After twenty years of travelling the world and meeting the global urban elite — those who purchase great wines and inhabit the sphere of luxury — I felt the time had come to attempt their psychological portrait.
One must first understand who this man (or woman) truly is. Not what he possesses, nor where he lives, nor even what he earns. That portrait is too well known, too obvious, too facile. What must be understood is what takes place within. And what takes place within is, for any seasoned observer of the springs of human psychology, of a profound and troubling complexity.
Let us call him what he is: an exceptional individual who has devoted the first twenty or thirty years of his adult life to a form of total optimisation. Optimisation of career, of performance, of income, of network, of body, of image. He is a corporate lawyer in Singapore, the co-founder of a scale-up in London, a chief financial officer at a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi, a celebrated architect in São Paulo. He has reached what society designates as the summit. And it is precisely there, at the summit, that he has encountered something for which he was wholly unprepared: the vertigo of the void.
What makes this psychological portrait particularly delicate to sketch is that this individual does not speak of it. The culture of performance in which he has long been immersed forbids any admission of inner emptiness. To confess that one finds oneself bored in one’s villa in Mykonos, that one feels profoundly alone after one’s third business dinner of the week in Tokyo, that the six-figure wine cellar no longer inspires wonder — this is a capitulation. It is, in the unspoken code of his tribe, an inadmissible form of weakness.
What, then, can a great wine offer him? An experience that demands total presence. The antidote to the anaesthesia from which he suffers: that particular affliction of having lived through everything whilst feeling nothing.
In truth, it is not the rarity of wine that seduces this elite at any great depth — it is its insistence upon undivided attention, its capacity to compel presence in a world that has rendered distraction perpetual. For an individual whose mind has been conditioned to process a multitude of simultaneous signals, the act of concentrating entirely upon a single glass — of seeking something within it, of finding something within it, and then of ceasing to seek — constitutes an experience that is almost therapeutic. It is, in the terms of positive psychology, a rare and precious access to what Martin Seligman calls “engagement”: one of the five dimensions of authentic well-being, and often the most deficient among high-performing individuals.
For a great wine is not consumed. It is practised. It demands attention — an attention of the same nature as that which the Buddhist meditant or the practitioner of mindfulness strives to cultivate. It engages simultaneously the olfactory memory, the most ancient strata of the limbic brain, language, geography, history, and the imagination. It obliges the body to slow. It renders sharing not merely desirable but necessary: one does not uncork a Chambolle-Musigny premier cru alone, in the silence of a study. Wine calls for the table, the table calls for the other, the other calls for genuine conversation.
Therein lies the true psychological key for these individuals. Fine wine is one of the very few luxury experiences that refuses to be consumed distractedly. It demands everything, or it yields nothing. An absolute necessity, today, for a global urban elite that wants for nothing — and has, despairingly, already had it all.
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