THE BIG WINE SCOOP

We are all selling the same ice cream.

I just got back from the Orkney Islands in Scotland. Stayed at my folk’s place. It was a dramatic location facing the Atlantic Ocean with nothing between us and Canada. There are no trees of note in Orkney, and the salty wind invigorates you while blowing the cobwebs out of your head. On gentler days, we wiled away the long light-filled summer evenings in the sunroom, watching what my kids called “Nature’s TV.”

They didn’t care too much about the 5,000-year-old stone house settlement at Skara Brae or the dramatic seagull-strewn cliffs at Yesnaby, but they did care about the local ice cream. The purveyor ‘Orkney Ice-Cream,’ seems to have a lock on this corner of the food market in Orkney. Everywhere we went, everyone had the same sign and logo outside, with the same flavors inside for roughly the same price. (I liked the Lemon Curd or the Rhubarb and Custard)

Campbell and Alice knew that vacation meant a little relaxing of the Vitamin S rules, so the positioning for an ice cream stop would start early in the day. They quickly decided that, all things being equal, they preferred to stop in Finstown for their ice cream fix.

Finstown is a spit in the wind of a place that you blow through on your way to somewhere else on the island. You only slow down because the speed limit sign turns from a frown to a smiley face if you go below 30mph. There is one store called Baikie’s, and going in there is like stepping back in time. It has a little bit of everything and a couple of ladies who look like farmer’s wives holding court. I asked Campbell in the car why they wanted to go to Finstown for a cone and he said, “Dad, they all have the same ice cream, but the lady there does the biggest scoops.” At a glance, a kid can calculate the mass differences of a scoop of ice cream, allowing for the spherical size and shape of the cone to within 100ths of an ounce. As a result, almost every day began with the innocent question of whether our travels might take us near to, or through, Finstown. We visited multiple times.

What did that extra bit of ice cream cost them? Probably almost nothing, yet it ensured that our British pounds and pence went consistently into their drawer. The scoop generosity of other places was quickly measured against the Finstown experience.

Work was not in my mind; however, I could not help but think about Wine Country and how we are all basically selling the same ice cream. We’d like to think that the extra two months in that particular French barrel or that iconic vineyard source makes us different, but in the customer’s eyes, it’s all ice cream. If I were to run with this analogy, I wouldn’t say we need to pour more wine as that is not responsible. However, we can be more generous in so many other ways. How we treat people, what we choose to charge for, what we include, what we pour, how much time we give them, how much we care, and what exceptions we make.

It may be that when all is said and done it will be those of us who serve bigger scoops who will survive the headwinds we now face.

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Thanks to Jason for seeing the story.