be contrived to bring you to a kind of peepshow of flavor, if that's your idea of a good time. True wine takes its legitimate place as part of your entire, true being. You are complete and human. You have not been reduced to a consumer unit whose behavior can be anticipated.
I didn't know any of this in 1978 when I started. No one explained it. I was shocked later on when I saw that wine could be otherwise, could merely entertain with its noise and phony seductiveness. Wine, it seemed, could be just another thing, product, disconnected from any reason a human being should care about it. My spirit felt starved when the caring wasn't there. I found the any-old-soil, technical nirvana New World ideal to be vacuous and lamentable. And yes—of course—there's no end of schlock from the Old World, but the Old World is hospitable to meaningful wine in a way the New World hasn't yet attained. A couple hundred years from now, it'll be a different story. Or so I hope.
In the pages to come I will challenge many common fallacies about wine, and I will show how wine can enrich your life by describing how it enriched mine. This isn't any sort of challenge to you, innocent reader. I've always cringed at the self-help “wisdom”-dispensing swamis for the rebuke underlying their message: You live these pathetic, suffocating lives because you're not as smart as I am, but I'll consent to get you smart for $18.95 and a donation to my ashram in Boca Raton, Florida. One of the great things about wine is that it will meet you wherever you manage to be.
I want to give you choices, and you can swallow what works for you and spit out the rest. I will make the case that wine belongs in a life of the soul, in an erotic life (in the Greek sense of eros as the force of life), but to encounter it there you have to be unsentimental and willing to demand authenticity from the wine and from yourself.
This doesn't guarantee exalted experience. It guarantees real experience. It guarantees that you won't have to curtail any aspect of your humanity to have a relationship with wine.
When my son was old enough to wonder what Daddy did, I had a hard time feeling satisfied with the answer that Daddy sold wine. I tried expanding it by explaining that Daddy sold wine he himself tasted and chose, but even then it seemed pretty mingy. Daddy sells stuff. Doesn't matter how adorable it is: Pop's a salesman.
How then does one define the larger questions? Is it even possible? It seems as if it must be, since I feel so stratified all the time. One layer is the garden-variety mercantile wine guy dealing with all the “issues” surrounding the zany categories with which I work. Everyone in the wine biz knows those issues: education, marketing, perseverance, dog-and-pony shows, “working the press.” I try to be good at those things, or as good as my fallibilities allow. The other (perhaps deeper) layer is less concerned with the job and more concerned with the work. I have a voice in my head that always says, “Yes, and?” So if I ask myself what is the net effect of what I do, this voice propels me through ever more big-picture considerations.
I sell wine. Yes, and? I help ensure the prosperity of good artisanal winegrowers. Yes , and ? I contribute to the continuing existence of cultures containing small artisanal winegrowers. Yes ,and? To remain sustainable, I need to tell people why this is a good thing. Yes , and ? In telling people why this is a good thing, I have to detail the reasons, which compels thoughts of soil, of family (the two are often combined into the word terroir), of a person's proper relationship with nature and to his human history. In short, I have to assert values. Yes, and? In delineating these values, I find I can't escape matters of soul. Ye s , a n d? If soul enters the equation, you can't select what it inhabits, because soul inhabits either all of it or none of it. So what I finally end up doing is placing wine in the context of a life of the soul. Yes , and ? So now I am defending and delineating the idea of living with conscience, gratitude, eros, humor, all the things soul imbues us with. And further, I'm placing wine squarely within this matrix and insisting that we don't have enough time to settle for less. Yes , and ? And we seem to need certain things: to know where we are. To be connected to something outside ourselves. To be connected to something inside ourselves. And the only wines that actually speak to our whole lives are authentic wines, which are themselves both located and connected. Confected wines are not designed for human beings; they are designed for “consumers.” Which do you want to be?
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BEFRIENDING YOUR PALATE
First you master your instrument. Then you forget all that shit and just play. —Charlie Parker, when asked how one becomes a great jazz musician
You're at home watching TV in the evening. Let's say you're watching a DVD of something you really like. Unless you have some monstrous home-theater system, you're looking at a relatively small screen across the room. You can't help but see all your stuff strewn about. Usually you have a light or two on. You hear ambient noises.
Now pretend you're at the movies. The lights go down, and you're sitting in a dark room with a bright screen encompassing your whole field of vision. Even with others around you, there is a strange, almost trance-like intimacy between these huge, bright images and your emotions. All great directors are acquainted with this spell; it's the essence of cinema. And it arouses a deep, almost precognitive attention from us.
We often think of palate as our physical taste receptor, the mouth itself, and, more saliently, the sense of smell. But a palate is more than what you taste; it is your relationship with what you taste. Palate isn't passive; it is kinetic.
Palate is really two things. First, it is the quality of attention you pay to the signals your taste receptors are sending. Second, it is memory, which arises from experience. A “good palate” is able to summon the cinema type of attention. An ordinary palate—more properly called an indifferent palate—is watching TV with the lights on.
Most of us are born with roughly the same discrete physical sensitivities to taste. (But there are said to be so-called supertasters who may have a larger number of taste buds than the rest of us do, in which case, lucky them; they're getting bombarded with signals.) What varies is our sensitivity to this…sensitivity. It seems to be an irreducible aspect of temperament, how the gods arranged the goodies in the box called you.
I remember when I was a wine fledgling being complimented on my palate by people more experienced than I was. It wasn't as gratifying as it may seem. I had no idea what a good palate was supposed to entail. I guess it was good that I had one. Then what?
Later, when I taught wine classes for beginners, I did a little exercise at the beginning, putting four different brands of tortilla chips on numbered plates, and asking the eager wine students (who must have been wondering when their refund checks would be mailed) to taste all four and write down which one they liked best and why. A lively discussion never failed to ensue: “Number three has the deepest corn flavor” or “Number one wasn't salty enough” or “The taste of number four lasts the longest time.” When it was all over I'd say, “Okay, guys, now you know everything you need in order to become good wine tasters.” Ah, excuse me? But these students tasted variations on a narrow theme; they paid attention because they had to, and they put their impressions into words. They were tasters, and the medium didn't matter.
Yet the approach path to wine seems so fraught (compared to tortilla chips!); there are so damnably many of them, they change all the time, and just when you think you're getting a handle on the whole unruly mess you read about yet another obscure place entering the world wine market with labels that look like anagrams without enough vowels. It's dispiriting; I feel your pain. But you're completely wrong.
When I started my wine life I made the
