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All that shiraz
Can't tell the difference between a woody Cabernet and a flabby Merlot? Join the club.
By Adam Sternbergh
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The first rule of wine anxiety is don't talk about wine anxiety. People who are intimidated by wine selection -- and I count myself among them -- typically suffer in silence. Think about it: you rarely see anyone in a swish restaurant handing the wine list back to the waiter saying "Beats me!"
Instead, oenophobes (those for whom the breadth of wine-related information is frightening beyond rationality) skim the wine list nervously, stalling for time. And who can blame them? There are dozens, even hundreds, of choices on a typical wine list. Its pages are rife with exotic-sounding jargon -- words such as serine, shiraz and syrah, which, incidentally, all mean exactly the same thing.
It's difficult to pinpoint that exact moment at which we are crippled by wine anxiety -- when we transform from carefree sprites who think nothing of showing up at a dinner party with a two-litre screw-top bottle to suddenly feeling that the wrong choice of wine will trigger a cascade of condescending snickers and our eventual social ruin. Perhaps this happens at roughly the same time that the dinner parties we attend no longer centre around pizza.
In any case, wine is something that we, as adults, are obliged to know about. But no one tells us how, or where, we're supposed to learn. All of a sudden, the waiter's handing you a cork that you're expected to wave under your nose in some sad pantomime of pretend expertise before declating "Yes, yes, that's fine," hoping the whole table doesn't burst out laughing.
But I've discovered that wine anxiety, like many phobias, can be conquered. All you need is 80 percent know-how and 20 percent bravado -- or vice versa. And remember, ordering wine is like hunting for an apartment or searching for a spouse: the process can be daunting, but there's comfort in knowing you only need to find one really good one.
I sincerely wish I knew more about wine. I also wish I knew more about classical music, bespoke tailoring and fixing the engine of my own car. I have, however, resigned myself to the fact that I will never know very much about any of these things. Still, I did ask my brother, a devoted oenophile (he has his own wine cellar), to help me out. So one year for Christmas he bought me The World Atlas of Wine by Hugh Johnson. Yet, flipping through its glossy pages, I became more intimidated, not less.
Wine knowledge is famously abstruse and forbidding. The wine aroma wheel, for example, not only contains familiar words like "fruity" and "oak," but also such terms as "rubbery," "burnt toast" and "wet dog." True, few things would tickle me more than going into a restaurant and asking the sommelier "Do you have anything in a diesel sauerkraut?" But these are just the scents. You also need to learn flavours! Regions! Vintages! Varietals! No wonder so many people point to the second-cheapest wine on the list and say "Gimme a bottle of that."
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