Two favorite wine writers recently teased at the distinction between sensual wine discovery and accumulated wine knowledge. Their words fanned a flame first kindled by my earliest wine crush back in the mid eighties. Not the press and juice kind of crush. I mean the ten-year-old-kiddie-kind-of-crush; when just the thought of that special “someone” lightens heads, warms chests, shortens breaths, stirs loins, and releases imaginations in delightful ways that never seemed plausible before. This style of sensual and intellectual pleasure requires absolutely no training yet is recognizable by anyone.  So guess what? Connecting with wine at the intensity levels of a 4th grade schoolyard crush requires as little training and knowledge.

Wine Knowledge

How is it that knowledge is not a prerequisite to understanding wine?  Organizing and participating in decades of regular, blind, peer group tastings makes it obvious to me that delicious wine can be picked out of blind lineups by beginner and expert wine tasters alike. Inexperienced palates are perfectly capable of discriminating between wines of the same grape, region, and vintage if they are poured side by side. New wine tasters are at ease identifying favorite and least favorite wines using unformed personal language to describe sensory detection to themselves, but are intimidated to verbalize their descriptions to others with more wine knowledge. Actually, their preferences are as interesting as any other taster’s choice; pure and unaffected by the presumptions of technical wine knowledge. Their interpretations are unadorned with catch phrases and buzzwords used, as required, by tasters with deeper wine education and knowledge.

Wine Expert in a Week? Really?

Committing time and energy to advanced wine education almost always relies on a sequence of loving wine before knowing wine. All the knowledge filling studious winos’ ammunition bunkers only comes after being smitten by a crush on wine.  And, the raw sensory and intellectual stimulus telling someone to prefer one wine over another is not something you learn in continuing wine education programs.

An excerpt from “The Taste of Wine: The Art and Science of Wine Appreciation” by Peynaud and Blouin further illustrates this point:

The transmission of a stimulus to the senses via our nervous system, and the response that our brain relays to our consciousness or motor centers, together create a continuous network of information and interpretation which is the very token of our existence: I sense therefore I am; our consciousness functions precisely because of the host of impressions which surround it.  It is also the means by which we understand our environment.  We live because of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Chauchard reminds us of the Latin adage: “What intelligence we have has its source in our senses”

In one of his recent Forbes.com columns, Jeff Lefevre calls it wisdom and differentiates that from wine knowledge by neatly saying, “…placing wine within a bigger context of the human experience making the enjoyment of wine not something that is reliant upon deep knowledge to appreciate, but rather as a beverage that can complement a life well lived.”  

Wine Crush

In a category of its own, “love” has its certain place alongside the many more structured elements defining a life well lived. Similarly, falling in love with wine is as central and separate a proposition to sensory identification and accumulated knowledge in a well lived life of wine. Addressing a group of wine writers this summer, Eric Asimov asserted “you need to own wine and drink bottles“ with meals to discover your love for wine. Simply tasting and educating yourself about it won’t do it.

The bottle of 1985 Lynches Bages that I first tasted in a blind tasting was a completely different wine experience than drinking the same wine with my wife over a relaxed anniversary dinner at Mirabelle, a once (have not been there since 1990, but it still operates) romantic temple of serious french cuisine in St. James, Long Island. The Lynches Bages was more layered, delicate, nuanced, and complex with excellent food and company.  The experience also cemented my developing fascination for the ways wine feeds human connection.  The links between my love for my dinner partner and crush on the wine naturally weaved themselves into a blanket of sensory delight.

Stephanie Ortigue, assistant professor of psychology and adjunct assistant professor of neurology at Syracuse University, published an important study called “The Neuroimaging of Love,” which touches on the sensory intake that leads to love creation in intellectual areas of the brain and also the heart:

…the complex concept of love is formed by both bottom-up and top-down processes from the brain to the heart and vice versa. For instance, activation in some parts of the brain can generate stimulations to the heart, butterflies in the stomach. Some symptoms we sometimes feel as a manifestation of the heart may sometimes be coming from the brain.

The study establishes that it only takes 1/5th of a second to fall in love when two potential mates establish sensory exchange. Various regions of the brain begin processing past experiences alongside immediate sensory intake to either create butterflies in the stomach or an empty feeling in less than a second. Ortigue asserts her study “…reinforces the fact that love is more than a basic emotion. Love also involves cognition.”

Is this combination of sensory and intellectual processing the same with wine?  If it sounds like it is, then isn’t it entirely possible to fall in love with the right wine and have that crush launch a lifetime of wine pursuit in the very same way two loving mates organize a life of personal commitment to one another?

Beauty and Crush

Commitment is serious business and crushes evaporate as fast as they start.  As we mature in life it’s easier to see that nuance, character, presence, challenge, and intellectual stimulation are as, if not more, important to a lifetime of love than surface level physical beauty.  For this reason, my wine cellar has a certain style of wine that I bought in the 80′s and early 90′s that I won’t buy anymore.  Fifteen years into my life of wine enjoyment I found wines what teased my intellect, challenged my palate, and invigorated my food.  That style combination stole my mind and heart.  And it wasn’t the big, fat, fruit forward, sex bomb style of wine I was previously consumed with.  I guess it’s never too late to grow up.

