The Ancient Game Is Afoot and It's Wine's Turn

How the wine industry should respond to the sacrifice of truth and common sense.

I don’t know who taught my grandfather, Thomas Marion Wark, to play chess. It almost certainly was his father. But I do know he taught my father, George Thomas, to play. George honed his game in England with other American pilots while between missions over the continent during World War II and, later, in a German prison camp.

George taught me to play chess when I was about 11. I never beat him before he died a few years later. But then again I didn’t have the luxury of sitting in a German prison camp for a year with nothing to do but work, play chess, and keep an eye out for stray cats running into the camp.

I taught our boy Henry George to play chess a couple of years ago when he was seven. It took. But he wasn’t too interested after the novelty of using his knight with its weird movement wore off. But out of the blue, he asked me to play a few weeks ago.

We have been playing regularly at night after dinner and he’s getting pretty good, despite occasionally not seeing a fork coming his way. He’s beaten me once, fair and square because he takes after his dad who also occasionally doesn’t see the fork coming.

But the other day I saw him carefully stationed over a chess board by himself, squinting, moving pieces back and forth, trying new moves, shaking his head, and starting over. He was clearly working something out. I left him be.

It didn’t take long before he ran outside, interrupted my evening cigar, and declared, “Dad, come look. I invented a Gambit! I’m calling it the ‘American Gambit’ ”

For those of you who haven’t seriously dabbled in Chess, a “Gambit” is when you purposely sacrifice a piece in order to obtain an advantage either immediately or shortly down the road. Chess has been played with most of its modern rules for about 500 years. There are no “new” gambits in the game. Unless you are just learning the game. Then, as with the beginning wine lover, everything is new and amazing…at least amazing enough to interrupt your father’s evening cigar.

Henry’s patriotism went unrewarded as there was already a chess opening called the “American Gambit”. I looked it up. But I didn’t tell him. If he sticks with the game and begins to study, he’ll figure it out himself and have a nice chuckle.

When a system in which humans are the main players has been around for so long, it’s almost impossible to discover something new. We are simply too curious and adventurous a species to leave anything on the board untried. This is certainly the case with the dueling arts of alcohol sales and alcohol control. I suspect there have been any number of competing moves over the millennium between those selling it and those trying to control its consumption.