The two wine questions I get asked most are “What is your favorite wine?” and some version of “Where do I start?”
The former question comes from people well into their wine journey, and considering I don’t have any kids, asking me to name my favorite wine is like asking me to name my favorite Rush or Todd Rundgren song. Don’t make me choose! The latter question comes from people who are curious about wine and so overwhelmed by it they don’t know where to begin, or how to proceed once they’ve begun. They expect to hear that there is some formula wine folks know and follow. I guess you could say there is, but it’s never the same for two people.
Years ago, when I worked at a magazine, I learned about the concept of multiple points of entry for longer feature stories. It’s a design thing. Instead of offering you only a giant gray block of text, a designer makes sure that a page has several other elements on it. A title in an interesting font. A “deck” — a phrase that sums up the story — below it. A photograph with a caption under it. A little box with some statistics or other at-a-glance information in it.
The idea was that your eye could go to any of it, and it would be fine. Everything would send you on your way: the title, the deck, the photo, the caption, the information box, the text itself. Like watching the world’s most ambitious documentary film project ever, “The Up Series” (which, in eight films separated by seven years each, has followed the lives of a handful of British people from childhood to middle age), you could enter anywhere and very soon be up to speed.
So when people ask what the best way to start learning about wine is, it’s kind of like asking how to read a magazine article — or at least how to read the kind I just described. The answer always is: “You start at the spot that draws you in.”
In wine, this could mean walking the aisles of a store and picking out a bottle that fits your budget. Any bottle, any style of wine. Gotta start somewhere. It could also mean reading an article about syrah, and then tracking down a bottle of it. Or taking a wine tasting class. You could also drink a dozen bottles without reading or uttering a single word about them. Eventually, if you are truly interested in the topic, it will all dovetail together.
Do all of this and don’t think about the order in which you’re doing it. Don’t feel like you need to read all about Australian shiraz before you host a tasting of it. Sometimes it’s better to go in the opposite direction: taste knowing nothing and then go back and read up on what you just tasted. And then taste the same stuff again. Or read everything you can find about the Edna Valley of California before you visit the place to taste through its chardonnays. Or don’t read a single word, and just go there and taste first. Or taste through four different Chianti Classicos in your living room, and then go have a conversation about Chianti with a wine store clerk.
All too often — and here is the key to all of this — people think that knowledge must precede enjoyment. Knowledge can increase enjoyment, sure, but it is not a prerequisite in wine appreciation. There are pursuits that require the acquisition of knowledge and skill in a very specific, linear order. Airline pilot, for one. Medical doctor. With wine, there’s no threshold of knowledge you need to cross before you can begin your practice. You don’t have to know everything, and you don’t even have to know anything. It seems like an obvious point, but there’s something about wine that makes people think they cannot enjoy it unless they know what they are enjoying. Yet most of us make authoritative judgments about movies all the time without ever having taken a single film class.
While wine learning is linear and circular in some ways, you could never accurately depict it with a straight line or even a circle. A more accurate depiction would look more like a Jackson Pollock drip painting. All of those squiggles and blobs add up to your final, symmetrical composition. But unlike a painting, which is complete and dry at some point, the quest for wine knowledge has no end, and never dries up.
The only nonnegotiable in your wine journey: To really learn about wine, you have to get a lot of it into your mouth. Another popular question from novices is: “What should I read to start learning about wine?” And the best answer to that is: “The label of the bottle you’re drinking.” Taste and spit if you must. Or open a bottle with dinner and drink every drop thoughtfully, making note of how it improves or drags down the food you’re eating. Make your wine education as academic as you like, but make sure that it always involves more bottles than pages.
For reasons you can imagine, a meteorologist can sit in a beach chair and look out at a sunset and see things you can’t. His technical knowledge gives him the upper hand when it comes to appreciating exactly what is causing all of those blazing colors and 3-D textures. But you can still enjoy the beauty of it the moment you see it. It’s just a sunset. And it’s just wine, which exists solely for your pleasure. Unless you are studying wine for work purposes, and need to have flash cards taped all over your home just to maintain your sanity, make sure to keep your learning fun, and organic, and as unchained, frenetic and wildly beautiful as a Pollock.
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