Learn about wine

What to look for in a wine

2008-05-14T12:04:00.000-07:00

So, you now have some wine in your mouth. Here are some thoughts about what you should look for. Some of these apply to red wines, some apply just to whites, and some to both. I should also point out that some of these terms overlap. What I’m aiming at here is giving you the beginnings of a language about wine. This all seems a bit technical, but it’s important stuff, and it’s worth persevering with.

1. Structure
In red wines, one of the most important elements, but one of the least written about, is structure. This is provided by two components: tannins and acidity. Tannins are the bits in a red wine that make your mouth taste dry; they are a bit astringent. They come from the skins of red grapes; white wines don’t usually have much in the way of tannins. Too much tannin is undesirable, because the wine can seem excessively dry, but tannins also serve a useful purpose, in that they provide a counter to the sweetness of fruit, making a red wine taste more interesting and savoury. Tannins can also vary in their nature: they can be smooth, fine-grained, coarse, green or robust, for example. They are such an important component of red wines we’ll give them their own section. Acidity also provides a counter to sweetness, and helps make a red wine taste fresher. We’ll discuss acidity in its own right further below. Structure is what enables a red wine to age well. Part of the skill of red wine making is to get the structure right, bearing in mind the style of wine that is being made.

2. Texture
Texture is related to structure. In part, it is the structure that helps determine the texture, but there’s more to texture than this. Both reds and whites possess texture: it is the way that the wine feels in the mouth. Another term for this might be ‘mouthfeel’. For reds, they can be silky, smooth, coarse, robust, chunky, velvety or even thick. This isn’t an exhaustive list, and some of the terms used to describe texture can overlap with terms used to describe actual flavours. For whites, they can be thin, fat, oily, piercing, smooth or drying. Again, this isn’t meant to be a complete list.

3. Fruit
Grapes are a sort of fruit, so it isn’t surprising that they often taste of fruits. Fruitiness is probably the easiest thing to describe in a wine, although I wonder about how many people will have a good point of reference for some of the more exotic descriptors used by some wine writers. I can’t tell you what a star fruit, or a pomegranate taste like, for instance, even though I’ve had both before. In white wines, commonly encountered fruits include grape, peach, pear, apple, apricot, grapefruit, lemon and lime. In reds, it’s common to see the fruit profile described broadly as red fruit or black fruit; more specific descriptors such as blackcurrant (and the related cassis), blackberry, raspberry, dark cherry and plum. All rosés seem to taste of strawberries, or so it seems, although they can also taste of raspberries and cranberries. It’s also possible for fruit to be fresh and bright, or rich and jammy. Red wines from hot climates often have jammy fruits.

4. Balance
A critical element in wine quality is that the wine should be balanced. This is hard to describe in words: I reckon you know a balanced wine when you meet one. It’s when all the components of the wine sit easily with each other, with nothing sticking out terribly much. Some examples? Well, a bit of spicy vanilla oak can sometimes balance out sweet fruit in red wines. The richness of Chardonnay can also be offset in this way, with oak spice and acidity providing a counterpoint to the broad, fat fruity flavours this grape variety often displays. With German white wines, the best show a delicate balance between a little bit of sweetness and acidity. Tannins work in red wines to offset sweeter fruit: a more sweetly fruited red can get away with more tannin than a red that has quite lean, savoury fruit.

5. Oak
Oak is important in wine – it’s a topic that deserves separate treatment, which it will get. For now, it is enough to say that oaky flavours, derived from barrels (or, these days, commonly from oak alternatives such as barrel staves bolted into tanks), can act as a sort of seasoning for wine. The famous Spanish wine Rioja is an excellent example: frequently, Rioja wines display sweet coconut and vanilla characters that are derived from the barrels that the wine is aged for long periods in. Many Australian and Californian reds also display spicy the vanilla notes imparted by new oak barrels. Most Chardonnays tend to have some oak influence, with toasty vanilla notes meshing well with the richness of flavour that Chardonnay from warmer regions displays. Like all seasonings, though, oak can be overdone. Personally, I find a strong oak influence in a wine to be a bit off-putting: I want it to support, not dominate the fruit.

