If you have ever stood in a wine shop with your eyes glazed over at the sight of 8,000 labels or stared hopelessly at a wine list, you know that there are a lot of names and words. Listening to wine lovers talk can be a little bit like listening to a foreign language. In fact, you can learn about wine in much the same way that you learned your native language: you start in the middle, any middle at all. You master what’s in front of you and then you move on to something else. Don’t worry, lawyers learn the law this way and the process is much less fun for them than it will be for you.
If you want to conduct your own course in wine, try this. Pick one particular kind of wine, California old-vines Zinfandel, for instance, or Napa Valley Chardonnay and start tasting. Try to always have at least two different wines in glasses in front of you. Recruit your friends. (It’s remarkably easy to get people together for this kind of homework.) Notice the small differences between one winemaker’s version and another. Read up on your specialty, ask advice, use the Internet. In a month or two, you will know as much about your new friend as most experienced wine-tasters do. Then move on. Remember that the cast of characters changes every year. Each new harvest or vintage has its own characteristics. That means that we all start out even every year so you can be on an equal footing with the masters. And just when you start to get smug, everything changes and you have to start again.
Travel, as you know is broadening. Wine travel can be down right intoxicating. There are companies offering tours of major wine regions, but I suggest a different tack.
The best way to learn about a region’s wine is to go there, plop yourself down and cook and eat for a week or two.
One school which offers courses is the incredible The Awaiting Table in Apulia, but there is scarcely a wine region in the world without one. You can also find wine tastings to attend, many of them decidedly informal and not at all intimidating. A lot of wine tastings these days remind you of the county fair. For a fee that can range from ten to a hundred dollars, you get a glass and enter the midway, where a few dozen wine distributors stand in their booths barking at the crowd of liquor store owners, writers, collectors, and enthusiastic amateurs.
On the tables in front of the vendors are bottles of wine and pre-printed sheaves of tasting notes (in case you want someone else to tell you what you tasted). Everybody’s willing to pour you a glass, and everybody wants to talk. Like the county fair, it’s fun. There’s the energy of people primed to sell, there’s the excitement of people out to taste 10 or 15 wines, and of course, there’s all that wine. The only problem is that you can’t really taste the wine. Imagine going to a concert that consisted of 20 bands all playing simultaneously. What could you hear? You might, in desperation, pick out an oboe here and a pedal steel there, but you certainly wouldn’t be hearing music the way it was intended to be heard. There are other ways. Some few restaurants will make for you what they call a degustation dinner. Each course is designed to go with a particular wine. Slowly, slowly, wine and food, each wine the way it was intended to be presented.
Further reading:
•The Wine Bible by Karen MacNeill is a great reference book
•The Vintner’s Art by Hugh Johnson and James Halliday is the best guide to winemaking
