How much should you care about wine?

background: this is the fifth part of a mini-series around the reasons people hate wine. I have set out this premise in my introductory piece “Why do they hate wine so much?”, which also includes links to the rest of the series.

There are many people that don’t object to the idea of wine, but feel it is better suited for the sort of person that takes pleasure in reading instruction manuals. There are just so many rules around it. Rules about choosing it and rules about serving it. Rules about storing it and rules about matching it. There are even rules about drinking the thing for crying out loud — weren’t you under the impression you had mastered drinking around the age of two? And the bar is so high; fail to master the alphabet soup of producer, region, and grape names, and They¹ will laugh at you. If only wine was fun. You know, like beer².

The funny thing is that wine requires none of these things. It has only one purpose: give you joy and pleasure³. As you are the sole judge of how much joy and pleasure something gives you, the only rules that exist are those that you find useful to adopt, and the only things you need to know are the things you find fun getting to learn. There are, roughly, three categories of people who drink wine, based on how they view it. This is how much you should care about it in each.

Wine As An Alcoholic Drink

At its core, and for the vast majority of people who enjoy it, wine is just an alcoholic drink. That includes wine drinkers in countries with a rich wine culture. Your average French wine drinker might have a reasonable awareness of a range of place names due their cultural significance, and a beautiful accent when pronouncing those, but, realistically, he is unlikely to know his Pauillac from his Pomerol, let alone spend enough money to buy either. More importantly, most of the wine that is produced globally is intended to be treated as a simple alcoholic drink, no more complex or demanding than your average lager. The instruction manual is really rather brief: bring glass to mouth; enjoy.

You might have some abstract idea that wine will make you look sophisticated or posh. It won’t, or at least not any more than drinking Peroni or Lipton will⁴. You might be fearing that sophisticated or posh people will look down on you if you don’t know about wine. They won’t; in fact, there is an awful lot of tedious counter-snobbery around wine among privileged people, but very little actual snobbery, either from professionals or from hobbyists. At the same time, I am sure you are nice and polite enough to let those of us that enjoy wine as a hobby to go about our business without any name-calling. More importantly, that you won’t act all uppity on the odd day you spend a bit more than usual, or go to the better restaurant⁵. Wine expertise takes time, and even if its value is debatable, its existence isn’t — and it is usually accompanied with humility.

How much money should you spend and what should you buy? Really, there is no rule whatsoever. Whatever amount you feel comfortable with, and whatever you like. Even the most humble wine today is well-made enough to be pleasant; it might surprise you, but legitimate experts will confirm that⁶. If you are interested in buying expert-approved stuff for some reason, you’re in luck. Almost all newspapers employ people who really know their stuff and really strive to provide good suggestions at the price range of their readership⁷. But honestly, it really doesn’t matter much. If you enjoy wine simply as an alcoholic drink (and there is no good reason why you shouldn’t), the differences are trivial and only make sense to people who pay too much attention to these things anyway⁸. Eat, drink, and be merry. It is just fermented grape juice anyway.

Wine As Premium Grocery

If you are in this category, you probably already spend a bigger chunk of your time and money on food than the average person⁹. You probably enjoy trying new things, but also improving on what you already know. It’s likely you’re at ease with foreign flavours and foreign names — maybe it is even part of the attraction. You want to know more about wine, as you know it’s great with food, but you are somewhat intimidated, or simply bored, by the sheer number of trivia it seems to involve. After all, your local supermarket carries one Époisses but around twenty Merlots¹⁰. That’s before country, region, producer, label, and vintage are taken into account. Knowing the difference between Prosciutto Cotto and Prosciutto Crudo is one thing; knowing how a guy in Barbaresco calls each and every one of his fields starts to be a bit too much.

Actually, very little of this is relevant. The only “training” you need in wine is learning how to really drink it. If you don’t already know, it takes around three minutes to learn and around ten or twenty times to perfect. The biggest challenge is how not to feel silly doing it, and how to resist the urge to gulp down the tasty tasty juice. The reward for this minute investment is a lifetime of enjoying wine much more — and, perhaps surprisingly, maybe even drinking less alcohol¹¹.

If you want some expert advice without having to delve into terminology and minutiae, there are plenty of great (free) sources out there. Two of my favourites are Eric Asimov’s Wine School and Fiona Beckett’s Matching Food and Wine. Eric is the wine critic for the New York Times, where he writes what is possibly the most readable wine column in the world, balancing beautifully the popular with the obscure. The Wine School, however, is aimed more towards the hedonistic side of wine¹², focusing on the big picture and inviting you to experience it without getting bogged down by details. It’s a great school —and there is no studying.

Fiona is probably best known for being the Guardian’s wine writer, a job that probably requires much more patience than it appears¹³, but it’s her own website that is her Magnum Opus. It’s a great resource, listing all the classics but also covering current trends and suggesting new pairings. Best of all, it has no jargon outside the strictly necessary and largely self-explanatory: it is written largely from the perspective of somebody who really appreciates food, with wine playing accompaniment — but getting a couple of really good solos.

Wine As A Hobby

As so often, the Grande Dame of English wine writing has put it best: wine sometimes gets to otherwise sane people. If you are interested in picking up wine as a hobby, I see a lot of fun in your future.