6. Freshness
Wines are much better when they taste fresh, as opposed to tired and stale. Bright, focused flavours are usually better than mushy, diffuse ones. How fresh is the wine you are tasting?

7. Complexity
Complexity is a word that often crops up in tasting notes, and it’s always a positive descriptor. A complex wine is one where there’s lots going on. You take a sip and you ‘get’ something from the wine; later, you return to the wine and you ‘get’ something different. A complex wine is one that makes you pause as you taste. ‘What is going on here?’, you may ask yourself. Like a many-faceted diamond, the best wines tend to respond to the light of your attention by revealing many sides to their personality. It’s like the difference between a field of wheat and a meadow in summer – there’s much more going on in one than in the other.

8. Elegance
Ah, elegance: a tricky descriptor indeed. I suspect that some people just add the term ‘elegant to their tasting notes simply because they really like the wine and want to say something else positive about it. Elegance, like balance, is quite subjective. And, as with balance, you kind of know elegance when you meet it. An elegant wine for me is one where there’s a smoothness and sense of assuredness to the nose, and most particularly, to the palate. A showy, demonstrative wine that shouts ‘me, me’ to you is not an elegant wine. Neither is a young, tannic red that clearly needs time to develop. Pinot Noir, when done well, often shows elegance. I guess you could say that elegance is the opposite of power and intensity.

9. Power
A powerful wine is one with impact. It has lots of flavour. It will typically be quite concentrated, but not all concentrated wines are powerful. Some people love their wines to be powerful. ‘Muscular’ is another term that is often used for powerful wines.

10. Concentration
Concentration in a wine is a highly prized attribute. Perhaps too highly prized? No one really wants their wines to be dilute, but mid-bodied wines can often be very alluring. A concentrated wine is one that has lots of flavour, but more than this it is a wine that just seems to have more substance, because it is possible for a wine to be concentrated yet elegant.

11. Length
Length is one of those words that is frequently used in tasting notes, but which runs the risk of merely being a bit pseudy. It’s the sort of term that people can use simply as a reinforcing, affirming descriptor when they really like the wine. A ‘long’ wine is one where the flavour persists in the mouth for a significant period after the wine is swallowed or spat out, which is known as the finish. I often find that older Sherries and Madeiras have long finishes. Cheap wines often have short or abrupt finishes. Sometimes you’ll see references to how long the finish of a wine is in seconds or minutes: personally, I think timing the finish is a slightly absurd practice.

12. Body
Body is quite a useful tasting term. Just as we all have bodies of differing physical attributes, wines come in different shapes and sizes. What we are trying to do by using this sort of term is to give a mental picture of the flavour of the wine, I suppose. A full-bodied wine has richer, more intense flavours than a light-bodied wine. Medium bodied wines lie somewhere in between. I guess it’s kind of obvious. I suppose we could describe an intense but fresh, focused wine as being lithe or slim, but being athletic with it, rather than sort of weedy.

Bad hair days for wine

2008-02-24T14:51:00.000-08:00

At this stage, there's something I need to tell you. It adds another level of complexity to wine tasting, but we can't ignore it.

It's the fact that wines show differently on different days. It's not clear why, but the same bottle opened on a Tuesday might taste different to the same bottle opened on Friday. It's known in the trade as 'bad hair days' for wine. Well, actually, it isn't but it should be. I've only heard the phrase mentioned once, by winewriter Simon Woods (pictured), and I like it.

What's the explanation? I can think of several. First, it could be that we change from day to day in our ability to taste. It could be our hormones; it could be our mood; it could be whether we have the beginnings of a cold; or it could be the other wines we've just tasted, or food we've recently eaten, that have affected our palate.

Context could matter: where and when we are tasting the wine.

Atmospheric pressure may have an effect - wines could taste better on bright days with high pressure than they do on cloudy, low-pressure days. Ambient temperature and humidity are likely to factor here, too.

