THE PERSISTENT OBSERVER’S
GUIDE TO
Wine
How to enjoy the best
and skip the rest
by J. P. Bary
Neon Press
A division of PdB Partners, Incorporated
Greenwich, Connecticut
“I think it’s really excellent, well written and although lots of detail, not tedious, easy to keep going.” John Sharpe, Retired COO, Four Seasons Resorts and Trustee Emeritus, Culinary Institute of America, Toronto, Ontario.
“I've read a lot of "basic guides" and I can honestly say yours is the approach to which I best relate. You make the reader laugh and keep him/her interested. You trust the reader to understand more than a lot of basic books do, but you don't cross the line and go too in depth. This is very, very good material and I can think of a dozen (or more) people to whom I would recommend your book.” Emily Turner, Blogger, Emily in the Glass, Louisville, KY.
“I started and couldn't stop reading (no kidding). Beautifully written and organized.” William Sleight, Webmaster, Cupertino, CA.
“I think it’s great and will be very helpful to wine drinkers of all levels —clearly a labor of love and a product of talent and much work.” Stephanie Nathanson, Social Worker, Darien, CT.
“The book is interesting, educational and written with a personal tone that made it very comfortable to read and understand. I will give copies to my three children when it is published. I know they will enjoy reading it.” Tullio Bori, Engineer, Metuchen ,NJ.
“One question - I am really enjoying his book and I wonder if you'd mind if I pass it on to a friend? She's just begun to try to understand wine and I think the book would be perfect for her.” Diane Reitano, Financial Manager and Wine Importer, NY, NY.
“Overall observation – I liked it, I liked it a lot. Just to be clear, I was a reader who had no interest in wine, or in learning anything about wine. My knowledge increased in a comfortable way, much easier than absorbing an encyclopedic description of wines.” Robert Friedman, Attorney, NY, NY
“I have read a few wine books for unsophisticated wine lovers like me ----mostly boring. Yours has a great style and thank God, does not preach to those of us who are rank amateurs. May I share your draft with my son-in-law? Loved your book! En avant!” Anna Longobardo, Engineer, Bronxville, NY
“Pairing is indeed a pleasant entertainment and you lay out the basic skills very well and present it in a very informal and accessible way.” Francis Furey, Documentary Producer, San Fransisco, CA.
“Haven't read a wine book with quite this personal and individualized point of view. Empowering actually.” Dudley Perry, Attorney, Montgomery, AL.
To my parents, who taught us to investigate things, search for the true path and keep ever close the vision of Paradise.
To our kind “Uncle” Donald Keene, who first brought wine to our home.
To all my partners in wine, especially:
Vickie, Ned and John de Bary
Diana and Peter Samponaro
Leslie and Charles Rousell
Lin and Tracy Lavery
Gabrielle and Richard Bolton
Martha and Dominique de Anfrasio
Making your way through the wine labyrinth isn’t that difficult once you get your bearings, but most people lose their way after a few wrong turns. In my own early wanderings, I often found myself at the intersection between success and failure without knowing how I got there or which way to turn. Despite efforts to read the map, I ended up on long detours or in blind alleys repeatedly. Indeed, much of what I read seemed to have little relationship to what I saw in front of me. So until I learned to recognize the little signals that kept me from going around in circles, I stumbled along a twisted but well-worn path for many years.
It’s not that I didn’t learn quite a bit about wine during those rootless years. It’s just that only a small fraction of what I learned was really useful. As I look back now on what helped me the most, the key guidelines I use today don’t seem to be terribly complicated or hard to fathom. Just a few persistent mistakes and misconceptions kept me in the dark. I can’t help wishing I’d figured them out earlier.
Part of what confused me was my assumption that a prodigious effort was required to truly understand wine. The task of becoming proficient always seemed daunting and somewhat mysterious. I was told I needed to improve my wine vocabulary, master the geographic subtleties of various wine regions and take detailed notes. But for me, wine was an easygoing companion. Why spoil a carefree relationship by taking it too seriously?
It was also too easy for me to believe I was picking up what I needed to know just by doing what came naturally. Supportive retailers treated me as a valued customer, less knowledgeable friends deferred to my judgments and occasionally a sommelier would compliment me on “a good choice.” Deep down, however, I was often disappointed with the decisions I made and knew I wasn’t getting it quite right. So I persisted in trying to learn more, though I sometimes wondered if I would ever have time to learn all I needed to know.
