughout the harvest season to ensure optimal pickings. The wine is fermented and aged only in new French oak barrels (a very costly expense), racked 15 times (a process that involves transferring the wine to a new barrel to remove sediment), After over 3 years of aging all of the barrels are tested and only the best are bottled and sold under the Chateau d’Yquem label. The kicker is that in some years, at the end of the lengthy process, none of the wine is considered worthy of the d’Yquem label. In such years, all of the wine is discarded, and Chateau d’Yquem produces no product.

Only by willing to risk failure does Chateau d’Yquem achieve its greatness. This isn’t true for just the wine business, but rather achieving greatness in endeavor. Edison claimed to have formulated over 3000 theories for electric light, but only achieved success twice; when Einstein went to Princeton, he asked for a desk, a chair, and a large wastebasket to throw away his mistakes; Keith Sawyer, after spending over a decade studying innovation across business and the arts found that a key to success was to, “Fail often, fail early, fail gloriously.”

The willingness to risk failure is required to produce great products and truly innovative solutions, a source of true business growth.

Since I’ve talked it up:

1986 Chateau d’Yquem $600
My favorite description of a Chateau d’Yquem comes from Jay McInerney’s Bacchus & Me: The best thing to lick off someone. Although, I’ve yet to lick it off someone (which is on my life’s to-do list), I have licked the last drop out of the bottom of a glass on more than one occasion. Two words come to mind when I think of great Chateau d’Yquem: immortality and greatness. Chateau d’Yquems from 1811 and 1847 have received perfect scores from the guru of wine critics, Robert Parker. I can only imagine what this 1986 will taste like 150 years from now. It’s surprisingly, surprisingly, still youthful. One of my friends likes to describe d’Yquem as comparable to eating a whole grape branch; I imagine d’Yquem tastes much better than the branch it comes from, but his analogy is illuminating: the purity of the fruit really stands out in a d’Yquem. The other thing that stands out in d’Yquem for me, the thing that puts it heads and shoulder above any other Sauternes or dessert wine is the balance of sugar and acidity; no other wine gets the balance like a d’Yquem. And this one has it in heaps. Like most d’Yquems, Classic honey (no big surprise with any botrytised wine), pineapple, vanilla, apricots, lemon. This wine has a full body, and an energizer-bunny-like finish. But trying to describe a Chateau d’Yquem in words doesn’t do it justice; it has to be experienced to be understood. A/A+

If you’re not ready to put down the cash for the 1986 d’Yquem, but want to try another 1986 Sauternes, the 1986 Chateau Climens at nearly a third of the price ($225) is excellent. But, then again, it’s not d’Yquem.

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