Reading between the Wines, With a New Preface. Terry Theise
head all you want. Scritch away—what a good boy! You go back to complaining to your friend about how no matter how much you study wine, it doesn't seem to get any easier…
Wine is like a shy dog. Lunge for it and it backs away. Just sit still and it draws nearer. Wine is less about what you can grasp than about how you can receive. You grasp it more firmly if you grab it less tightly. It will resist you if you insist on subduing it. You can accumulate only so much knowledge in quantifiable bits, but you accumulate understanding if you learn to relax. Wine doesn't like being dominated. It prefers being loved and wondered about. It will do anything for you if you're curious and grateful.
I learned this the hard way, and so will you, if you don't already know it. I made quite an ass of myself strutting with my sexy-pants wine knowledge, and I wasted far too much time arguing with other wine geeks to prove my alpha cred. Learn from my sad past! The first hint I can offer is to try to distinguish between true complexity and mere complicatedness. The latter is usually frustrating, but the former is usually wonderful. You have to direct a beam of mind to pick a way through complicatedness. You set your jaw and grind your teeth until you've prevailed. You've nailed the flavors, quantified and named every nuance, and decided precisely how much you liked the wine on whatever scale they told you to use. But complexity asks the opposite. It is an immediate sense of something you can't know, something you won't be able to isolate or explain. Complexity is quiet; complicatedness is noisy. With complexity you have to relax your mind and see what happens. I can't promise this mental state is available to most of us, unless you are the Dalai Lama, until you reach a certain…ahem…age. It has been years since I worked at wine. I work with it, of course, and it's fun work, but I'm sure that after a certain point, the more we work at our pleasures (we say we “pursue” our pleasures, tellingly), the more they'll back away from us. Show me someone who “plays hard” and I'll show you someone who has forgotten how to play at all.
Of course, it is play, for many of us, to deconstruct and describe all of a wine's elements. But to the extent that they can be detected, what we're describing is intricacy, not (necessarily) complexity. A wine is complex when it suggests something that can't be seen or even known, but it is definitely, and hauntingly there. A complex wine seems to channel the very complexity of living. A complicated wine is just a mosaic we piece together with our senses.
Here's what I think you're after: a point of utter receptivity in which you're seeing only the wine instead of seeing yourself seeing the wine. Oh, it does sound very Zen. But I'm persuaded it's the way to pleasure and sanity. If you don't see past your own discrete palate, you can't get past What am I getting from the wine? It starts and stops with “I.” What am I getting, what do I think, how many points will I give it—all I can say is, if you drink wine this way, I sure hope you don't make love this way, because your partner's bored.
I know how it is; you're trying to get a handle on wine, and so you grasp for a handhold. If you're drinking a wine you like and someone tells you it was fermented with cultured yeast, the lightbulb goes on over your head: Aha! Cultured yeast = wine I like, thus I must posit the theorem that better wines are made from cultured yeast. Innocent enough. The problem arises when you cling to your belief despite any new evidence. It's tempting to add knowledge nuggets to your basket, and discouraging to chuck them away. But you have to; wine will force you to. It will lie in wait the minute you get certain about something, and trip you up in front of your friends, your sommelier, and the date you hoped to score with. Not that this has ever happened to me personally…
It's actually best when you make a mistake. And the easiest mistake is thinking you've got it aced, because now you're not asking questions anymore, you're waiting for each wine to confirm your conclusions. Yet wine will contrive to confuse your assumptions in order to force you to still your ego and listen. If you hold wine too tightly, it can't dance with you. Hold it just right and it will glide over the floor with you as if you were a single body.
Remember, your palate isn't a thing you possess; it is part of you. You don't taste with this thing; you taste with your whole self. Some years ago there was a story about a so-called Robotongue the Japanese had developed, a machine that could be programmed to identify wines based on predictable markers (acidity, sweetness, and tannin, among others) and that was able to “perform” with uncanny accuracy. So the actual physiochemical reception of flavor can be bettered by a machine, which can register and catalog what it “tastes.” But does it actually taste? We are entire human beings tasting wine; we bring our memories and longings and anticipations to every glass.
Each of us relates to our palates based on our temperament: a geek will have a geeky relationship with his palate, a right brainer will have an elliptical and inferential relationship with his palate, and a linear, cataloguing person will organize his palate like a well-oiled machine. No single system is “best”; it's important to have the relationship that comes naturally. If you try to force it, you'll be doomed to frustration.
These relationships change over time. In a wine lover's early days, he's usually (and usefully) an obsessive note-taker. Notes help hone his powers of concentration and help him remember what he has tasted. My closets are laden with dusty old notebooks so full of entirely tedious tasting notes that my wife's running out of space for her shoes. She's right, I probably ought to chuck “em. I hardly write notes anymore unless the wine is seriously moving. And I'm confident I can deconstruct a wine's flavor if I have to. In the early days I wasn't, none of us is, but like every muscle, this one got stronger the more I used it.
The greatest wines are the ones you can't write notes about because you're weeping, overcome with their loveliness. This happened to me in a restaurant in Paris one evening; the waiter must have thought my wife had just told me she didn't love me anymore and was absconding with the plumber. Nah, it was just the damned Jurançon. This, like all wine experiences, will jump out of the darkness at you, but it's okay, it's part of the spell. Don't fear the weeper.
There's no need to posture with your palate. Unless you publish tasting notes for a living, no one knows what you think or feel about the wines you drink except you. So don't play games. Don't grope for extravagant language, don't confuse what you admire or find interesting with what you spontaneously like, and please, if the wine smells like roses, it doesn't make you a better taster if you find some esoteric flower like buddleia to compare it to. Trust any impulse that emerges spontaneously, as these are most authentically you. Some wines intrigue with their mosaiclike arrangement of nuances, and it's fun to root around and glean the intricacy of the design. Other wines seem to be pure image. If you're at all in the synesthesia continuum you'll find color images come to you immediately. I definitely receive some wines as “green” or “orange” or “purple,” and while some of this is reassuringly literal—purple as aromas of irises, wisteria, lavender, violets, for example—other times I have no idea why a wine seems “silvery” or why it might play in a “major” key. I just know the image makes sense even if I can't make sense of it. Your notes should help you remember not only how the wine tasted, but what it was like to drink it.
And what of the notorious practice of blind tasting? What, indeed.
For some people it is the sine qua non of wine knowledge. Many of the exams for various wine titles (Master of Wine, famously) require proficiency at blind tasting. Why, I don't know. Once a guy can bench-press three hundred pounds, he needs a way to employ that strength; otherwise, he can show off his irrelevant prowess only on the bench. Blind tasting as such is hardly a skill that will be put to use in a wine career, unless you plan to make a living playing parlor games with wine. Importer and author Kermit Lynch said it best: “Blind tastings are to wine what strip poker is to love.”
Let's come back to the musical instrument metaphor. The palate is an instrument played by the taster. As you learn your instrument, you practice exercises and repetitions until you are skilled. Then it comes naturally. You don't get on a stage and play your exercises in front of an audience, and blind tasting is the equivalent of playing scales: valuable, necessary, but not to be confused with playing music or tasting wine.
When Keith Jarrett recorded The Melody at Night, with You, he was recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome. He couldn't play concerts;