Douglas E. Barzelay – 50th Reunion Essay

Douglas E. Barzelay

210 Lewis St.

Southampton, NY 11968

debarzelay@gmail.com

Education: Harvard Law School, JD 1973

Career: I practiced corporate law from 1973 to 2009, including as a partner at Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, as General Counsel at The Dime Savings Bank and at W.P. Carey Inc. Since retiring in 2009, I have founded several companies engaged in various aspects of the wine business.

Avocations: Grand Cellérier of the Commanderie d’Amérique, Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin

College: Saybrook

Writing this essay has provided at least one concrete link with my college years—I am sitting down to compose it on the day it’s due.

The 50th reunion may for some be a time for summing up, for articulating achievements and dissatisfactions, but this deadline catches me at a different moment: in the midst of change and unfinished initiatives—of making what may at age 70 be a foolhardy commitment to the future, but it’s mine nonetheless.

To start with a backward glance, I continue to look on my years at Yale with both clarity and great fondness. Yale changed my life. I wrote in the 25th Reunion Class Book about the intellectual provocations of those years. What I neglected to mention, though it came to assume increasing importance, was the pleasure I took in new challenges (mental ones at least; climbing Everest never interested me). Indeed, what ultimately led me to leave law, after a 35-year career that was not without its satisfactions (and some travails), was the realization that I was being paid to do things I’d done 20—or 100—times before, when what I yearned for was to master (or at least learn) things I didn’t yet know.

I retired in 2009, in time to give back to my then-aging parents a small measure of the time and love they had lavished on me. Following their deaths, I decided to pursue ideas that had been gnawing at me, often in half-articulated form, for years. I wanted to see if I could run my own business, instead of helping others to run theirs, to do it with friends and colleagues I respected and whose company I enjoyed, and, perhaps, to pass along whatever wisdom I had absorbed over the years. Because my hobby (then passion, then obsession) had, from early college days, been wine (and I’d had the satisfaction of helping expose a massive wine counterfeiting operation), I decided to make it a focus. I opened a wine brokerage business with a few friends, and began to write (blogging at first), then started some related enterprises. Right now, I’m caught up in two projects that are keeping me busier than ever: a book (co-authored with a friend) on Burgundy’s vintages (and history) from 1845 to the present, which sums up a lifetime of fascination with the wines and people of this remarkable region; and the purchase of vineyard property (and possibly a winery), in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, a remote, emerging wine region. As I write this, the book is close to completion (and I’m already thinking about the next), while the other project is just beginning.

For the 25th, I wrote that I still hoped to arrive, at some future date, at a place from which I could then look back and say that the journey made sense. I’m not there yet. Catch me in 10 years, and we’ll see how things look then.