The Label Is Never the Whole Truth
A few weeks ago in Giverny, I sat down to a Michelin-star dinner and said yes to the wine pairing before the sommelier finished asking. Not because I was feeling bold. Because I'd made a decision before the trip that I was going to get out of my own way as much as possible, and this felt like a real test of that.
For context: I've been a red wine person my entire adult life. Not just a preference, a personality. The kind that says "I'm not really a white wine person" with enough confidence that people stop offering. I had no idea that was also a cage until somewhere between the second and third course, they poured something I didn't recognize, and I drank it, and then I sat very still.
I took a picture of the bottle.
It was a Chenin Blanc from the Loire Valley. White. The thing I wasn't.
I spent the weeks after that dinner doing what I always do when something genuinely interests me: researching. What was I actually tasting? Why was it landing so differently than the whites I'd written off for years? I used Claude to build a real understanding of the region and what I was responding to.
Turns out the answer wasn't in the grape variety. It wasn't really about the winemaker either. It was the ground. Tuffeau, the chalky limestone that runs under the Loire Valley, creates a kind of minerality in the wine, a precision and freshness that's almost impossible to describe until you've tasted it, and then you start tasting it everywhere. A few weeks later in Dijon, I did a tasting of Burgundy wines and kept having exactly the same reaction. Same quality, completely different color, completely different grape. Burgundy is also a limestone country.
So here's what I found out about myself: I'm not a red wine person or a white wine person. I'm a limestone person. And I would have gone my entire life without knowing that if I'd kept trusting the label I gave myself twenty years ago.
When the Category Becomes the Ceiling
We do this with people, too, probably more than we realize.
We call someone a creative and quietly stop offering them operational work. We decide someone's a client and route the internal projects elsewhere. The pattern locks in before anyone thinks to question it, and then the category becomes the ceiling, not because it was wrong exactly, but because we stopped looking after the first data point.
What actually matters, what a good sommelier understands intuitively, is what's in the ground. Someone who seems checked out might be running at forty percent of their actual capacity because the work is that far below them. Someone you've written off as not a culture fit might be reacting to something specific in the environment, something that's fixable if you care enough to look. The diagnosis that comes from a label is almost always less useful than the one that comes from actually examining what's underneath it.
I've been thinking about what it would look like to lead with fewer fixed conclusions and more genuine curiosity about what someone is actually responding to, not just what bucket I've put them in. That's harder than it sounds when you're busy. Categories are efficient. But efficiency isn't always the point.
What Monet Actually Painted
Giverny is where Monet lived for the last forty years of his life. He built the garden specifically to paint it, and what made the water lily series extraordinary wasn't the pond. It was his attention to the light on the pond. Those are entirely different subjects, and he understood that the obvious one, the subject most people would paint, wasn't the interesting variable.
I didn't find the best wine of my life in France because I finally found the right grape. I found it because I set down the story I'd been telling, let someone else choose, and paid attention to what I was actually tasting.
Whatever label you've been carrying, about yourself or someone on your team, it's probably pointing in a real direction. It just tends to stop one layer too early to actually be useful.
What preference have you been treating as a fact?
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Sarah Shepard is the COO of StringCan Interactive. She writes the String By String newsletter on LinkedIn most weeks. If this one landed for you, it's worth subscribing.