And there's also the biodynamic calendar. Stop sniggering at the back: some UK supermarkets actually schedule their press tastings to take into account whether it is a shoot day or a root day. I'm not sure which is best.

The long and short of it is that experienced people in the trade think that there's something real about the fact that wines have these 'bad hair days', although personally I suspect this explanation is marshalled more often for wines with the 'right' labels than it is for humble wines.

Different levels of wine appreciation

2008-01-27T15:21:00.000-08:00

One of the keys to being able to make sense of wine is understanding that there are two different ways of appreciating wine. If we fail to realize this, then all sorts of contradictions and confusions creep into our discussions.

Both these forms of wine appreciation are valid, and there's a degree to which they overlap, but I reckon the distinction is still an important one.

The first level of appreciation is, to use a posh, rather pseudy term, the hedonic level, which basically means how much we actually like the wine – this is a sort of first-pass sense of deliciousness or disgust, or even ambiguity. This is the level at which most people operate in their taste world: they like something or they don't like it. If you press them further, they might say that they really liked it, or really hated it, or that they didn't mind it, but that's as far as they can go in their description.

I can think of lots of foods that have elicit this immediate hedonic response. Sweet things are a good example: I love the taste of ice cream without thinking about it too much. It just tastes nice. I love the taste of chocolate in a similar way. I hate the taste of marmite (a yeast extract spread known elsewhere as vegimite), again, without thinking about it.

Moving to wine, some wines have that immediate hedonic appeal, particularly when they have ripe, sweet fruit and perhaps a bit of residual sugar. Many branded reds and whites are designed to taste 'nice' without the drinker having to think too much about them. Other wines, however, can require a bit of effort, and have flavours that novices find a little off-putting. Let's face it, wine itself is a bit of an acquired taste, isn't it? Wines such as Californian rosés with sweet, fruity flavours reminiscent of alcopops are designed to appeal to a broad audience – and particularly non-wine drinkers.

The second level of appreciation involves learning and experience. As we think about the flavours we are encountering, there emerges a new way of appreciating these flavours, and we realize that we have the capacity to learn to like things. Thus even flavours that we fail to appreciate at a hedonic level (those we are unsure about, or don't like) can grow on us. Interestingly, it is these acquired tastes that are often the more enduring ones. We rarely go crazy about flavours that are easy to like, but those which we've grown to like are frequently compelling.

Let me give a personal example. Some five years ago I never ate cheese. I didn't really like it, to be honest. But I kept getting exposed to it, most notably on trips to wine country. One time, tasting Queijo de Serra – a Portuguese sheep's cheese from the Dao – I decided that this rather pungent, intense flavour was one I was going to make an effort to get along with. Now I really, really like cheese. Not every cheese, mind you, but most of them.

I reckon that it's only as we add this learned element of appreciation to the initial hedonic level that we can really get going in tasting wine properly. So much of wine appreciation involves learning to like strange flavours, thinking about what we are experiencing as we taste and bringing all these elements together in rich combination. I don't think that someone who is new to wine can 'get' the world's finest wiines, because there's much more to them than just deliciousness. It's only when you come armed with the proper context, built up through repeated exposure to lots of wines, that you can 'get' the difference between a truly great wine and a merely good one.

Satiety is another posh pseudy term that needs to be mentioned here. In some senses, this is a third level of appreciation, and it relates to how hungry I am for a particular flavour experience. Here's an obvious example of satiety: it's a scorching hot day and I've been walking in the hills, and i'm incredibly thirsty. That first, cold glass of water tastes absolutely, mind blowingly delicious in a way that the third or fourth won't. This is because after I've drunk some water, my thirst has been sated. Repeated exposure to any particular flavour can induce what is known as 'sensory-specific satiety'. This means that even if I am still hungry, I don't really feel like eating, say, a banana, if all I have to eat is bananas. We can become sated (have had enough) of one flavour even though we haven't had enough of other flavours. I guess the application for wine is that there are occasions when we just want a glass of wine – say, for example, we've just got home from work, or we've sat down for lunch outside on a summer's day – and almost any drinkable wine will do. But after a glass or two our need for just any wine is sated, and whether we continue to drink or not is then driven by other factors such as whether the wine tastes nice to us or is of interest.

