After almost twenty years working in a winery, it is inevitable that friends repeat the phrase “choose the wine, you know how …” every time we’re coming together to eat, have dinner or celebrate something. Just as inevitable is my answer, always the same: if you had a cook friend, would you ask him to choose your food for you?
In recent years, probably caused by the need to improve the general perception of the quality of the wines of our regions, we have witnessed the appearance of a series of misuses, which, as collateral damage, jeopardize true enjoyment and hinder the generalization of wine as a fun and easy-to-understand element. We can call it “snobbery” or simply “nonsense”, as my grandmother would say.
A test that I also usually do with people who tell me “I don’t know about wine”, almost with shame, as if it were an obligation to understand everything, as if it were necessary to understand wine to enjoy it, is to face them with two glasses of two different wines and give them a choice.
Everyone always chooses the one they like the most, how could it be otherwise. The same happens with yogurts, with bread, with cookies or with trousers.
It is there when those of us who can have some more knowledge about production, varieties, tasting and many other things, we must make that first approach easy, without having a glass of wine becoming an intellectual and sensory effort, and that, to avoid that effort, we end up simply asking for “a beer”
The first time in my life that I tasted a carbonic maceration wine, I had no idea what this method of production consisted of, but I did know that I liked it.
It should be the most normal thing to drink a Bobal Blanco and enjoy its acidity, its aroma of white flowers and at the same time of ripe fruit, without having any idea that it is a white wine from a variety that is known for producing strong reds of intense colours and with its own character.
We all have to change the paradigm and launch ourselves to taste the wine without any kind of self-imposed pressure, and if we like it, say so, and if not, say it too.
Maybe that way, we will start drinking wines that we like, instead of drinking wines that a friend who says he understands about wines has recommended us, a critic or a specialized journalist and whom we dare not contradict.
Perhaps that way we will be able to enjoy a Nebla Verdejo Rosé with a screw closure, without our heads exploding trying to remember if the Verdejo grape is a grape for whites or if the screw closure is better or worse than a cork stopper or a synthetic one….
But we will talk about closures another day.
Let’s forget the complexes and enjoy wine in moderation, it is much simpler than someone would have made us believe. Cheers!
Article written by:
José María Busquets
Purchasing and Operations Director of Bodegas Vicente Gandia