The books I’ve read about wine over the years could more than fill my modest wine cellar. Most were written by well-recognized experts. Some entertained me with stories, others featured clever layouts and graphics to help me visualize and memorize a host of details. Beautiful photos of vineyards, wineries and, of course, elegant people delightedly sampling the product inspired me and brought back pleasant memories of evenings when every drop of the lustrous liquid in my glass seemed precious. With the right wines meals tasted better, conversation flowed more easily and my life just took on a brighter glow. Yet those “right” wines seemed frustratingly difficult to find. It wasn’t simply a matter of paying more or choosing wines the experts had rated highly. Despite what I was learning, I still experienced disappointment as often as success.
As I tried to learn more about wine, I attended tastings led by professionals. Yet there was a wide gap between what the professionals said and what I experienced. I could sometimes pick up tastes when they suggested them, but could almost never pick them out on my own. I even became suspicious (rightly so in a few cases) that what I was being told was simply a put-on. After all, most of my friends couldn’t connect what they read or heard about the taste of a wine to what they actually experienced. Were we all the victims of an elaborate hoax, or just missing some elusive wine-tasting gene?
For a long time, I learned more than I needed to know, yet not enough to make a real difference. So many things influenced the experience: food, friends, storage, service, even the shape and temperature of the glass. It was all pretty bewildering. But gradually I realized that what was helping me most wasn’t so much what I had learned about wine as what I was learning about the mistakes I kept making.
These mistkes weren’t things I read about in books. I had to figure them out for myself. Yet, as I learned how to avoid them, my success began to increase steadily. And as I shared the lessons I’d learned with others I found I wasn’t the only one making these mistakes. I still wasn’t a great expert on wine, but I was becoming an expert on wine mistakes, and could help others figure out what confused them, so they could enjoy their wines more as well.
I think I can now appreciate why it’s so difficult for wine experts to write a useful introductory guide for ordinary consumers. It’s easy for beginners to get lost in the details as they first attempt to find the patterns woven deep in the fabric of wine’s rich tapestry, but as one learns to recognize them these patterns begin to seem obvious. Since the details no longer obscure the basics, it’s easy to assume that everyone else understands them too. Meanwhile, the hard-won skills you’ve developed become so instinctive that you employ them unconsciously.
So it occurred to me that it might be useful to have a wine guide written by someone who hasn’t become too much of an expert. I seem to be at a sweet spot in the progression from neophyte to connoisseur: far enough along to understand what the experts are trying to say, but still able to connect with what confuses the ordinary consumer. If I can’t soar high enough to command the entire landscape, I’ve at least scratched the dirt long enough to learn the difference between a kernel of truth and a poisonous pest.
I don’t intend to cover the same well-trodden ground as other wine books. This isn’t a slimmed-down wine encyclopedia. It doesn’t describe a single wine region or drop the names of legendary wines I’ve sampled with famous producers. There are no rules about how to taste or serve wine and no diagrams segmenting the tongue or showing the interactions between flavor elements in food and wine. Nor are there any defined terms you need to master before you can understand what I’m saying.
What I’d like to share with you is something different. I’ve asked the muse to help me keep the focus of this book on you and how you experience wine. Rather than classifying and presenting wines in the abstract, I want to help you develop an understanding of them as you drink them, without having to memorize anything. I’d like to give you a better context for your wine experiences by revealing the natural processes and human interventions at work behind the scenes, so you can sort through all the confusing details by yourself and make better choices without the need of expert assistance. You’ll learn how to think for yourself about wine, so you can overcome whatever challenges you in a way that’s best suited to your own particular needs.
In this book I describe serious mistakes that millions of people make every day—mistakes I’ve made many times myself. Once I describe them to you, you’ll see why they’re so easy to make and why they’re such persistent barriers to a deeper understanding of wine. Then I’ll help you remove those barriers so you can get closer to wine as a living, breathing organism and become intimately familiar with its personalities and moods. You’ll learn to pick out the special qualities that different grape varieties contribute to a wine and see how they’re modified by climate and manipulated by winemakers. You’ll see how each glass communicates with you in its own way and be able to build a deeper rapport with the wines you love best. You’ll also get better at spotting the troublemakers early, so you can keep them at a distance or maybe even make them behave.
