To summarize the essence of a company in a one or two sentence mission statement is a daunting task. On the surface, our job at Scheid Vineyards is to supply our winery clients with the grapes they need at an acceptable price and at the highest quality possible. But it goes much deeper than that. For to supply a particular client with particular grapes implies an understanding of the specific wine and style being made and the knowledge of how to custom farm to achieve that profile. Say, a certain Sauvignon Blanc customer produces a grassy, herbaceous style of wine while another client aims for a more floral and fruitier character. Same grape, different approach. That’s where the “intelligent effort” part comes in. So we chose for our mission statement a quote by Mr. John Ruskin that we felt perfectly captured our philosophy. Ruskin has been called one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the 19th century. He was also a bit of a lunatic. The only child of a prosperous wine merchant (you see? already a wine connection), he was a recognized poet at an early age and grew to become a prolific and renowned art critic, publishing some 250 works. One of the most well-known, “The Stones of Venice”, is a three volume architectural study of Venice, Italy in which he rails against the Greek, Roman and Renaissance style, believing it to be “utterly devoid of all life, virtue, honourableness, or power of doing good.” Ruskin was a member of the group who began the Arts & Crafts movement and he founded a utopian community in 1871. His most radical idea was his total rejection of any machine-produced products. Rather, he believed that handwork and craftsmanship brought dignity to labor. To put it mildly, this was a man of strongly held beliefs. Unfortunately, his personal life was, in a word, disastrous. His only marriage ended in annulment, on grounds of non-consummation. Later, he fell deeply in love with Rose La Touche, a young girl 30 years his junior, who died of insanity at the age of 36. Soon after, Ruskin’s life became punctuated by bouts of despair and insanity, culminating in a total breakdown for the last ten years of his life. O.K., so it’s not the most uplifting story, but, as Aristotle so aptly put it, “There was never a genius without a tincture of madness”. And this bit of background is important in explaining our mission statement only to illustrate that Ruskin was not a fly-by-night fellow, but a man of deep conviction who studied, analyzed and cared profoundly about the world. Quality is a term that has been trivialized, used by purveyors from McDonald’s to Verizon to K-Mart. Genuine quality is harder to come by and does not mean simply well-made or acceptable. Real quality is that which is superior. It is the result of thought, analysis, communication, sweat and honest-to-God hard labor, succinctly stated by Mr. Ruskin as “intelligent effort”. True quality is giving each customer no less than exactly what they want and need. It is never an accident.