Here are the specifics of my situation.
I started and have been managing a winemaking group out of my home for the past 15 years. It all started with just my immediate family, but over time the winemaking evolved and grew to include my entire family, friends, coworkers, and even friends of friends. As my winemaking knowledge increased, and after several successful years, the number of people in the group grew substantially. When it came to the group, I never made any profit on our winemaking activities, preferring instead to keep winemaking a purly social activity.
I was always careful about who I would include as part of the winemaking group. For the most part, I looked forward to each year’s crush and a number of bottling parties through the summer. I enjoyed winemaking so much that Crush Day became the highlight of my calendar year.
I like to think of “crush day” as being a working party. A typical crush day would go from 8am to about 3am. Sure, we have tasks to accomplish, but we always managed to have fun in the process. There were many people in our group that worked hard, and many others that just liked to watch. I would provide Food, Drink, Party favors, even some gag gifts for individuals in the group. It all was very enjoyable…
…but that was before “The Scourge” joined our group.
I have always believed in Tuttle’s law. According to this law, the chances of there being a “black sheep” in any group of people increases exponentially to the number of people introduced to that group. That is to say, the more people you have, the more likely that at least one of them turns out to be trouble.
I had known “The Scourge” almost all my life. He was the nephew of a friend of my mother. He joined not even knowing if it was possible to make a decent homemade wine. For the first eight years or so, he played little or no role my winemaking group. He was always on the sidelines and never really contributed much. Two years ago, “The Scourge” retired. With a lot of time on his hands, and no family of his own, he started searching for something to occupy his time. When he realized that we were producing good wine and also having a great time doing so, he targeted the winemaking group to fulfill the gap in his otherwise empty life.
It all started innocently enough with him offering to help out more. To be honest, I felt I could use the help. I had him helping me with a lot of the tasks that I would normally do myself and I was glad to have his help. This all changed over time. As “The Scourge” learned more and more about winemaking, and his comfort level increased, he started to see himself as the manager of the group and that crush day was his baby.
I had a long standing agreement that folks could do as much or as little work as they wanted. This maintained a very friendly environment. I know that this might sound crazy, but the system worked and I always had more help than I needed.
The real problems started when “The Scourge” took it upon himself to order around the other people in our group. These people were friends, family and coworkers and NOT field hands. Working under his deluded sense of authority, “The Scourge” took it upon himself to be the job foreman. Without even a please or thank you, he would make the other people feel like dirt. It got so bad that I had to stop one of the guys in our group from actually punching him.
As time march on, “The Scourge” began to argue with me more and more over small aspects of my wine making. He would become increasingly frustrated when I would shoot his ideas down. Most of the time his ideas were either too expensive, had no appreciable merit, or already been tried in the past with bad results. He did not listen to the reasons why I shot his ideas down. He simply focused on the fact his ideas got shot down.
Eventually he became very resentful and adopted a “rather ask forgiveness then ask permission” philosophy. In other words, he simply stopped telling me his ideas and would go ahead and act on them behind my back, leaving me to find out later. He began to take great joy in keeping me in the dark and It made him feel important and superior.
A case in point, “the Scourge” called my local HBWS and changed my grape order without telling me. He changed the varietal, and the quantity. I found out about this when I went to pick up my grapes. This is just one case in a long list of episodes.
Every time an event like this would happen, I would simply see it as a betrayal and I would react accordingly. This sort of played into “The Scourge’s” hands. “The Scourge” would simply act hurt, telling everybody else in the group that “I was only trying to help”. As it turns out, “The Scourge” was an amazing politician. He was very successful in partitioning the winemaking group into three camps, “the scourge” camp, my camp, and those poor people that simply did not want to get involved.
It got so bad with “the Scourge” that I had to make a tough choice. If I kicked him out of the group, I will lose all of the members of his camp. I might also lose a good portion of the “don’t get me involved” group. Ultimately, I forced myself to remember how things used to be, before the camps, before “the scourge”, and how much I enjoyed winemaking. My ultimate decision was to ask him to leave.
Although some folks in our group did follow him, there were a good number of folks that did stay with me.
I feel that I have learned the following lessons...
1) Deal with problems immediately. Had I dealt with “the scourge” as soon as there was a problem, I would have avoided a lot of grief.
2) Do NOT try to be the “nice guy” and make everybody happy. In so doing, I allowed the fun and joy of the winemaking experience wither and die.
3) Be careful who you share your passion with. Remember, it’s only a matter of time before Tuttle’s Black Sheep shows up.
4) Set your goal on what you want to get out of winemaking. If having fun and sharing a good time with your friends and family is as important as making good wine, then do not let anybody try to take that away from you.
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