In a few short lessons, I’ll show you how to avoid disappointment and be energized, rather than intimidated, by the choices you have to make. Then surprises will be something you look for and part of what makes wine more exciting. You’ll come to understand why, in the world of wine, complexity isn’t a curse; it’s a compliment.
Many books promise to simplify wine, but it’s complicated for good reasons. Oversimplification ignores wine’s greatest virtue and leaves you oblivious to its most unpredictable and thrilling pleasures. Yet the devil isn’t in the details, either. While a good book can help make the arduous process of learning the many fine points of wine a bit easier, knowing all those details won’t protect you from most of the frustrating mistakes and misconceptions that ruin your wine experiences. By learning more about those common mistakes and misconceptions, you’ll master the art of choosing and enjoying wines much more quickly than you will by learning all the fine points. In this book, I’ll clear away the biggest obstacles that keep you from enjoying wine at its best, so your wine experiences will become more rewarding with each chapter and you’ll find more pleasure than you ever expected in each new glass you drink.
To disregard the taste of a wine is to ignore its reason to exist. Wine may nourish us, quench our thirst and give a pleasant lift to our spirits, but it gets our attention with its taste. If that doesn’t appeal to us, we’ll drink something else.
It’s curious, then, that so many people pay so little attention to the taste of the wines they drink, and it’s disconcerting to think of all the good wine and money being wasted as a result. Every day, in restaurants and retail shops, people ignore advice about taste or are just oblivious to the issue. How often, for example, do we see a group at a restaurant proudly order one of the most expensive wines on the list and ask that it be served right away? Then they’ll order spicy appetizers and salads drenched with vinegar or topped with palate-smothering cheeses—dishes that destroy the ability of anyone to distinguish between the expensive wine and ordinary plonk. After quickly polishing off the expensive bottle, the group will then order wines better suited to the appetizers they’ve just finished, which inevitably arrive just in time to overwhelm the taste of courses that would have been better complemented by the expensive wine.
Does it make sense to buy an expensive wine and then proceed with the rest of the meal as if its taste didn’t matter? Not if the taste is what you’re paying extra for.
When asked to think about it, most people agree that taste is the most important quality in a wine. Yet it isn’t usually the first thing they think of when choosing a wine. In fact, it’s often the last thing they think of. Why is that?
In my case, it was mainly because I didn’t make the right connection between taste and value. Overwhelmed by the noticeable disparity in the prices of the many different wines available to me, my first concern was with whether I was getting my money’s worth. I felt I needed to understand “quality,” and that was something I had a very hard time putting my finger on.
Over the years, I’ve found many others who’ve shared this concern, and the wine industry seems to appreciate just how widespread it is. Most efforts to sell wine involve some variation on the value proposition. One is that a wine is a great bargain. Examples of this range from a breathless “I know this is expensive, but it’s really priceless!” to a cynical “I know this tastes bad, but at least you won’t spend a lot of money on it!”
Another way that wine marketers address our concern over value is by trying to persuade us that the inherent quality of a good wine justifies its higher price. This approach usually has more substance behind it, but their pitches can include everything from sly misdirection to transparent fraud. At the lower end of the market, pedestrian wines may be dressed up to look like their nobler cousins, while at high-end auctions fake bottles of legendary wines are passed off by counterfeiters secure in the knowledge that the wines aren’t likely to be consumed immediately, if ever.
Even if you filter out commercially motivated pitches and clever chatter from the more earnest references to wine quality, there are many competing views of what quality is. Wine professionals and connoisseurs usually have strong and well-informed opinions on the subject, but they often disagree, which doesn’t exactly help those of us who like to keep things simple. But as I’ve come to understand these disagreements, I’ve found them to be largely a matter of taste. They agree that a higher-quality wine should taste better, just not about what tastes better.
It’s not surprising, then, that most people are as confused as I was about wine quality, even when they tell me it’s the first thing they think of when they choose a wine. But even though they’ll readily confess to being a bit uncertain about what quality is, they’re still sure they want it. Problem is, since it’s a matter of taste, there’s no fixed and immutable standard of quality in a wine. In fact, understanding your own sense of taste is the only place to start if you want to get good value when you choose a wine.
For many years I had only the vaguest idea of what a particular wine might taste like when I saw it in a shop or on a restaurant wine list. Even though I could taste wines when I drank them, I had difficulty recalling the taste when choosing a wine later. I could easily identify with the couple standing in front of a wine shop in a New Yorker cartoon. One says: “I think we’ve had that wine before, but I can’t remember whether it was good or bad!”
