Wine Nerd

The summer I fell down the rabbit hole and then started this newsletter to talk about my journey.

Once upon a time, I was a moderately educated consumer of wine. I knew the major varietals and a few lesser-known grapes. I had been to a number of wineries, understood the basic process of making wine, and tasted…well, it was a not insignificant amount. I liked wine and drank it frequently. I could order a bottle at a restaurant and be fairly assured that it would be good and pair well with the food. I did things like choose vacation spots based on the fact that they were wine producing regions.

That’s how I ended up in Bordeaux this summer.

I arrived thinking I knew quite a bit about wine. But when I thought about it, I wasn’t sure I had ever had a wine from Bordeaux. We booked a tour of Médoc to help us start getting acquainted with the area. The fact that I previously had no idea there were different regions within Bordeaux and had never heard the terms “Left Bank” and “Right Bank” really should have prepared me to be a complete novice here, but hey, I’ve been to Napa! I know the things! So, armed with the assumption that I had significant wine knowledge, I started tasting at the wineries we visited.

And I hated the wine.

I listened to our guide and the winery workers tell us how wonderful the wine was, and made myself nod and smile as I sipped my way through glass after glass of tart, tannic Bordeaux reds. I wondered what was going wrong here. Had we chosen a bad tour? Were these particular wineries just making terrible wine? Maybe it’s just that I don’t like Merlot, which was the primary grape in all these wines. It’s true that I have never particularly liked Merlot. Regardless, I was irritated that I had been hyped on Bordeaux, and I was pretty much ready to poo-poo the entire region.

It took two more days and a vertical tasting (trying multiple vintages of the same wine) in Saint-Émilion to make me realize that perhaps the problem was not the wine, but rather that I did not actually know all the things. Someone who did know the things might have been able to tell me, yes! The wine is incredibly high acid and high tannins! That is because it is young. It’s not really ready for drinking. This is not the bottle you pop open and share with friends immediately when you get home and want to share stories about your travels in France. This is the bottle you store carefully for a decade or more, letting it become what it is meant to be. And in order to become that wine, it needs to first be this wine, with its high acid and high tannins providing a structure that will endure the years.

All this may seem painfully obvious to some people, but for me it was like a rubber band snapped in my brain. I fell straight down the rabbit hole into a world it was clear that I barely understood - but I wanted to understand. In an instant, the way I approached wine, the way I tasted it, my questions about it all radically changed. My primary question before that moment had always been, “Do I like it?” Now that question seems almost irrelevant when I’m tasting wine; it’s been replaced with other questions. What does it taste like? Why does it taste that way? What was this winemaker trying to create?

And that is how, over the course of a few days, I went from being someone who didn’t care for Merlot, hated sweet wines, and wouldn’t touch a glass of Chardonnay with a ten-foot pole, to this person who can’t wait to order a good vintage of one of those Merlot-heavy Médocs, who savors Sauternes with dessert, and who scans wine lists for Chablis because I’m trying to broaden my exposure to different styles of Chardonnay. It’s also how I became a person who registered for a Level 2 certification course in wine, which begins later this month. I suppose it’s also how I decided to start this newsletter, to have a forum to talk about my passion for wine and how it expands as I learn more and perhaps fall deeper down this hole, along with my accompanying loves for food and travel. This is not how I expected my summer to turn out, but here we are.

Whoever you may be, however much you know or don’t know about wine, I’m glad to have you along on this journey. You just never know where it might take you.