To learn about wine, know back story
Drinking is not the only way to learn about wine.
To paraphrase a saying in the wine world, particularly in the segment focused on teaching and learning, “the best way to learn about wine is to drink it.” Recently, at a back porch dinner involving a hot grill and two arms full of wine, a friend who is well-versed in the ways of wine reiterated this saying, as if it were new information. “You know, I think the best way to learn about wine is to drink as much as you can.”
“Yes, and Canada shares a border with the United States,” I teased.
My friend’s concept of drinking to learn is about as basic as it gets — it is the same advice I have offered to countless people. But the more I reflected on his statement, the more I realized that the “best way” to learn about wine also requires context.
Drinking wine is surely the “best way” if it is the only way available — if you’re on a deserted island and a really nice wine delivery gets lowered to you from a helicopter once a week. You’re going to figure out which wines you like better than others and which of them taste best with the food available to you on that island. You’ll also know which of them make you want to dance as if no one’s watching (even if no one possibly could be) and which of them you’ll drink only if you’re sitting next to the island’s freshwater stream, so you can chase every sip with a cupped hand of water.
Similarly, “the best way to know more about movies is to watch as many movies as you can.” Set a film novice down in front of a few Fellini and Bergman movies. The images and sounds of the movies will speak for themselves, and that novice might appreciate or enjoy parts or even all of the movies. But with a little context explaining what the directors were attempting to do in those movies, the novice’s understanding will certainly increase. And with an increased understanding usually comes greater enjoyment.
Drinking is not the only way to learn about wine. We have other sources of information at our service, pretty much around the clock, to help put what we have drunk into context, and all of it contributes to the joy of the lifelong wine journey. Anyone can smell, taste and feel what a wine has to offer, but until that person has a good grip on some of the back story of wine, she will not be able to fully enjoy it, no matter how much she drinks. In my experience, knowledge and enjoyment have risen in direct proportion to one another.
The back story of wine includes how the wine itself is made, how grapegrowing affects the final wine, and how climate and other natural conditions affect grape-growing. We all have our limits on how much we want to know — about anything, let alone wine — and our preferences on how we want to receive the information.
You could spend your whole life never cracking the binding of a wine book and know all you need to know. On the other end of the spectrum, you could devote huge eras of your life memorizing minutiae, either for a professional goal or just because you are the kind of person who wants to retain facts. But you can never truly know wine just by reading about it. If you relied on Cliffs Notes in college, you might opt for wine movies or TV shows instead of books for your nontasting learning. You might prefer to ask questions of the people filling your glasses in restaurants or educators walking you through the regions of the world in a classroom setting, complete with samples.
The point is, no one does it alone or in any one way. Mere facts do not result in the joy of learning and eureka moments — sometimes it’s fun to just have a conversation with a likeminded person about a topic you are both interested in, and isn’t it convenient that said topic happens to be a most efficient social lubricant?
Even in those moments when you don’t consider that you could be learning something about wine, you probably are. And then one day, when you call on that knowledge, it’s there. As if it had somehow sneaked in, undetected, in the middle of the night. Getting to that point is where all the fun is — whether it’s reading about vine-training systems, sitting through classes on the wines of the Rhone Valley or sitting on a porch with friends and just … drinking wine.
The Pour Man