Tasting wine: an introductory video

2007-12-22T15:36:00.000-08:00

Here's a slightly different approach. You've been reading about tasting wine. Here's a short introductory video where I talk about how I approach wine tasting.

The taste of wine, part 1

2007-11-22T08:46:00.000-08:00

Now it’s time to put the wine in your mouth. Whereas sniffing wine involves just the nose, putting it in your mouth involves input from both the tastebuds on your tongue and also the smell receptors in the back of your nose. Thus the sensation is a combined one.

There are five basic tastes: bitter, salty, sweet, sour and umami. [The last one may need some explanation: umami refers to the sense of deliciousness or savouriness we experience when we taste the amino acid glutamate, which is a component of proteins. Apparently, some wines have this umami flavour. It’s a recent addition to the tastebud repertoire in that until a few years ago we didn’t know about it.]

Now these five basic tastes, in terms of information about what is in our mouths, are rather basic. Think of them as the lines in a child’s colouring book. The colour is added by the smell receptors in the nose, which are activated when volatile components of what’s in our mouth travel through to the nasal cavity from the back of our mouths.

For this reason, when we are tasting wine we swish it around in our mouths a bit, or do a sort of closed mouth chew. Some people take air in as they are doing this, but it’s noisy and I find it really annoying at wine tastings when I hear it because it’s kind of ostentatious and a bit pretentious, I reckon. And it sounds disgusting. [End of mini-rant.]

One more thing to add about taste, while I’m in nerdy mood. It’s about the tongue taste map. You may have seen this in textbooks, or even wine tasting books: it consists of a diagram in which the tongue is split into zones, each of which is supposed to be where one of the primary tastes is predominantly detected. Wine glass manufacturers who offer a gazillion wine glass shapes, one for each type of wine, have used this map as a part-justification for why you must have a separate glass for each wine style: they have claimed that the different glasses direct the wine to different zones of the tongue.

Well, I hate to be a party pooper, but this map is apparently a myth. Yes, different bits of the tongue are more sensitive than others, but they are more sensitive to all tastes. But the myth of the tongue map is a surprisingly enduring one: even though Professor Linda Bartoshuk of Yale University, who is a taste expert, has debunked this map on several occasions in print, you still see it around.

A brief aside: wine glasses

2007-09-26T02:30:00.000-07:00

Do glasses matter? The short answer is yes, but probably not as much as some people seem to think. I’ve enjoyed great wines from tumblers in the past. Having said this, if you try the same wine in three very different sized and shaped glasses, it will taste different, although you’ll probably still recognize it as the same wine. I guess it’s like seeing someone you know in different photographs. They look a little different in each, but almost always you know who it is in the picture. It’s also true that different shaped glasses can suit different styles of wines better—Austrian glass manufacturer Riedel has built their business round this concept—but for most people who aren’t ultra-serious about their wine, one suitably shaped and reasonably generously sized glass should be good for all wine types. Avoid the squat, hemispherical glasses known as Paris goblets (the left-most glass in the picture), and instead go for something bigger and more tulip shaped.

Why do glasses affect the way a wine tastes? The main effect seems to be on the way that the aromas are released and then trapped. If you drink from a small beaker or a glass that’s pretty much full to the brim, there’s no opportunity to swirl the wine in such a way as to encourage the release of the volatile aroma molecules. And any aromas that are given off will rapidly dissipate into the air. With a larger, tulip-shaped glass, modestly filled, you can swirl the wine around, releasing aromas which are then caught—to a degree—within the headspace of the bowl. Putting it simply, the wine smells more. And if it’s a nice wine, then that is a good thing. Don’t despair, though, if all you have to hand is a tumbler or a mug: you can still taste the wine, and while it is in your mouth it will give off aromas that are then picked up by your nose through the back door route. This is known as retronasal olfaction. Thus the wine will still give you much of which it has to offer.

