A bottle of wine

Around 2008, at a family dinner party, my father was gifted 2 bottles of one of the most expensive Portuguese red wines: Pêra Manca.

At home, he offered me one of the bottles and told me:

I heeded the advice. It didn’t serve as’t motivation but it was a nice conversation starter. How this nice €400 bottle of red wine was waiting for me to conclude my software engineering degree.

After finishing my bachelors, I thought to myself: “this is way too much a nice bottle of wine for only 3 years of a bachelors. Also, it didn’t feel that hard anyway.. I’ll wait for something truly worthwhile to open it:

In 2012, I presented my master thesis after months of re-writing and frustration, a common experience for grad students. At that time I had also started working on spinning out a product from the concept I developed in my master thesis. Finishing my masters, and with a new exciting challenge on the horizon, I ended up saying to myself:

The company started and there was little time for pricey bottles of wine. I forgot about the bottle. From time to time, the bottle would be the subject of dinner party conversations which would make me create new deadlines to open it.

An important thing to understand by this time is that wines don’t age forever. Depending on the wine region and wine making style, wines with good aging potential should age anywhere from 2 years to 50 years (for Vintage Ports)¹. In other words, waiting endlessly was not necessarily good as the wine could have spoiled.

Another important thing to understand is that the bottle did not only represent the next challenge to overcome. The bottle accrued a number of achieved milestones, making it an relic worthy only of climbing Everest.

Around that time, we were working hard to raise our seed round, which was difficult as there was still not a lot to show. Raising money was mythical at that time for me, a 24 year old software engineer. So, the challenge was fit for the glorious reward:

We closed the round and had a beer. We started working to hire people (i.e. putting the fresh capital to work) and to finish building our product, which at that time was launched as a beta. I recall that getting our first customer in 2013 was a challenging objective. In my head the 0 to 1 of revenue was worthy of the prized wined. So, naturally:

We did close our first customer in 2013, a startup working literally next door to us who we convinced to buy our product.

However, no vino.²

I kept moving the goal post. I must have done it twice after that (for sure, I was eyeballing the bottle for our series A celebration).

As I looked back, I recalled thinking that I failed to celebrated much of the things I had accomplished. Always thinking that the next milestone was finally the one which made the bottle worth it. In the meantime, the bottle was now a heirloom, a treasure, with all the milestones I had achieved, worth much more than the mere money.

So I decided to finally open it. At my birthday party with friends. “It’s been long enough”.

I went home to my mother’s to find the bottle.
I searched everywhere for it.
“I’m sure I had placed here”.
I couldn’t find it. Because the wine was not there.

It had been drank.

I learned this around the time that I discovered our housekeeper’s drinking problem. It feels selfish to admit this, given that our housekeeper was stealing wine to drink in what can only be a debilitating disease, but I got bummed that not only I did not drink my red holy-grail but also because the wine was likely drank together with some other cheap stuff.³

I postponed it so much that I lost the opportunity to drink it. More importantly than that, I had lost the opportunity to savor what I had achieved and that was not about the wine anymore. My co-founder João Caxaria even offered me a Pêra Manca white wine to make up for my loss which was a terribly kind thing to do and I still have that bottle with me.

In May 2021, after many recollections of this story to people, our team at Codacy decided to offer me a 2013 bottle of Pêra Manca red wine, as a gesture for achieving our targets but also as an ask: to drink it when my daughter is born.

It was one of the best gifts I received and one with special meaning. I intend to assign it all the meaning I lost with the disappearance of my wine bottle. And I decided to drink it with our team this year.

Carminho was born in August 6th 2021. Today is October 24th, the bottle hasn’t been opened yet.

Queue Seinfeld bass line