How Not to Taste Wine.

And now for something completely different…

The way people describe wine has always been just a tad on the screamingly hilarious side to me.

The whole process of it tends to be funny. OK, so picture it:-

The house sommelier at Hetero. Converts ‘R Us (AKA your local steakhouse) brings your date for the evening his glass of chardonnay, which comes in a charming shade of asparagus pee yellow. Your date pulls the old sip, swish and swill trick, whilst heavily nose breathing and inhaling an aroma that’s strangely akin to hairspray.

“Mmm. Yes, that’s satisfactory, thank you,” he says to the waiter who pours him his glass and leaves the bottle.

Your date turns to you and says,

“It has highlights of slightly bitter almond with an underlying chocolate base, and an almost overwhelmingly subtle glow of blackcurrant.”

Translation: It tastes rather like someone has mixed half a cup of Ribena in with the barrel then strained the whole thing through a sock worn for a week by a pale, sweaty Vegan during an Alabama heat wave.

“Really?,” you say.

“Oh yes, you see the wine isn’t overly textured but it has a distinct undertone of berry mixed with…”

He pauses to waft the wine towards his nose, “a fine background of white truffle and pistachio.”

Translation: It smells like an old sock too but it isn’t as bad as when you actually drink it.

It is at this point that you realise your date wouldn’t know white truffle from a bar of soap even if it was grated onto his plate, and that he’s nuttier than the wine is.

“Would you like a sip?” he enquires.

“No, thank you. I’m not that big on wine,” you say, praying he won’t keep talking.

Translation: Somebody bring me a Mai Tai! And please, $Deity, if there’s any justice in the world let lightning strike this guy before we get to the dessert wine. It has about as much chance of happening as I do of enjoying a wine I’m now compelled to regard as pure ambrosia even though it still tastes like it was made by people stomping their stinky feet all over it.

How do I know this? Take my word for it. I grew up in a house with a wine cellar, which was basically a mini bat cave. We had a trapdoor in the hallway. It was really cool. I’ve sipped and spat with some serious pros – and I don’t just mean the hookers I occasionally hung out with when I was at boarding school (long story).

But no, the professionals don’t talk about each and every wine like it’s a thesis in a bottle – distilled essence of Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrization of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifold. Oy vey.

Only the Grand Poobahs of the world get a kick out of making wine sound like an impenetrable jazz riff played by a drummer named Spike on the day he forgot to take his medication, took some Crystal Meth and decided to use the Zither because it’s a seriously underutilised instrument. Too bad he’d never studied it.

For wine makers, for wine enthusiasts, for the sommeliers who do know their ass from their elbow wine is to be savoured but not, contrary to a vocal minority, actually orgasmed over – at least not right there at the dinner table.

Tasting wine is a slow art at the best of times, I grant you. But you don’t need to talk about it like it’s a gift sent straight to your mouth by Dionysus himself. Shut up already. We know it’s good, you don’t need to hump my leg to tell me you’re horny. It’ll do just fine to say “that’s a nice drop,” instead.