Have you ever read a wine description in a newspaper review or a food and wine magazine and immediately hated the author? “Aromas of cumquat, Florence fennel, and dragon fruit, dance in the glass with layers of cassis, veal stock, and dried sage on the palate, finishing long and velvety.” Thanks Dickens, but will I actually like this wine as much as you enjoyed writing that little poem? Am I drinking a fruit salad or a vegetable-pie smoothie? Would you describe Coca-Cola like that? How about chicken noodle soup? What is so different about wine? Wine is ultimately just a beverage, and while it affords this author regular romance, profound life lessons, intriguing histories of diverse cultures, a career, great friendships, and a life rich with gustatory ecstasy, I would have to consider it the world’s third best beverage. Coffee delivers a far more important drug than alcohol, and then there’s whisky: sometimes you don’t need romance; you just need a drink.
In short, wine can be overblown. The reasons for this? In many cases, inequality of information allows those with more information to confuse those who don’t have much information, and regularly to the advantage of those with it. My Wall Street friends can attest to how well this works. In some cases, marketers rely on puffery when the true character or the quality of a wine are actually wanting. For the defensible few, it’s because there’s genuine passion, artistry, and a life’s pursuit in every bottle. The immeasurable blood, sweat, tears, bad weather, vineyard pests, plant diseases, early mornings, late nights, barrel-rolling, wine-racking, tank-cleaning, and marathon tastings that goes into one vintage of one wine, indeed merits faithful worship of the art of winemaking. Or, as explained more succinctly by many winemakers, it takes a lot of good beer to make good wine. Through this lens, wine is deservedly complex. For fledgling students of wine, the complexity and challenges of understanding wine are significant. First, illogically, the major differences across wines are subtle. Deciphering subtlety takes practice. It also isn’t easy to teach or explain a sensory experience. How can any expert argue with what a person says they taste? Regardless, and not coincidentally, perhaps as many as 90 percent of wine drinkers can’t articulate what they like, much less why. But it’s not their fault. Nobody teaches the wine-drinking public a consistent language to articulate what they are tasting or what they like. Journalists, educators, retailers, and waitstaff can all fail you, and regularly do.
For those who don’t have the inclination to read up on the Chardonnay clones of Burgundy, nor the means or access to barrel-taste upcoming Bordeaux releases, nor the time to track weather patterns over a favorite winemaking region, the experience remains convoluted and intimidating---or, as my sometimes feisty mother would say, “frustrating as hell.” For those wine drinkers and for my mother, I have the solution. Wine doesn’t need to be so difficult.
