There’s Drinking Your Wine, and then There’s Drinking Your Wine

I took a Music & Society class in university as an elective. As part of the introduction to that course, the professor asked us what we thought the difference between listening and listening.

You listen to music in your car as a mood setter, or while you’re studying to keep your mind stimulated, or while you’re at a party to keep moods up and silences less awkward.

But sometimes, you pull out the liner notes (does anyone still use those) or Google the lyrics to your favourite song to understand it. You learn what the artist was going through while he or she wrote it. You think about the time when that song was released: where you were living, what was going on in the world.

You don’t need to do this to enjoy music of course. But it will fully enrich your experience of the song, and you will probably appreciate it more.

Wine is exactly the same.

Johnathan Brown Photography

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The trouble is, there seems to be a desire on the part of the wine world to make wine more accessible. In order to do that, many seem to believe you have to dismantle definitions and make the experience so broad that you’re unable to define anything. Wine is just wine — right?

Postmodernism and wine may seem entirely unrelated but in fact, their marriage has exposed itself pretty blatantly, probably even to you, if you’ve ever gone to a winery.

Probably your wine server behind the bar told you at some point when you said that your Cabernet Sauvignon tasted sweet, she said, “Sure! I can see that. There are no wrong answers, right?”

And while she’s entirely correct that we all have remarkably unique sensory experiences when it comes to wine (particularly its aromas), she is wrong in saying that there are no wrong answers. Maybe your wine is in fact, quite dry, and your perception of it is being derived from some other quality about it. It could be that the oak that it was aged in has chemical components in its makeup which is reacting with the wine, causing you to think (consciously or not) of sweet-tasting foods, like toffee or chocolate — but it is not, in fact, sweet. Maybe it smells to you like ribena, that sugary, blackcurrant drink your grandmother loved when you were a child, and so that association lingers.

That doesn’t change the fact that your perception is, indeed, incorrect. And that is entirely all right. We seem to have forgotten that making mistakes and learning are the integral part of any experience, and enjoying your wine is no exception.

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But consumers expect it now. This notion of “whatever I like is correct” has been coupled with the maddening expression, “the customer is always right,” and so even the people that work with the wine itself are told they are wrong.

I’ll relate an anecdotal story. I was working at a winery as a server when a customer asked me for our driest white wine. I served it to her. She informed me that it was not at all dry. What was I to say? Other than telling her she was wrong — which is the death of customer service.

She asked for another selection, and pointed to the one she wanted on the menu. I poured her some to try. She tasted it, pointed to the glass, and said to me condescendingly, “Now, see dear, that is a dry wine.” In fact, the first wine I’d poured for her was 3g/L of residual sugar, while the second was 20g/L of residual sugar. The second was nearly nine times sweeter than the first!

In retrospect, what she probably wanted was a crisp wine. The second wine had more acidity than the first, which not only makes it very fresh tasting, it can often conceal sugar. But now, she not only has the wrong concept of what she’s drinking, she probably also thinks the staff at the winery she’d visited are not well trained on their products.

This whole situation could have been avoided if it were for an informed, educated public. That doesn’t mean you have to be a sommelier to enjoy, appreciate, and understand wine. It just means that we have to approach wine as we do food: we have a defined vocabulary when it comes to nearly anything else we put in our mouths. It’s time we do that for wine as well.

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