I was born and raised in Bordeaux, France. When my mother was 6 months pregnant with me, my father passed away from Hodgkin's disease at age 26. I spent my first few years at my maternal grandparents' small winery/estate in the Côtes de Bourg. Then my mother and I moved to Bordeaux proper so I could go to a better school.
Weekends and every single vacation day outside of summer break were spent at my grandparents' vineyard, playing outdoors and helping out with whatever tasks I could do in the cellar or the vineyard, depending on needs. That's how I started to make some pocket money, feeding the bottling line or labeling or putting bottles in carton boxes for random shipments to Germany or Belgium.
For a couple of weeks each summer, I headed out to see my paternal family in Patrimonio, Corsica. The Corsican identity runs deep in that side of the fam, the accent is thick, the personalities strong. My grandfather - Joseph Palazzi - was a ex-Colonel in the French "Commandos d'Outre-Mer," as he would refer it as (*) having started in the St Cyr war school and proceeded to fight all the wars France had been involved in during his 40-year career. My father, Paul-Marie Palazzi, had left a strong imprint as someone very smart, landing an Armament Engineering job after having completed L'École Polytechnique (also known as L'X), which is arguably the French version of say, MIT or Harvard. His brother, Jean-Michel, also graduated from a well-known engineering school, which led him to several important jobs within the French public sector, including Director of the Corsican Environmental Agency.
On those days of July or August, Joseph and Michel were up at 4:15 a.m. reading all the newspapers they had in the house, following all the news they could. We played tennis from 7 to 9 a.m. Lights were out at 8:30 p.m. after the evening news, as the next day was starting early. Those "vacations" left a strong imprint, especially as I was going to Corsica solo as soon as I hit the age when Air Inter, the then regional arm of Air France, allowed kids to fly without adults (if memory serves, i was 6). The death of my father had created a riff between my mother and my paternal grand parents.
On both sides of the family, there was a fairly basic vision of life: the world was made of two kinds of people, the salespeople and the engineers.
The engineers, unsurprisingly, were the better ones.
It was also obvious to everyone that I should do at least as well as my father did.
As a boy, then a teen, and a young man, I never thought about anything much. I worked, was mostly hanging out by myself, and started in my mid-teens to go to the gym. I did become an engineer with two majors, chemistry and physics, but from a small, not very reputable school. It was a letdown to many. It had been clear to me for a long time that I did not have the same gifts of superior intelligence my father and uncle displayed.
I worked a few years as an Environmental Engineer for EDF, the French electricity company, doing surveys and analyzing environmental data with the goal of monitoring the impact on the environment for the French nuclear power plants. The first couple of years were good. First salaries, the impression of being on an upward track. Then things shifted.
Fast forward another year or so, and work had become uninspiring. The perspectives of moving up in the world were brought down to reality: I had a job that was secure, I was making okay money, I knew exactly, based on the school I had attended and the salary grids HR had, where I was going to land within the company at retirement age and how much I would be making then. I guess I should have seen a sign when HR offered me the job, as one of the main questions to 21-year-old me, eager to get into the workforce, was: "Do you want to work 5 or 4 days a week?". It was a real thing in France then. Les 35 heures. I took the 5-day option.
This is proof that I never thought about any of it much. I just did what was expected of me which landed me in that rather uninspiring line of work. Now, like it seems often happens to those who don't intellectualize, one day they wake up feeling weird, upset or down, and they don't know why nor how they got there.
At age 25, as I was approaching the age my father had passed, I landed in a strange mental place: anger was a fuel, I hated the job and resented the people I was working with. I had been riding motorbikes for a while, and I was pushing that 1200 Bandit harder than I should have. Had I been self-aware, I would have seen the clear auto-destructive vibe of the behavior.
The need to do something very different than my current occupation became suddenly obvious. Going to work was a dread.
My idea at the time: I had been practicing Krav Maga for a bit, really liked it, felt I wasn't too bad at it, and thought I would go to Israel, train more, get some kind of diploma, come back to France, and start a school. It never happened, probably for the better.
A meeting one random evening in Bordeaux with a friend of a friend who happened to be visiting her family in Bordeaux really got me thinking: she had an apartment in NYC on 33rd & 3rd, offered that I'd crash on her sofa and check the city out. I had never really traveled anywhere. Never been to the US. Had no plan. It felt cool. And so I went.
This experience was so mind-bending that a few months later I had quit my job in France (in this specific division of EDF, it apparently was the first time anyone had quit without a plan nor because of another job offer - those jobs were so cushy, nobody would have thought of leaving - so much so that the company rounded up everyone after my departure to assess engagement and make sure everybody was in good spirits) and moved to NYC. This was 2004.
It took a few months (I think) to find a job as a manager for a Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research lab in the Bronx. Getting a visa as an engineer was rather easy at the time. Life in NYC was just so new and awesome. But the job itself got old real quick.
I was back waking up in the morning feeling angry for no reason (though I always redirected it to do non-negative stuff like working out) and I didn't want to go to work. The same exact feelings I had in France in a more powerful version.
This is when even someone who is not very in touch with his emotions realizes that maybe, just maybe, there is something deeper to address. That there is a chance the line of work one is in is not a good fit, that one may want to rethink one's life and what one is doing with it.
I despised my work-life; I just could not wait for these work hours to be over so that real life could be enjoyed. Those feelings were very powerful, and that work-life was just so long, 5 days a week and repeating itself to no end.
It wasn't healthy to keep going, so I gave my notice and decided to think long and hard about what I really liked to do, what I felt positive about, what I could work long hours toward and not feel it was work. What I wanted to get to was to find an occupation where there was no "work-life" vs "personal life," no dread of Mondays, etc.
I liked wine, I liked booze, I liked beers, I liked drinking good stuff and reading about them, I liked smelling and tasting and learning about what I was ingesting.
I had been buying some wines here and there from Jean-Luc Le Du and had sat in on some of his seminars at his shop, Le Du's Wines. A dude in a wheelchair was working there and seemed to know his stuff. I needed money, and I wanted to learn; I asked Jean-Luc if, by chance, he did not need part-time help.
This ended up being the laboratory where the idea behind PM was born, the place where I was lucky enough to meet some of the greatest minds and most passionate wine people in the city.
The dude in the wheelchair is/was Yannick Benjamin, one of the most capable, inspiring, and knowledgeable sommeliers in the country; whether he knows it or not, he has been one of the most impactful people in my small booze career.
So many links about Yannick, it’s hard to chose which ones to link to and to sum up all what the dude is involved in. Google the guy, support Wheeling Forward, eat at Contento, buy bottles at Beaupierre.
https://www.winespectator.com/articles/sommelier-talk-yannick-benjamin-discusses-dignity-and-accessibility
https://wheelingforward.org/team/yannick-benjamin/
https://www.foodandwine.com/travel/restaurants/game-changers-yannick-benjamin
https://www.wineenthusiast.com/culture/industry-news/wine-star-awards/yannick-benjamin-sommelier/
(*) on the document that comes with his Legion d’Honneur nomination (for heroic acts of war), Joseph Palazzi was listed as “Lieutenant d’Infanterie Coloniale” then “Colonel des Troupes de Marine”.