The Making of a Wine Lover

I remember the night I tasted my first good wine. My future husband Andrew and I had just graduated from university and were enjoying our “wealth” relative to our student days. We dined out a lot and our favorite place was a small Italian restaurant around the corner from our apartment.

The first time we went there, the owner, a tall, burly man with fierce dark eyes, asked us if we’d like to try the brunello. We thought at first it was a regional dish, but it turned out to be a red wine from central Italy. We were relieved not to have to tackle the wine list: neither of us knew much more about wine than which fluffy animals on the label we liked best.

When the owner opened the bottle tableside, the pop of the cork seemed to pierce something inside me and relieve a little pressure. He poured the brunello, a rich robe of mahogany, into two tumblers with none of the pretentious sniffing and approval ceremony. “Chimó!” he said, and bustled off.

As I raised the glass to my lips, I stopped. The aroma of the wine rushed out to meet me and all the smells that I had ever known fell away. I didn’t know how to describe it, but I knew how it made me feel.

I moistened my lips with the wine and drank it slowly, letting it coat my tongue and slide from one side of my mouth to the other. The brunello trickled down my throat and out along a thousand fault lines through my body, dissolving them.

My second glass tasted like a sigh at the end of a long day: a gathering in, and a letting go. I felt the fingers of alcoholic warmth relax the muscles at the back of my jaw and curl under my ears. The wine flushed warmth up into my cheeks, down through my shoulders and across my thighs. My mind was as calm as a black ocean. The wine gently stirred the silt of memories on the bottom, helping me recall childhood moments of wordless abandon.   

Andrew’s eyes had softened and we talked with the wonder of unexpected abundance about our lives together, our career goals, our hope for a family. The pasta seemed unnecessary next to this wonderful wine. To paraphrase Robert Frost, our conversation glided on its own melting, as we moved from delight to wisdom. By the time we were on our second bottle, I started to feel so flammable that I wondered if I were violating the building’s fire code.

When we finally got up to leave, we realized that the restaurant was empty. We said good night to the owner and he slapped Andrew on the back as if he were choking on a bread stick. That was the first of many happy evenings there and we drank that brunello for a year. A pilot light had been ignited inside me; over time it would grow into the flames of full-blown passion.

Today, I joke that I started drinking seriously when I met Andrew. (Andrew is good-natured about this because there’s still some upside to having a wine writer for a wife.) However, my earliest experiences with wine should have driven me into the frothy embrace of beer forever. Growing up on the East Coast in the 1970s and 1980s, I’d be given one undrinkable glass of wine to toast the New Year, and another at Easter—usually from the same box. During the rest of the year, my Scottish family knocked back beer and whisky.

My teen drinking began and ended at the same high school dance, behind the utility shed where all the illicit activities took place: I chugged half a bottle of syrupy sparkling wine. Not only did it taste wretched, but it also made me spend the next day in the vise grip of a searing, sugar-withdrawal headache. After this, there were family celebrations. At a cousin’s wedding, I drank their homemade wine: Tanya and Ronny's True Love Forever Chablis. I hoped the marriage would age better than the wine.

In the years that have passed since we discovered that brunello, the taste of wine has helped me store many memories. I remember one particular bottle because of the weather. Andrew and I were snug inside a rented cabin as rain battered the roof, dripped down the chimney and hissed on the fire. Thunder rolled overhead as the windows rattled. The wind whipped across the lake in angry gusts, as if hurling itself at our cabin. The smoky aromas of that Rhône Valley syrah wrapped around my head and filled my body. The storm outside made the calm pleasure of the wine deeper, more sensual. As long as my glass was full, I wanted it to rage for years. Even when I’m drinking alone, my mind will still clink with past toasts, glasses drained, fond farewells. Some wines will always taste like a lost argument or a long embrace. I think many of us have a secret cellar in our minds where we collect our empty bottles filled with memories.

As I developed a taste for wine, I wanted to find words to describe the way it lightened and lifted me. I had long admired the way Colette, Dorothy Parker and M.F.K. Fisher wrote about food and drink. They fused mind and body with their narratives, and I reread my favorite passages until I was drunk on their prose.