My taste-blind wine selections continued long after I began attending wine tastings, reading tasting notes and visiting tasting rooms at various wineries. I gradually became familiar with the taste of a few of the more affordable wines I drank regularly, but when I wanted to step up and buy a better bottle for a special occasion or order from a restaurant wine list, I had little idea what the wines available for me to choose from would taste like. The only thing I could say for sure was that 99.9 percent of the wines in the world wouldn’t taste much like the ones I was familiar with. Sometimes, even the taste of those changed.
I wasn’t entirely alone in my confusion. Sometimes, as I shared a glass with friends, I would ask what they thought the wine tasted like. Perhaps they would murmur something about “body” or “fruitiness,” but for the most part, even when they had a glass in hand, the only thing they were sure it tasted like was, well…wine! Did it have to be any more complicated than orange juice or Coca-Cola?
The answer should be obvious, of course, but it took me a while to realize that what makes wine different is precisely the wide variety of tastes it can have. Wine producers compete for your attention by trying to distinguish their wine, not only from other beverages, but also from other wines. This gives you a better range of selections for wine than you normally have with drinks such as tea or coffee, or even soft drinks, juices, beer or liquor.
All that variety offers us better choices, but it can also lead to confusion and disappointment. Without a clear sense of what a particular wine will taste like, it’s hard to know how well it will suit your needs or your pocketbook.
While inexpensive bulk wines can be quite tolerable in the right circumstances, most of us tire of them if we have to drink them too often. They’re also not likely to be the kind of wines we’d consider for a special occasion or to enhance the experience of a specially prepared meal. When we set out to purchase a more expensive wine, however, it’s difficult to know what it will taste like, since it’s unlikely to be a wine we can afford to drink every day. In fact, the minute we move up the price scale from bulk wines, we enter a very competitive arena where variations in taste and price abound. This is where the action is, where we can find the quirky and the overlooked, and where it’s easy to stumble on something unexpected. Lamentably, as cost increases, so does the risk of making mistakes.
We’re accustomed to thinking that a higher price should be a protection against disappointment, however. Simple economics also suggests that the price of a wine should be dictated by the relationship between its supply and the demand for it. We’re tempted to apply this simplistically and assume that demand should be greatest for the wines that taste best and that higher-priced wines should taste better than cheaper ones.
But taste is a relative matter. The French say: “Chacun à son goût!”; the English: “There’s no accounting for taste,” in ancient Rome, “De gustibus non disputandum est!” A wine won’t necessarily appeal to you just because it appeals to many others, and there are all sorts of other things that affect the taste of a wine: its age, the temperature you drink it at, the food you eat it with…even the mood you’re in when you drink it. Great wines transcend many of these factors, but none can transcend them all.
A compounding problem is that there are only so many wines the average consumer can learn to recognize in a lifetime. For reasons we’ll get into later, wines that achieve celebrity status tend to be produced in limited quantities compared to their renown. While the laws of supply and demand may work handsomely for them, they don’t necessarily result in equivalent prices for many other lesser known but equally worthy wines. Even Adam Smith was concerned about the price inefficiencies of wine.
Despite these complexities, however, the global wine distribution system does a remarkable job of satisfying the tastes and needs of millions of happy wine drinkers who every day embrace the challenge of sorting through all that variety. You might find it a bit intimidating at first, but it’s really not difficult to master the skills that make the process fun rather than fearsome. The most important skill needed is one you already have: the ability to taste.
To get the most out of any glass of wine, you need to be able to taste it properly and have a sense of what you like or dislike about it. If you know why a wine pleases you, you’ll be better able to find others like it. More important, if you understand what you don’t like about a wine, you’re in a better position to judge whether it’s something you want to avoid in the future or a good wine you’re just dinking under the wrong circumstances.
The first step toward understanding any wine is quite simply to taste it and ask yourself what you first notice. Although the answer should come naturally, it can be difficult to put a finger on it at first, since we’re naturally influenced by what we’ve been told about the taste of wine in the past and feel obliged to come up with something similar. But trying to remember what it is you’re supposed to be noticing at the same time you’re trying to notice it can be a pretty challenging task. Fortunately, it’s unnecessary.
