Do you need to know anything about wine?

When I tell people who aren’t in the wine trade that I’m a Junior Sommelier, their initial response tends to be intrigue – how does one become a sommelier, after all? But after a moment, a shadow falls over their faces – a look of embarrassment, or trepidation that they’re about to be found out somehow – and they mumble that they don’t know anything about wine. “Remind me never to buy wine for you then,” is a common follow up once composure has been regained. It’s said in jest but there is a theme, even among my closest friends, and it’s because there is a fear around wine. You could call it mystique. Except that’s not it.

Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of mystique to be basked in when it comes to wine – it’s an art and a science with a gargantuan history and what feels like a billion players in the game; it crosses history and literature, geography, geology, chemistry, even astronomy. It’s also big business. Learning about wine is a never-ending process no matter who you are – industry icons included – and, because wines are continually being made, there can be no end-point to the things one can know on the subject.

And there’s the rub: does knowing about wine make you enjoy it any more? Will a glass taste better to you if I fire off 10 factoids about it as I place it in front of you? Will you savour it more or less than I would if I can trump you on trivia?

Appreciation and enjoyment are two different things. The former may enhance the latter, in some ways, but only if you’re someone who wants to study the topic further, for whatever reason. Wine is designed to be drunk – any winemaker will tell you that. And you are meant to take pleasure in said consumption (hopefully, not to the detriment of anybody else) whether the liquid be young or old, red or white, pink, orange, bubbly, cloudy, cheap or expensive.

I think of it like classical music – another art form often considered impenetrable, elitist, ‘not for me’ territory: there is plenty to read, plenty of technicalities to understand and, my word, enough jargon, but if someone gets goose bumps from listening to a piece of music then what kind of odious killjoy would you have to be to shout them down and claim that that physical reaction didn’t count, is invalid, just because they hadn’t comprehended the sociological implications of the harmonisation in the 57th bar? Enjoyment isn’t a question of validity.

Remember Pretty Woman? At the end of her first opera, Verdi’s La Traviata, Julia Roberts as Vivian has tears in her eyes, is short of breath, and claps as loudly as her white-gloved hands will allow. When the elderly lady next to her asks whether she enjoyed it, she famously replies, “Oh, it was so good I almost peed my pants!” Was that experience somehow not real because of a lack of technical knowledge? No, that would be ABSURD.

Personal reactions to physical stimuli are not up for verification – they are what they are. I’m not about to get into ‘mindfulness’ chat here, nor whether there is some objective standard deciding that Verdi’s music is ‘better’ art than The Beatles’ or vice versa, but if you clamp your hands over your ears at the sound of one and yet relish the other, then regardless of anyone’s judgment on it, that’s simply the reaction you had. It happened. It’s in the past. Analysis won’t alter the sensation you felt, regardless of what it might do to future sensations.

I happen to think that Vivian has good taste: when I hear those magical first moments of La Traviata, I get chills up and down my spine too. But those sensations couldn’t retroactively cease to exist if I get Verdi’s birthday wrong in a test. Similarly, if you like a wine, then nobody’s going to arrest you if you can’t draw out the family tree of the winemaker, or point to the vineyards on a map, or explain how the particular trellising method used on the vines affects the flavour of the grapes. Those things might aid your appreciation of the wine by offering context and a deeper understanding of why it is that way. They might enable you to find other wines that you’d enjoy or provide an indication of whether the price asked for it is fair. They might purely be interesting to you, or one day help in a pub quiz. But if you despised the taste then they’re not going to change that either.

Wine as a field of study is limitless, which makes it wholly vexatious… and utterly irresistible to many (me included). Nobody knows all there is to know. A sommelier’s job is to try and find a wine you’ll like, and one that will complement the food you’re eating, whatever your budget. It’s not an exact science, and you may want to hear those 10 bits of trivia as you sample it, or you may not. The beauty is, it’s entirely up to you. The last thing any wine lover (professional or otherwise) is there to do, is put you off something that could bring you joy.

But when it comes to buying wine for me? Seriously, it’s the thought that counts. So if that thought is wine, I’m already happy.