While Andrew and I were still in the bloom of childless romance, we decided to take an evening course: wine appreciation. Drinking at night was something we could handle after a long day’s work, and perhaps I’d even learn how to describe those feelings. That course opened our eyes to the diversity of wine: all the wine-producing countries, the sub regions, appellations, quality designations and the thousands of wineries—some of which are centuries old. There are hundreds of grapes, blends, styles and winemaking methods to learn about, not to mention the chemistry of aging wine, the art of matching it with food and the history of its role in civilization. In fact, at first our eyes were wide open in fear—the range of the subject seemed so daunting. How would we ever master even a small part of it?

Our teacher—a jocular fellow with the relaxed air of a successful nightclub owner who still goes on stage just for fun—reassured us. He guided us gently through the material, so that we weren’t too intimidated. His frank admission of his own inability to detect certain aromas put us at ease. He even broke out some champagne and potato chips, an inspired combination, to demonstrate that wine isn’t just for fancy food and special occasions.                                    

The class was a mixed bunch: the guy who had read the entire Oxford Companion to Wine (and who lived for the moment when the instructor asked for the definition of fermentation); the quiet forty-something woman who hoped that there was more to life than chardonnay; the savvy young waiter who wanted to earn bigger tips by selling better wines; and an older couple who planned to buy a vineyard in their retirement.

My favorite part was the wine tasting itself. I kept a hopeful eye on the stash of wine bottles at the front of the room until our teacher opened them. Never had I encountered a subject that so thoroughly engaged both the mind and the senses. I realized that wine is as cerebral as it is sensual. In fact, drinking wine is a full-brain exercise—until it becomes a foggy-brained exercise. Eighty percent of wine’s character is in its aroma; and smell is the only one of our senses that connects directly to the brain areas responsible for memory and emotion.

Wine descriptions, however, often have a faint scent of condescension over a robust layer of barnyard by-product. The adjectives seem to be the fruit of over-ripe imaginations: when I hear “muscular,” “tight” or “rakish,” it’s hard to tell whether the critic is talking about wine or Brad Pitt. “Legendary concentration” is what I need to figure out my income tax return and “perfectly integrated” is how I’d describe my son’s school. But “opulent” is indeed a legitimate wine descriptor—it often refers to the price.

Most of us in the class were initially at a loss for words until the quiet woman tentatively suggested that one wine reminded her of the Dallas airport. We chuckled; but surprisingly, our teacher was delighted. He explained that we were tasting riesling, which when well-aged tends to have the faint scent of petrol or jet fuel.

Now we were on a roll. Another woman said the chardonnay reminded her of her son’s gerbil cage; the oak-aged wine evoked the wood shavings. The young waiter likened a gewürztraminer to his grandmother’s Christmas ham. That puzzled us until our instructor asked how the ham was prepared. Turned out, it was made with lots of spices, just like the classic gewürztraminer aromas.

That introductory course was enough for Andrew, but I wanted to learn more. I completed the four-level sommelier certificate, which gave me a basic understanding of the industry. I was learning to love wine not only hedonistically, but also intelligently, as a product of the vine grower's science and the vintner’s art. A wine lover would no more order a “glass of wine” in a restaurant than a gourmet would request a “plate of food.” Most of us want to know what ingredients are in the dish and how it’s prepared. Similarly, the differences between wines made from grapes grown in neighboring vineyards are as great as the difference between a rare steak and one that’s well done.

Despite this formal training, my real wine education has largely been through the people I’ve met and the places I’ve been. Most of the time, I learn something interesting not because I ask an intrepid question, but because I stumble on something accidentally. I’d love to say that I was born with an uncanny palate, but I was just born thirsty.

I was still insecure about wine even after I had finished the course, especially at my first formal wine tasting. As our guide droned on about ripeness units and rainfall levels, I nervously knocked back all the wine in front of me—I needed a couple of stiff ones just to be there. Then I looked around and realized that all the others had only sipped their first wine and they were all busy writing notes. To avoid the disapproving stares, I put my head down and started scribbling too—my grocery list.

I can laugh now, but I’ll never forget that heat of embarrassment at still not knowing much about the nuances of wine. Fortunately, learning about wine today is a lot easier than it was thirty years ago. Magazines such as the Wine Spectator didn't exist back then and neither did the consumer-friendly version of the Internet—which, more than any other tool, has exponentially increased my knowledge of wine. Not only can you find the most obscure wines and producers online, but you can also connect with other people via web sites, chat rooms, blogs and e-mail. I find these connections essential when I’m writing about a topic on which there isn’t yet much published, or about a region that’s too far away to visit before my story is due.