Next time you start to drink wine, put aside whatever you’ve been told about the art and science of wine tasting. Don’t try to focus on the “attack,” the “mid-palate,” the “aftertaste” or any exotic flavor. Just take a moment and concentrate on what stands out in your overall impression. You might experience a sense of heat, a tingle or a feeling that your tongue is getting rough. You might be a bit overwhelmed by sweetness or bitterness or notice a pronounced flavor that’s familiar to you. Just take your time and get comfortable with the fact that you can pick up quite a bit of information on your own.
For too many of the years I spent aimlessly wandering in the wine wilderness, I was hindered as much as helped by well-meaning wine aficionados eager to share with me what they tasted in a wine. I could almost always find whatever they suggested to me if I concentrated on it hard enough, but it usually wasn’t something I’d tasted before they suggested it to me.
Once I became comfortable identifying tastes for myself, the tables suddenly reversed and others almost always found the same things I did. Like the golden bough emerging from the Sybil’s breast, this was a precious passport to a deeper understanding of wine. With my newly gained confidence, my own sense of taste emerged from the shadows and the impressions of others could be put in their proper context. I could pass through the ivory gates and begin to chart my own course.
Initially, my newfound confidence made me eager to offer advice to beginners, just the way others had given advice to me. Each time I suggested a taste and a glint of recognition came from across the table, I thought I was helping another lost soul along the road to wine appreciation. What I failed to realize was that the most important difference between us was not a vast store of wine knowledge, but simply my confidence in the ability to taste for myself.
Instead of telling inexperienced tasters what I was finding in the wine, I should have been asking them what they were finding and helping them appreciate what discerning tasters they already were. We all use our sense of taste every day and can easily tell if something tastes good or not. To taste wine well, we don’t need to change that, just understand it better and learn how not to interfere with it.
Almost always, when someone suggests a taste to you, you’ll find what was suggested, but if it wasn’t what you noticed yourself, it won’t be so easy to find it again. So instead of trying to find something exotic, like a “soupçon of asparagus,” or poetic, like “silkiness,” just begin your exploration of wine by concentrating on tastes you feel are either overwhelming or noticeably missing. It’s more important to understand what you experience, and connect that with what other people say, than it is to focus on something you’ve heard and try to find it.
As soon as you start to concentrate on your own taste, you’ll find it easier to understand what you like and dislike. Then you’ll naturally want to learn more about the taste of wine so you can enjoy it even more by avoiding wines that aren’t pleasing to your own palate and choosing those that are. Since you are the only person with the knowledge that enables you to do that, it doesn’t work to substitute the judgment of others. Their judgments can be interesting, but they’ll help you only if you have a judgment of your own to compare them to.
The process of learning to taste wine is a bit like learning to field a ball. You have to start by simply doing it. At first, the ball coming toward you can seem a bit frightening, but as you become more familiar with the various incoming trajectories your reactions change from instinctive alarm to instinctive response. Gradually, as your confidence builds, you take pride in your ability to anticipate an unusual bounce and learn to handle what originally seemed out of reach with grace and aplomb.
I hate the idea of an “educated palate,” because for me each glass of wine is an education. It does help, however, to learn to recognize the basic taste elements in wine, just as it helps to learn to recognize the trajectories of a ball. This is much easier when you’re actively involved and building on what you already know. Whether you’ve learned to conceptualize it or not, you know what you taste. Rather than learning to find something in a wine you don’t already recognize, it’s better to learn to recognize what others call the things you already find.
Once you stop trying to remember what it is that you’re supposed to taste and just concentrate on what you actually taste, your first reaction is likely to be a sense that a wine has too much or too little of something. Does it seem a bit too sweet or too dry; too thin or too heavy; too rough or missing that bit of kick you enjoy when you finish it? These are clues to your sense of taste and how it relates to wine.
When you concentrate on what you yourself taste, it’s natural to think about what you enjoy most or least, which might or might not be what you notice first. You may find it interesting to pay attention to the last thing you notice about the taste of the wine. Since your first impression is likely to be influenced by residual tastes in your mouth, different qualities can emerge as you drink more of it. What you notice last is likely to be quite different from what you notice first and might even be what you like best.
The tastes you notice for yourself, particularly those you like or dislike, are things you can easily remember and look for the next time you try a glass of wine. As you start to identify things you find too much or too little of in a wine, you’ll also start to build a natural understanding of the term “balance” and you’ll instinctively realize that it’s a relative term rather than a fixed ideal.