But there’s another aspect to wine glasses that is separate from the way that the wine is detected by our nose and taste-buds: aesthetics. Nice stemware is beautiful. If you are drinking out of a really attractive glass, this adds greatly to the wine drinking experience. This is because of expectation. If I go to my cupboard and select what I believe to be exactly the right glass for the wine I’m about to open, then this enhances the level of expectation that I bring to the wine drinking experience. And this is something not to be sniffed at; it can powerfully affect the way I perceive the wine.

Sniff my wine...

2007-09-11T14:33:00.000-07:00

Take a good sniff of your wine. We get a lot of information from our noses in tasting. In fact, the nose is involved both in sniffing the wine, and also when the wine is in the mouth, at which point you’ll be receiving information from both your tongue (taste buds) and the olfactory receptors in the back of your nose – a sort of smell known by scientists as retronasal olfaction (normal smell as you sniff is termed orthonasal olfaction).

We have an impoverished language for taste and smells, and this makes the next phase difficult. This is the process of beginning to put words to our experience as we assess the wine. Why are words necessary? Because it’s only as we begin to think of descriptors for our sensory experience that we are able to make sense of it. These words act as pegs on which we hang our impressions, or, to use another metaphor, they are like drawers in a desk in which we file our impressions away. Not only do words enable us to structure our perceptions in such a way that we can write them down, they also focus the tasting event in such a way that we can get more out of the wine.

This all sounds a bit theoretical and complicated. What I’m saying is that developing a language for wine is a vital step in being able to appreciate it. More on this later. For now, let’s stay practical, and think about some of the smells you might experience.

Dr Ann Noble, emeritus professor at the University of California, Davis, is famous for developing a wine aroma wheel. This is a circular dartboard-like chart, broken into rings and segments, which groups all the sorts of aromas you might experience in smelling wines into similar categories. This aroma wheel is a useful tool for developing a vocabulary for describe wines with. It begins with broad category terms, such as ‘fruity’, or ‘earthy’, and then offers a range of more specific descriptors for each category.

But let’s not get too carried away with aroma wheels. While they are very useful for analytical tasting, their very nature carries with it a danger. The problem with these sorts of winetasting approaches is that we become ‘reductionist’, breaking the wine down into its component parts. In this sensory dissection, it is very easy to lose sight of the whole. Wine is more than just a sum of its parts.

Let me try to use a rather stretched metaphor to explain this. Think of one of these reductionist descriptions of a wine as a CV. There’s a world of difference between reading a CV – which gives factually correct and useful information about a person – and meeting the person themselves. If I were to ask you to describe a good friend of yours, you could send me their CV, but this wouldn’t tell me what they are really like. It would be better for me to meet the person, but if I couldn’t do that, then you’d be better off writing a few paragraphs about what the person is like, than jotting down facts about them in CV-like fashion.

When we come to try to write down our impressions of a wine, it’s important not to get too carried away by just listing descriptors. Yes, I’m impressed that you’ve spotted three different fruits, two distinct earthy components, another two different spices and that you’ve nailed the way the tannins are showing. But what does the wine taste like? What is the overall impression? Don’t lose sight of the whole as you look at the bits. That’s what I’m trying to say.

Before we put the wine in our mouths, we’ll dwell a little on the ‘nose’, which is the term used in the trade to describe what the wine smells like. Is it aromatic (particularly smelly) or muted (not showing a great deal)? Is it predominantly showing fruity aromas, or are there what are known as ‘secondary’ aromas, such as earth and spice? Is there any evidence of vanilla or coconut or toast, which could indicate some oak? Is there some greenness (herby or grassy aromas)? Is it sweet or savoury? Is it complex or simple? Is it nice? Is it weird and a bit funky? These are just examples of the sorts of questions you can ask yourself which will help you tie down some of your sensations so that you can put them into words.