As you know, hobbies are hardly rational pursuits. They involve spending serious amounts of time on overheads that look largely unrelated to the core activity (like travelling to the other side of the country and sleeping in a flea-ridden hostel, to spend 90’ of sort-of seeing what is probably your favourite singer, though you couldn’t really tell because he looks about as big as ant from the seats you could afford and the sound seemed to be coming from a broken ’80s boombox). They require learning an unreasonable amount of trivia to be able to get the maximum out of it (you see, Discovery throwing a tribble in there is a big deal; it could just be an innocent tribute to the original series, or it could be a hint that Lt Tyler is not who he appears to be, or it could even be an entry point for an entire Klingon-Tribble storyline. Such fun!). Bewilderingly, hobbyists appear to be able to persevere with the hobby even when the main event has, by all objective accounts, been a complete disaster (like spending £60 and two hours of your life, under pouring rain, only to see your team getting unceremoniously kicked out of the Champions League. And you know you will read the Sports section the next day to relive it all over again). Mostly, they involve spending an amount of money that can only be described as silly (okay, admittedly on this wine is up there with the best of them). But they’re great! The trick is of course that the hobbyist enjoys all these. The journey is every bit as much part of the fun as the destination.

One of the best parts about wine as a hobby, is that it starts delivering almost immediately¹⁴. Yes, there is a never-ending stream of things to learn, but that’s only because the enjoyment-effort curve is logarithmic. As far as theory is concerned, I learned 90% of what I know about wine from the first ten pages of my first wine book, a slim volume covering the Greek wine scene of the late ‘90s¹⁵. I got another 8% from my first proper reference book¹⁶. Maybe 1% more from the books I’ve read since then, and another 1% from the columns, blog posts, and on-line discussions I follow regularly.

That is not to say that all the other stuff is not fun and interesting; it is to me, that’s why I keep doing it. It’s just that it’s not all that crucial to the teleological purpose of wine: joy and pleasure. It really is much simpler than you might imagine. All you need is one introductory book to provide a framework, and an interest in tasting. Two such books I enjoyed in recent years are Matt Walls’s Drink Me, which fits a remarkable amount of information in 200 pages, and Jancis Robinson’s The 24-Hour Wine Expert, a stylistic beauty whose title is its sole fault¹⁷.

Of course, I haven’t really answered if wine is worth going to all this trouble. It’s ok just drinking the thing, but isn’t wine just too boring to take up as an actual hobby? Well, this has been covered comprehensively yet succinctly by someone far wiser than me, so I’ll leave it at that.

Yeah, yeah, I know, that last part works both ways. Oh, well.

next week: On Tasting Notes!

footnotes

1. Who are these They that do all this stuff? If only I got my hands on them. Well, actually I wouldn’t do much — my idea of athleticism is lifting a heavy glass.

2. But not the beer that your unfriendly neighbourhood hipster drinks. The other one.

3. A bottle of wine on the other hand is an item of some cultural and social significance and, as such, it might have signaling uses for status, wealth, affection, romantic interest etc. The content, however, is there to make you happy.

4. Far be it from me to claim an understanding of the Byzantine intricacy of the rules that define what is posh in the UK. My impression after a decade of close observation though, is that it isn’t what you buy, but how much and where you pay for it. It goes a little bit of something like this [in order of ascending social importance]:

Paying between 50–100% of RRP in a chain store or online: Pleb
Paying 125% of RRP in a John Lewis (physical store only please): Rest of UK Posh
As above, in an independent outlet in Zone 1: London Posh
Paying 150% of RRP, but sending someone else to fetch it: Foreign Posh
Promising the Embassy will pay, but in the end never doing so: Noble (Foreign)
Promising to pay, but in the end never doing so: Noble (UK)
Getting it for free but having to tweet about it: Sublebrity
Getting it for free, forever: Royal

5. Even more so if you’re lucky enough to have so much money that expensive bottles and posh restaurants are a default part of your lifestyle.

6. Though I am still not entirely convinced that the scores in that particular column are not meant to be tongue-in-cheek.

7. In the UK especially, things are particularly good. Wine and sports writing are just about the only domains where the UK press beats its US counterpart.

8. A word of caution on marketing people though. They might or might not have expertise in wine, but they do have expertise in parting you from your money. False flattery is usually the quickest way to achieve this aim.

9. And out of respect for you and the English language I will not call you a “foodie”.

10. Also, if you’re a pre-millenial you seem to have vague memories of Merlot being bad? Like, wine people are (all together now) “not drinking any fucking Merlot”?

11. Okay, so don’t hold me on that latter promise. But if you drink wine properly, at least you will take more time doing it. Surely that’s a good thing. I think.

12. Id est, the best side.

13. Because every single time she dares recommend a label that breaks the Croesus ceiling of £4.99, there is a mob in the Comments section screaming blue murder. Every.Single.Time. I have this image of Fiona as a WWI trooper trapped in a machine gun-guarded £4.99 trench. Every time she tries to raise her head above…RAT-A-TAT-TAT. Presumably the ideal wine column of that crowd consists of the words “Tesco Australian Shiraz” written again and again every week, Shining-style.

14. Around the middle of the second glass to be precise.

15. If you are not familiar with that particular scene, in that point in time, let’s just say that it was a very slim volume.

16. The World Atlas Of Wine. Naturally.

17. Though I can imagine why the Penguin marketing people wouldn’t be ecstatic with the rather more honest “The Twelve Week Introduction to Wine”.