The concept of balance in a wine is often talked about, but many people find it confusing. This shouldn’t happen, because most people can learn to appreciate balance fairly easily. The mystery isn’t so much how to recognize it as what makes it happen.
Many references to balance suggest that it’s simply a matter of offsetting sweetness with sourness (which most wine writers refer to as acidity) on some sort of linear scale. Simply equalizing the levels of each of these qualities doesn’t create balance, however. Rather, it’s a matter of letting all the most desirable qualities of a wine emerge by making sure that nothing else dominates the taste. So, for example, a level of sweetness that might distract from the delicate flavors of a light white wine could blend almost imperceptibly into the bolder flavors of a full-bodied red wine.
Many wines are prized for attributes, such as aromatics, dryness or weight that complement a particular food or style of cuisine. Like a mechanic balancing the wheels on an automobile, a winemaker will add or subtract a little something here or there to help the wine show off these attributes. When you learn about balance by picking up on what’s missing or overwhelming in a wine, you appreciate intuitively that there are too many elements involved to measure balance in any precise linear way. Rather, balance involves a kind of restraint; it’s a quality that makes all the ingredients in a wine blend harmoniously into something indefinable, where the whole is equal to more than the sum of the parts.
Wine writers often refer to this in younger or more full-bodied wines as “character” and in older or lighter wines as “finesse.” There are other terms: “breed,” “harmoniousness,” “elegance.” These don’t need to be defined; you know them when you taste them. For you, balance will be a little bit different than for anyone else, but you shouldn’t worry about whether you can taste it. If a wine seems one-dimensional and uninteresting, it’s unbalanced; if there’s something special going on and the wine seems to resonate and be evolving as you drink it, you’re sensing balance. It’s actually what makes a wine stand out and get noticed—what winemakers and critics spend most of their time looking for—yet we all can sense it quite naturally.
Once you connect with what seems harmonious to you, you’ve begun to develop a sense of your own unique way of tasting things. Don’t be afraid to run with it. Taste is deeply entwined with our primitive instincts for survival and growth, and it can be a bit intimidating when you first experience the full extent of its capabilities. But this is only an affirmation of how well suited we are to take our unique place in the wild riot of life. Nothing smells as fragrant as a meadow, as fresh as a sea breeze. When we feel good, we say life is a bowl of cherries. Somehow, everyone knows just what we mean.
Whether we encounter it in a tended garden, a vast wilderness or the majesty of the night sky, we have a deep-seated ability to enjoy the sights, smells and tactile sensations nature offers. The natural world breaks down the remnants of unpleasantness and returns them to us as luxuriant new life. It is this world that the vine inhabits and pours forth in the taste of wine. With roots deep in the soil, it pulls up the elemental juices of the earth. Its leaves and tendrils stretch out to the warmth of the sun and stir in the scented air of the mountain valleys and maritime hillsides it inhabits.
With care and skill, winemakers can use the natural cycles of fermentation and gentle repose to concentrate, digest and refine the wild flavors that surround and permeate grapes as they struggle to survive and flourish. With any well-crafted wine, these tastes can be found in plentiful diversity and are constantly evolving and changing, even as they sit in the glass. No one can describe them all with perfect precision; it’s actually quite an achievement just to be able to describe the few you’re most likely to find.
When you have difficulty matching the taste of a wine to what you’ve been told about it, the reason is usually quite simple. Don’t discount the possibility that what’s been described simply isn’t there. Although it’s not unheard of, you’re unlikely to find exotic tastes in inexpensive wines. Their tastes aren’t the ones that wine writers wax poetic about, but that doesn’t always prevent their marketers from using a little poetic license. A producer promoting a wine will understandably emphasize the tastes consumers are most likely to seek, even if these aren’t the ones they’re most likely to find.
Similarly, while some restaurants make an effort to familiarize their staff with the wines on their list, others concentrate on training them how to sell whatever is on it, regardless of whether they are familiar with it. One young fellow told me proudly how he had been trained to sell wine when he worked as a waiter. If he was asked what a wine tasted like, he was told to answer according to whether it was red, white or sparkling. If it was red, it had “soft fruit”; if it was white, it was “minerally”; and if it was sparkling, it was “toasty.” When I asked him if that was what he tasted in the wines, he said he really wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but found that little formula good enough to impress most people.