When M.F.K. Fisher was asked why she wrote about food rather than about more “serious” subjects, she replied that she was really writing about love and our hunger for it. When bread is broken and wine is drunk, there is a communion of more than our bodies. Writing about wine has allowed me to extend my hedonism and give it a sharper, more satisfying edge. Language and wine are two of the most pleasing things we consume: they animate us and become part of us. The English language is as wide and deep and layered as wine is. When I write about wine, I feel expansive, as though I’m standing in a field of words and I can stoop to pluck any of them. The world is configured exactly to my needs.

But I have to confess, much as I’m drawn to its nuances, I wouldn't be writing about wine if it weren’t for the buzz. I love the way a glass of wine makes me feel—invigorated and animated, released from my natural shyness. After a couple of glasses, I’m mellow, soothed, contemplative. Perhaps because I trained as a dancer, I cannot forget the body. My mind has always been an extension of every muscle, every bone, every breath. It’s only when I let myself down into my body that I can write about it.  

I'm sure other wine writers feel the same way; and yet when I read about wine, I often get the odd impression that it has no alcohol in it. Perhaps this unnecessary seriousness about wine is a hangover from Prohibition; or maybe it’s because we think that the body can’t be part of anything intellectual.

Yet I'm not blind to the damage that excessive drinking can cause: my parents separated when I was three because my father was an alcoholic. My Celtic relatives, with their dark sense of humor, find it amusing that I choose to write about this subject. I do too. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm drawn to wine partly because of that dangerous side. At dinner parties, I drink faster than almost anyone else, including the men. (I know this because I watch everyone else’s glasses a little too closely.) I need a drink to get through the arsenic hours between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. If I ever gave in completely to those impulses, I’d throw away everything I’ve worked for. My subject is addictive. However, I believe I’m less likely to abuse something I know well and love.

The thought of making my part-time passion into a full-time career didn’t occur to me until I hadn’t slept soundly for about three weeks. In November 1998, shortly after our son Rian was born, I was on maternity leave from my job as a “web evangelist” for a California-based computer company. One day, shopping at the local supermarket, I picked up the store’s food magazine. It was beautifully illustrated and packed with recipes, but not a word about pairing them with wine. Desperate to reactivate my brain, I rushed home to call the editor with my idea for a story about where shoppers could find wine matching information on the Internet. I figured that I knew just enough about both areas to say something. (But only in a sleep-deprived state could you believe that jumping from a career in high tech marketing to writing about wine made any sort of sense.)

The editor asked if I had been published before, and I said yes, thinking of my high school newspaper and praying she wouldn’t ask me to send samples. Luckily, she didn’t. Instead, she gave me that assignment and several others to follow. I felt that a bolt had slid back and the door to my future life had opened. Six months later, when my maternity leave was over, I decided not to go back. I had already given my heart, mind and liver to wine.

The desire to write about wine was irresistible; I couldn’t believe that people would actually pay me to drink. Still, the field turned out to be hard to break into. That first assignment had been misleadingly easy to come by; rejection was far more often my fate. The established writers in the business had been penning their columns for twenty years or more, and they weren’t about to step aside for a newcomer. At one point, I called one of the most senior columnists for advice. He told me not to expect to earn a living from wine writing and to treat it as a hobby career to pursue on weekends. So I started selling stories about wine to small, local publications.
    
After three years of this, wanting more independence and a more direct connection with readers who shared my passion for wine, I took the plunge and launched my own web site, www.nataliemaclean.com, and an e-newsletter. The comments and questions I got back from readers added to my own curiosity. I started to wonder about new issues: for instance, why are Burgundy’s wines so sought after, and so costly? What makes them different from wines made in newer regions, such as California? Is it just a matter of climate and soil or does the vintner play a larger role? I had no idea.

Then there were all the other aspects of wine to consider, beyond just the making of it. What about buying it, tasting it and matching it with food? I wanted to find out why we accord wine such high status, more than any other drink we consume. We rate it, we age it and we often remember it years after we drink it. Why? This book is the result of my journeys through the wine world—from vineyard to wine shop, from restaurant to dining room—in search of the stories to help answer some of those questions.
    
Writing this book has deepened my belief that wine both brings us together and brings us closer to ourselves. In drinking it, we find camaraderie and consolation. Comfort me with cabernet.    
 

- Natalie MacLean

natdecants@nataliemaclean.com

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