Wilder: Beginner's (good) luck

So many people seem apologetic about being novice wine drinkers. They may feel they need to be drinking the "right" wines, or that they need to learn which vintages were good and which were not so good. Or, they feel inferior for not knowing which varietals make up a Cotes du Rhone blend.

Instead of worrying, new wine drinkers should enjoy one of the best periods of their relationships with wine.

There are, of course, different levels of which wine, like anything else, can be enjoyed. The more you learn, the deeper your enjoyment may become.

However, there is something to be said about that phase of wine drinking where you don't know what the heck is in your glass, but you know that it tastes so good that your eyes may halfway close when you smell it and then widen when you taste it. You're not trying to pick out obscure fruits to compare the wine to, nor are you concerned about whether it was aged in American or French oak (or did it just go through malolactic fermentation in the tank?). You still have the ability to be amazed by even the most ordinary wines.

That is an ability that not many experts can claim.

I first drank wine on a regular basis while studying abroad in England. I would just pick up a bottle of whatever had an interesting label at the Safeway supermarket or Oddbins (a chain of wine stores in the UK). I didn't know the different regions and I didn't really know one grape from another. I just knew that I liked wine. I couldn't tell you the name of a single bottle I drank that semester!

When I first became interested in really learning more about wine, the names of some of the first wines that I went crazy over would elicit a smirk from many of my colleagues in the wine business. And they are not bottles I would ever buy now. But I am sure that I enjoyed them just as much as I enjoy more complex wines now. Seasoned wine drinkers often like to forget what they enjoyed when they were starting out, but I think it's a good way to remind ourselves of the core aspects of wine that we first fell in love with.

All these thoughts came to me at work while I was trying some wine that my coworkers and I found incredibly boring. If we have to taste too many such wines in a workday, it can almost get depressing. We moan, asking why producers don’t try to do something different and interesting, producing wine with some subtlety and character to it.

But then I thought, ‘Wait, at one point, this wine would have really excited me.’ And I felt a little pang for those days when the most modest juice gave such pleasure; when every bottle was a new, adventurous foray deeper into what wine was.

So, here’s my message to all the wine newbies: Don't worry. If you keep drinking wine, you will eventually hunger for those wines that we veterans wish we saw more of, and once you start paying attention, the knowledge takes care of itself.

As humans, we are always in search of the new, of a higher form of interest. The further you progress in your wine expertise, the less you’ll encounter wines that have the ability to make you take pause and say, "Wow. What is this?"

The innocence of palate that the novice is lucky enough to still possess makes this sense of wonder a common occurrence. It's truly a gift — enjoy it while you've got it!


Questions? Comments? Contact Courtney at wilderonwine@gmail.com