In my experience, people who can succinctly and effectively communicate what they taste in a wine are extremely rare. It’s understandable that these writers can give proper attention only to a small fraction of the wine the world drinks each year and prefer to devote their attention to the world’s greatest wines. Yet the greatest wines are the most difficult to describe adequately with words. You shouldn’t let that keep you from enjoying them. Neither should you let the fact that no one will ever write about most of the wines you drink keep you from learning how to taste them.
Even if you’re a rank beginner, there isn’t much you need to learn in order to get the best out of wine. What you need is just enough knowledge to keep you in your comfort zone and out of a disorienting trap. Then the idea that you don’t exactly know what to expect will make each experience richer and more exiting, like trying a new delicacy being offered to you by an old friend or having a meal prepared by a great chef who delights in coming up with new and surprising tastes for you to enjoy.
To be able to keep yourself in your own wine comfort zone, you’ll need to understand a wine’s basic structure and how things like grape variety, climate, and winemaking style affect it. You’ll also want to learn how to store your wines, serve them and drink them properly. The basics of each of these subjects are easy to understand and we’ll take them up in turn. But the most fundamental skill you need to enjoy wine is the one you’ve been practicing since the day you were born. You don’t need to learn how to taste wine the same way someone else does or become a walking wine encyclopedia in order to enjoy wine’s natural and man-made wonders. Trust your own sense of taste and let it be your constant guide as we continue on our way.
Whenever you take a glass in hand, remember to concentrate on what you’re tasting and experiencing yourself. Learning to understand which wines appeal to your personal preferences is the easiest way to maximize your drinking pleasure and become comfortable with the value you receive when you purchase wines. Concentrate on what you enjoy and you’ll build that understanding on a solid foundation, one you’ll be able to draw on readily and use confidently. Just don’t forget that the most important aspect of taste is the overall impression it conveys and that the thrill of the unexpected is one of wine’s predictable pleasures.
In the next few chapters we’ll delve more deeply into the taste of wine and begin to pick apart its different elements. I’ll show you why you can easily get confused by some of the things you hear about wine and you’ll learn how to avoid the most common misconceptions and troublesome distractions that interfere with your understanding of the wines you drink. Then you’ll be able to focus your natural wine-tasting ability on the things you enjoy most. Those won’t be too hard to find or so easy to forget.
People who are passionate about wine always remember that first transcendental moment: the exact time and place when an unfamiliar wine began to speak to them in a surprisingly intimate way. If it hasn’t happened to you, it’s something to look forward to.
It’s almost never love at first sip. Often it’s the last sip that does it. Suddenly, the thought that you might never taste this wine again seems devastating and you realize you’ve been taking it for granted. If you’re lucky, your glass will be refilled and you can draw the wine close, savor its scent and revel in its intoxicating embrace, entering a state where everything else seems incidental because you’re so intently focused on the wine. Time itself seems to slow down.
There’s a message hidden in that special feeling. Our surrender to wine’s slower rhythms is a necessary part of the experience. In order to enjoy the best of what it has to offer, we have to learn to make time for wine. But in the haste to reconnect with the transcendent moments, it’s easy to lose sight of this. We try various shortcuts and end up getting lost, victims of ignorance and wine’s special versions of divination, numerology and idolatry. All that’s necessary to avoid these pitfalls, however, is an understanding that drinking almost any wine can be a deeply rewarding experience.
You have an innate capacity to take pleasure from wine, and learning how to take full advantage of it isn’t as difficult as you might imagine. All you need is to incorporate a few simple steps into your wine-drinking routine and take the time to gradually absorb what you learn as a result. To do it most efficiently, though, you’ll need to resist the temptation to take shortcuts, since they’ll only slow you down. Most of them involve excluding from your consideration the very wines that will please you most. I know it’s counterintuitive, but by taking your time and giving every wine its due, you’ll actually develop your understanding of wine more quickly.
Because there are so many wines and so many differences among them, it’s natural to look for shortcuts to wine happiness: simple techniques to filter out all the wrong wines we might choose and leave us with only sure-fire winners. When people try to streamline the wine selection process, however, they have a tendency to oversimplify things, and that doesn’t make their selections better, just quicker. Having a decided preference for very dry white wines doesn’t mean there won’t be times when a red wine or a sweet one will seem absolutely glorious. If the shortcuts we take simply narrow our choices, all we do is limit our options and keep ourselves from learning how to enjoy wine more, in different ways.