The eyes: looking at wine

2007-09-10T12:52:00.000-07:00

It's time to taste. So pour a glass of wine. The colour tells us something – and appearances matter, because expectation does seem to guide our perception to a degree. If we’re expecting a wine to be great, or we’ve spent a lot of money on it, we’re more inclined to hunt for complexity, and give the wine the benefit of the doubt. If it’s a really cheap bottle we’re usually a bit more honest about its shortcomings.

In brief, with white wines, the darker the colour the more likely it is to have some age, or to have been given some oak treatment (such as being fermented in barrel). Richer, fatter whites tend to be more yellow/gold, while brighter, crisper whites tend to be more transparent, or have glints of green to them.

With red wines, as you’d expect, the darker the colour the more intense the flavours generally are. Warmer climate reds tend to be darker; younger reds also tend to be darker. Redder wines tend to be fresher and more acidic; blacker wines tend to be more lush and have lower acid. Oaked wines are generally darker. Bright purple is the sign of a very young wine. These are all generalities, but they can be useful cues if you are tasting blind.

next...take a sniff

Advanced tasting part 1, the eyes

2007-08-28T07:05:00.000-07:00

So you’ve taken your time, thought deeply about the wine you are drinking, and you may also have jotted some of these thoughts down. Are you closer to ‘getting’ or understanding this wine? Perhaps. Now it’s time to look at some slightly more advanced tasting techniques.

Advanced tasting
Tasting begins with the eyes. Colour is important in wine. It sounds silly, but the taste experience we have is quite heavily influenced by visual cues.

What we see prepares us for our taste experience without us realizing it. Even experts can be led astray: in rather naughty experiments, a French psychologist got experts to taste the same wine separated by a couple of weeks.

The first time it was labelled as a humble Vin de Pays, the second as a Grand Cru. The experts were fooled and used much more flattering terms to describe the same wine the second time round.

So as we come to a wine, it’s useful to remember this as we look at the colour in the glass, which is usually best revealed against a white background.

Learning to taste

2007-08-22T05:38:00.000-07:00

It sounds a bit silly instructing people how to drink wine. I’m assuming that most people are familiar with the practice of drinking a liquid. Well, wine tasting is the same, it’s just that to do it well you need to be a bit thoughtful about it.

Pour a small measure, swirl it in the glass, and then take a sniff. Then put some in your mouth, swish it around a bit, and then either spit or swallow. All the time you need to be thinking the following sorts of thoughts:

What does it taste and smell like?
Do I like what it tastes and smells like?
What sorts of components can I taste or smell?
Does it work as a whole?
Is it simple, or complex?
As I think about the taste and smell of the wine, am I getting any fresh nuances, or does the experience change?
What sorts of food might this wine go with?

It’s no good just reading this, because it will rapidly be lost in some dark corner of your memory, never to resurface. To understand what I’m getting at, you need to be reading this glass in hand. If this isn’t appropriate or possible now, then make a mental note to come back to this page on a suitable occasion when you can actually drink.

Have you got a glass in front of you? Now go back to the list of questions above. Think about what you are drinking: it may help to have a notepad to hand to jot down and make sense of your thoughts.

Tasting takes time, especially if you aren’t experienced. I find the analogy of a Turkish carpet shop helpful. For most people, the taste experience is like looking at a rolled up carpet. You can tell it’s a carpet, but not much else about what it’s really like; in a similar vein, to most people a glass of wine is wine, usually either white or red, and dry or sweet. For many others, the taste experience is like leafing through a stack of plied up carpets. Now you can see a bit of the pattern, but not too much.

But if you take the time, and think about what you are dinking in a semi-analytical way, as you gain experience it will be like taking a carpet and unrolling it across the floor: suddenly the entire pattern becomes apparent. But there’s an uncertainty – and imprecision – associated with the senses of taste and smell: so however experienced we are, it’s often as if we are studying the carpet in the dim light of a back street shop in Istanbul with a pushy salesman at our elbow. We just have to live with this imprecision.

