I CAME TO WINE THROUGH HEDONISM AND BY CHANCE
On one of my first dates, years ago, my poor partner introduced me to the art of cooking. I was accustomed to a steady diet of spagbol out of a package, only hot water was added and you would obtain a rich sauce that would feed a medium poor student like me for days. Easy to freeze in batches and defrost, a package would render up to 8 portions. Cooking as chore.
The new concept introduced to me was that cooking could actually be fun. My partner wanted to make a tomato sauce, and I was thoroughly surprised, when, to that means, he bought 2 kilos of tomatoes, the “real” stuff, I mean. “But you can never make a rich sauce out of them!” I declared, thinking of the thick, instant brew that had served me so satisfactorily over the years. He only smirked. The rollercoaster ride had just started.
The next loop came in the form of yet another novelty: wine at the dinner table. I stem from a background where drinking anything, even water, at dinner was considered “unhealthy”…We headed for a wine merchant, as buying wine in supermarkets was another path my partner did not regularly tread, unlike me.
At that time we were living in Berlin and wine merchants still existed in those days, but a whole new breed of amateur wine merchants crept up and would happily settle for cheap and therefore unusual locations. Most of these “merchants” would normally hold a day job, as the revenue from what could only be perceived as a mere hobby, often only covered the rent, which explained for the unusual and rather brief opening hours of their parallel business. Or a combination of different tasks would marry a love for wine with a more lucrative enterprise (“Autos &” Weine - car hire and wines, to name but one example, did not strike me immediately as logical, although you need cars to get wine to customers, etc, but I digress). In this case our wine merchant was located in a basement. Inside you could only see the shoes of walkers-by through the small windows. It was here that I heard the word “Cabernet Sauvignon” for the first time. I do not recall the wine’s provenance, but I remember vividly how impressed I was by its taste, especially with a palate previously accustomed to beer and the occasional Beaujolais Primeur. I became infatuated.
This situation meant that I frequented the “merchant” very regularly, and was half heartedly introduced to a small group of people that would meet in the basement and talk “wine”. Although I didn’t have a clue about wine, I quickly became suspicious about their true motives, apart from having a drink after work. I was to find out soon.
The “merchant” organised a dinner at a nearby restaurant, and we were invited to join. I was excited at first, but the dinner itself almost turned me away from wine for good. While the starter arrived everything was still fine, but the more we progressed through the evening, the more “serious” the conversation became, evolving about wine, vintages, and the differences between them. It became more and more clear that we were total novices to this kind of gatherings and a mild scorn was bestowed upon us for the rest of the evening. As a result I was never to walk down the stairs to the basement again. The subject of wine seemed hermetically closed, the threshold to pleasure steep. Almost as steep as the learning curve I went through in the following 10 years.
What I, and probably many others who start to develop a passion for wine, had experienced could be summarised as the “snob appeal” of wine, when it turns into something more than a beverage made by the action of fermenting grape juice. Of course, the final result is much more than the sum of the parts, and wine’s greatest virtue when compared to almost all other alcoholic drinks. It is a complex subject and knowledge of wine is regarded highly, and can add social prestige to a person. It can also be a source of endless misunderstanding and snobbery. The wine dinner had made one thing perfectly clear to me: I needed to know everything about wine, to prevent a similar situation from happening again. Ironically, the more I knew, the less I was certain.