The notion that there’s a simple way to find appealing wines more quickly isn’t the only reason we’re tempted to take shortcuts. Self-image and our troublesome vulnerability to peer pressure also play a part. In fact, the shortcuts we take usually reveal more about us than they do about wine. Being told that a connoisseur can find quality wines at inexpensive prices, a frugal person may be inclined to believe that only cheap wines are worth considering and judge the value of wines only in terms of price. Religiously ordering only the cheapest wines, a penny pincher will only waste money and could get better value drinking water.
The super-rich are at the other end of the spectrum, of course. They can afford to drink only the most expensive wine and, not surprisingly, there are quite a few people out there willing to sell it to them, whether it makes sense or not. It might be a horrible match for the food they’ve just ordered, but when Mr. and Mrs. Fitch choose the most expensive wine on the list, the sommelier is more likely to compliment than object, even though a higher price has much less to do with how suitable a wine will be than a host of other factors. True, food isn’t the main event when you order wines made for a billionaire’s palate, but it’s hard to admire someone who substitutes flaunting of wealth for knowledge of wine.
Most of us are easily able to avoid these extremes, of course, but we’re still hampered by certain preconceptions and limitations when it comes to understanding wine. That’s why it’s important to recognize some of the many other less easily recognized shortcuts that can tempt us, and understand why they don’t work.
Art Buchwald, the legendry humorist and food and wine reviewer for the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune in the 1960s and ‘70s, once described his early efforts to pretend he was an expert on wine as “learning a few big names and throwing them around.” We smile because he’s making fun of himself and so many others.
Of course, name-dropping is as common and obnoxious in the wine business as it is anywhere else, but Buchwald ultimately became quite a connoisseur of wines, and I think he was trying to convey a more serious message through his humor. Many people assume it’s easier to learn about wine from the top down than from the bottom up, so they shortcut the learning process by paying attention to only a few prestigious wines. Yet there is a world of difference between learning all the top names in wine and learning to understand wine. In fact, starting at the top is a bit like assuming that the best place to learn mountain climbing is on the summit of K-2 or Mount Everest. You’re more likely to slip and fall than learn anything useful.
The greatest wines are the most difficult to understand because complexity and intangible nuances are among their most highly valued qualities. They would not be quite as special if they had only the attributes we expect to find in our everyday wines, nor should we expect to find in our everyday wines the attributes we value most in great wines. Everyday wines have a job to do, and we only become snobbish and superficial when we take what they do for granted. If all we learn about are the unique characteristics found in a few very expensive wines, we’re learning about things that don’t exist in most of the wines we drink on a regular basis. As the journeymen of the wine world, these more modest wines have their own individual talents: flavors, textures and other qualities that bring out the best in food and friends. These are talents we can put to good use on a daily basis.
I must confess that, at certain points in the earlier stages of my wine education, my desire to learn was propelled by something more than natural curiosity. Like Buchwald, I was anxious to appear in the know, especially to those I considered privileged to drink the world’s most prestigious wines. Knowing a bit more about wine seemed to offer a bit of a toehold when I felt under social pressure. On those glittering occasions when I suddenly felt painfully less attractive and successful than everyone else, it was comforting to know a little more than others in the room with respect to at least one subject that was likely to be near at hand.
Looking back, I realize now that at least a few of those listening to me (probably the ones with the most encouraging smiles) actually knew much more about wine than I did, but were kind enough not to dampen my enthusiasm by pointing out my mistakes. Inevitably, I also ran into others who were playing the same game I was, knew some obscure fact about the subject I didn’t and delighted in taking me down a peg. For a while, I foolishly tried to avoid this by doubling down; memorizing more and more about the wines from the most prestigious wine regions and producers, even though I wasn’t likely to drink them very often.
Learning prestigious names and places did increase my familiarity with the leading wine regions and make me more knowledgeable about the leading wine producers. But there are hundreds of leading producers around the world. Each year they make new wines that are carefully scrutinized and rapidly snapped up by knowledgeable and affluent buyers. One could dedicate hours and hours to learning about them and only have the wherewithal to drink their wines a few times a year, if at all. Eventually, it became clear to me that keeping assiduous track of them was more trouble than it was worth.