The wine world isn’t unique in prizing expertise; Let’s just say that it does so to an exaggerated degree. Ask someone, just offhand, to associate a subject domain with the word connoisseur, and chances are very good that wine would come out on top, or very near the top, of any list of responses.We generally don’t associate connoisseurship with the actual making of things, no matter how much skill may be involved. Connoisseurs of Old Master drawings aren’t expected to be artists themselves, yet their opinions about what are fine and authentic examples of a genre are highly sought after.
The ability to identify and articulate fine shades of likeness and difference that escape the rest of us (because we haven’t expended the thousands of hours required to attain a similar level of discernment) is of the very essence of connoisseurship. That few among us ever achieve this doesn’t mean we’re shut out of the pleasures that flow from the observation, experience and investigation of delightful things.
How much do you really need to know to enjoy wine? I would say just enough to satisfy your present thirst for information about it, whatever that is. If a wine pleases you, try finding the producer’s website and see what you can learn of the philosophy and technique at work. It’s often worthwhile.
Have the idea that it might be interesting to know the names of all ten cru villages of the Beaujolais and sample one wine from each? Do that, and you’ll already be wading into some geekish wine depths. Loiter at Bertrand Celce’s marvelous Wine Terroirs site with its bumpy English. Buy and read a wine book.* Start down any path; follow your nose; go walkabout. Don’t study so much as browse, swirl, sniff and noodle.
And if, at some point you momentarily feel a little overwhelmed with it all, go feast your eyes on some Old Master art and remember that no wine has ever been, or will ever be, a Rembrandt.
-Stephen Meuse
*Adventures on the Wine Route, Kermit Lynch; Vino Italiano, David Lynch; Essential Winetasting, Michael Schuster; Foot Trodden, Woolf & Opaz; A Short History of Wine, Rod Phillips.