In a recent open letter of advice to “wine newbies”, the Wine Spectator’s Matt Kramer drew a distinction between wines that can provide “life satisfaction” and those that simply offer “pleasure”.  In it, he leaned on E. E. Cummings who raised the bar by writing, “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question,” suggesting the real trick to discovering a lifetime of wine enjoyment is to find your own “beautiful questions.” Kramer went on to explain that a life of wine satisfaction:

“…depends upon recognizing what you’re really seeking… I was in Napa Valley and was tasting a Cabernet that is, by most estimations, a lovely wine. And it was a lovely wine: dense, fragrant, irresistibly supple and oh-so pleasing. A lot of people like it…Yet I’ve never cared overly for the wine… Here we come to the “beautiful question” part. Whenever you taste a wine that goes beyond the ordinary (dull wines allow only the dullest demands), you’ve got to go beyond the usual techno-talk about tannins or acidity or oakiness. If those are your “more beautiful questions” I promise you that you’ll never really “get into” wine.

So what was my problem with this perfectly fine Napa Cabernet? It had no “edge.” Really good and, especially, great wines, for me anyway, have an “edge.” It’s a certain something that not only fascinates, but challenges. This Napa Cabernet offered no challenge. It only offered—dare I say it?—pleasure.

It’s okay, just like in life, to fall in love with the most beautiful and alluring surface characteristics that produce pleasurable gulps of wine.  It proves we don’t require knowledge for wine to produce its visceral swoons of delight and human connection.  At some point, though, finding lasting beauty requires, as Matt Kramer suggests, asking the “more beautiful questions” that eventually define lifetimes of intellectual and emotional reward through wine.  And from there, the knowledge will easily flow.

Earlier this summer (winter in South Africa’s Swartland wine growing subregion) I had the chance to mix it up with the drivers of the Swartland Revolution; the winemakers.  Ever since I began to comprehend the unusually high authenticity and quality levels of the upstart region’s wines, I started sharing information about individual pieces of the story you can revisit in the following WineZag posts:

Swartland Perspective By David Sadie

Peeking in on Winemakers in Swartland, South Africa

Connecting South African Wine, Culture, & Topography

Sadie Family Vineyards Top South Africa Wine Charts   

Today, Palate Press published my most comprehensive look at the drivers and background of the Cape’s Swartland winemaking hotbed.   I urge you to read it if you are a fan of beautiful wines with impeccable textures and freshness, or if you are interested in getting in early on what will certainly be a well known global winemaking center for top quality Chenin Blanc and Grenache before too long.  I also strongly recommend, if you can swing it, a visit to Swartland on 11/11/11 when the second annual celebration of the Swartland Revolution takes place. Almost 80% of the event tickets are already sold, so don’t hesitate.   If you attend this righteously earned celebration highlighting everything about the region, be sure to look for me.  I am trying to work out logistics for my visit now.

If you can’t make it to South Africa in November and want to know more about Swartland, or if you want some Revolutionary background before your visit, check out my latest post at Palate Press by clicking the link or image that follows:

How the Swartland Crew is Bringing Up South African Wine

I’ll admit to spending more time than it’s probably worth thinking about nuances in wine and food culture.  For example, I ponder how obvious it is that most of us Americans act with righteous self confidence buying, ordering, and cooking the foodstuffs and ingredients we prefer. We’ll ask questions freely when shopping or ordering to make sure a dish or ingredient lines up with our palates’ preferences. Conversely, I am consumed by “knowledge gap” insecurities that loom large around restaurant wine lists and retail shelves. We tend to get embarrassed that we don’t know enough and fear asking the questions that might reveal these insufficiencies.

People I eat with know I think about wine a lot and regularly delegate the decision about the wine they will drink with dinner to me. How come this happens with wine but not food? Dinner companions don’t funnel all their food menus my way. They are confident enough to pick dishes and ask questions that help fill in blanks about preparation. Ordering food in a restaurant is as easy as brushing your teeth, but juxtaposed with the trauma of ordering wine it turns into one bookend of a cultural culinary divide.

We eat multiple times a day but wine is a minuscule piece of our diet. According to the Wine Market Council, the average American drank a bit over 11 litres of wine during the last twelve months.  Compare that to the idea of “wine as food”, a steady piece of the European diet where there is an absence of anxiety ordering a glass of Cotes du Rhone, Muscadet, or Bandol with lunch or dinner.  Continental Europeans, Brits, and Aussies more than double per capita US consumption.  This idea of “wine as food” stems way back, something I was reminded of when I read this at CliffordAWright.com (a great resource, by the way, for Mediterranean food and wine culture):

Languedoc, the region to the west of Provence, shared many alimentary parallels with Provence, especially the prevalence of bread and wine in the diet. In his study of the peasants of Languedoc during the last third of the fifteenth century, the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie compared the diet of the farmworkers of Narbonne to the bourgeoisie of Beziers, using household accounts. The bourgeois family of Beziers, the Rocolles, consisted of a widow, her two daughters, and a female servant. The four of them consumed about two thousand liters of wine a year. Again, as in Provence, we see that wine was food. The Narbonne farmworkers drank even more, about 650 liters of red wine a year per person. The farm workers were not demanding, insisting only on money in the pocket, white bread on the table, and a glass of good wine.