Tastes change with time

2007-08-14T14:55:00.000-07:00

It’s also important to bear in mind that our perception of wine itself – how it ‘tastes’ – changes with experience. As you drink wine thoughtfully, you’ll begin to ‘get’ it better. It will say more to you. And your taste preferences will also likely shift. This is worth bearing in mind if you are planning to build up a cellar of bottles: I know chums who have bought enthusiastically the sorts of wines they liked when they were first developing into geeks, only for their preferences to change, leaving them with a cellar of wines in a style they no longer cared for.

Wine is best shared, but as you learn more and become more confident of your own tastes, you’ll begin to be able to appreciate a great bottle even when you drink it on your own. I remember when I first started tasting wine thoughtfully. I needed the second opinions of others to help me decide whether the wine I was drinking was particularly good or not. I guess that’s why critics who operate in absolutes—giving wine scores, for example—are so popular. They reassure people that the expensive bottle of wine that they are drinking really is incredibly good.

Why it's good to learn, and don't be afraid

2007-08-02T16:15:00.000-07:00

First, let’s begin with three key introductory points:

Learning enhances enjoyment.
We learn best by experiencing.
As we learn, our tastes change.

I believe that you’ll have more fun with wine if you know a bit about it, which is the reason I’m writing this course. I’m assuming, though, that you don’t just want knowledge for the sake of it, and you don’t want to have to spend hours reading through a huge doorstop of a textbook. I’m also aware that entering the world of wine for the first time can be daunting. There’s simply too much information to absorb. Relax! The truth is, you are never going to know everything about this subject. Don’t be even the tiniest bit gutted by this revelation; rather, be relieved. The wine world is just so huge and changes so rapidly that it’s no longer possible for any one person to be a real expert on all the world’s wines (although some claim to be; dig deeper and you’ll find areas where their knowledge is superficial, or out of date, or both).

Good news: you can learn a bit at a time, slowly building up your knowledge base. Even better news: you don’t have to learn by reading large books – instead, you can learn on the job.

Last year I had my first experience of flying, and it was great, because as soon as we were up in the air I was given the stick and told what to do. I was flying, and I hadn’t looked at a single book or had any lessons on the ground. I didn’t have much clue about what I was doing, but that’s the way to learn. You move the stick, you feel its effects. Hence the goal of this course is to encourage you to drink wine, and think about it as you drink, picking up the relevant information at the same time. In that way, you’ll really learn, and what you learn will be useful.

First, though, you must leave you fear of getting it wrong behind. So many people come to wine scared stiff of making mistakes or being made to look stupid. I’ll let you in on a secret: almost all wine ‘experts’ are pretending that there are more absolutes and more certainty than there really is. In truth, much of what passes for the body of knowledge in wine is made up, imaginary and passes on from generation to generation without really being challenged. Experts don’t like to admit how incomplete and uncertain their knowledge really is, because there’s a risk that they’d be taken less seriously. It’s really OK to question things, even things said by experts.

Introduction

2007-07-16T11:29:00.000-07:00

I’ll admit it. Wine is complicated. Walk into even a modest-sized supermarket and you’ll likely be faced with a wall of hundreds of different wines. In a situation like this, how is a non-expert supposed to make an informed choice? Easy, you just go for what’s reduced by a couple of quid on the gondola end, or else you choose by label design, or mere guesswork.

But this complexity that can prove so frustrating to consumers is actually part of the appeal of wine – it means there’s always something new to discover. The fact that wines come in an enormous range of different styles, many of which reflect a real sense of place, is what lures so many into the hugely rewarding pursuit of wine geekdom.

So it’s inevitable that there’s a degree of learning associated with exploring the world of wine. The goal of this wine course is to help people who are interested in wine find out more, not so they can become wine bores, but so that they have more understanding, which usually leads to more fun. And I’m going to try to make this an enjoyable journey of discovery: you’ll find the writing style here an accessible one, without the content being dumbed down.

Learning about wine

2007-07-11T06:07:00.000-07:00

A chance to learn about wine

Digestible content
Assuming very little prior knowledge
Acessible but not dumbed down
A fresh approach