That was 60X more wine than the average current day US consumer, and 180X the average US per person 1970 consumption rate. The frequency of consumption in the European diet demanded an uncomplicated approach to wine.  Is there really any question whether the low rates of consumption and immersion are top differentiators between food confidence and wine phobia in the US?

Jonathon Alsop

I still wonder about how this US culinary divide perpetuates itself.  One interesting question to ponder is how it came to be that restaurants distribute only one wine list per table.  This point only surfaced last night sharing a few bottles of old wines with Jonathon Alsop, founder of the Boston Wine School.  Jonathon is a pretty grounded guy, carrying tons of wine knowledge that he shares in a remarkably matter of fact, uncomplicated fashion.  I never fail to spend even five minutes with Jonathon and not realize an hour later that I learned something new without ever having noticed being taught.  I shared my interest in this concept of “food as wine” with Jonathan and will attempt to paraphrase his reaction as best as I can:

Think about this, why do restaurants continue to present only one wine list per table?  Do they think only one person is capable of ordering wine?  Is there one person who has more knowledge than anyone else at that table?  Is there a ranking of knowledge that the restaurant expects all their guests to participate in at each table?  Is everyone to pass the wine list to the oldest, wisest, whitest, richest, man to order their wine for them?  It’s insanity!”

It’s a guess, but I presume this tradition started when great restaurants with classic cellars used hard cover bound books to showcase the hundreds of pages of inventory.  You can still find something like this at Tour D’Argent, for example, where a small stand is placed next to your table to rest the twenty pound tome on.  But with practically all of today’s restaurants producing a few pages of wine inventory on cheap printed paper, why not make sure everyone at the table can look at wine menus?  Isn’t this akin to giving only the smartest math student in the class a math textbook because he knows more about math than the other students, and everyone else just gets history and literature textbooks without any hope of becoming more comfortable with mathematics?

The earliest evidence of wine making and drinking goes back to Neolithic times.  National Geographic recalls Patrick McGovern’s research on ancient wine and throws a jab at the people and forces that complicated wine matters over the last 2,500 years:

Wine snobs might shudder at the thought, but the first wine-tasting may have occurred when Paleolithic humans slurped the juice of naturally fermented wild grapes from animal-skin pouches or crude wooden bowls.  The idea of winemaking may have occurred to our alert and resourceful ancestors when they observed birds gorging themselves silly on fermented fruit and decided to see what the buzz was all about.

Serving wine and food at Per Se in New York City is anything but Neolithic and a far cry from animal skin wine vessels or crudely carved table adornments.  Phoebe Damrosch was working her way through graduate school waiting tables at this pinnacle of New York eating establishments.  She was forced to confront her total lack of wine knowledge by deferring to the sommelier.  She eventually took some lessons from him which lead to a more useful romantic involvement than deep wine savvy.  She simply cemented her crutch and reliance on him.  Phoebe had no problem having her new beau constantly visiting her tables and stepping in with the right wine talk at just the right moment.  She left the restaurant after 18 months, was still totally insecure about her wine knowledge, yet she became the go to person among her girlfriends for ordering wine in restaurants.  After all, she must know something having worked at Per Se and dated the sommelier.  Phoebe dreaded these moments and froze in front of wine lists and wine waiters, scared to reveal the gaps in her knowledge even though she had more exposure to wine than the average person.  She wrote about how she overcame her own wine list phobia in a Food & Wine piece and shared this liberating vignette of a dinner out with friends:

“Do you like red wines or white wines?” He asked me slowly, with raised eyebrows and wide eyes, as if I were very young or dim-witted. And then it hit me. I had just been pegged as a Chardonnay-with-ice drinker. This would not do.

“Give me a minute,” I said, grabbing the list. I had ordered smoked fish and my friend a salad with vinaigrette, which meant the ideal pairing would be a high-acid, low-oak white. Scanning the whites, I happened to recognize a few of the producers—Marcel Deiss, Albert Boxler—and settled on J.J. Prüm Kabinett Riesling. When I got to the reds, one jumped out at me: the Movia Veliko Rosso, a biodynamic Slovenian wine that’s a blend of Merlot, Pinot Nero and Cabernet Sauvignon. We served Movia’s Ribolla at Per Se.

I ordered the Riesling and got the standard “excellent choice,” but when I ordered the Movia, the sommelier hesitated. “Have you had the Movia before?” he asked.

Having closely observed sommeliers in their natural habitat, I recognized his behavior. This unusual wine was the sommelier’s little pet. He wanted it to go to a good home and be appropriately adored.

When the Movia was poured, and I swirled and stuck my nose halfway into the glass, the sommelier asked, “Are you in the business?”

I guess there’s hope for all of us if we challenge ourselves and stir up enough courage to experience the liberating confidence from ordering wine you think you might like to drink.