Is it true that the more knowledge and understanding about wine we have the more enjoyment we will get from it?
How much does one actually need to know about something that offers sensual pleasure or spiritual sustenance? I mostly mean about wine, of course, but perhaps French sauces, or sculpture, or mountainous landscapes, or… Or music, which is always my own niggling example when I wonder along these lines.
I once had a beloved and, as I thought, particularly intelligent and soulful dog. Sometimes if I talked to her, she would look at me intently and (I imagined) reachingly, as though she were on the point of fully comprehending human communication and ready for a conversation. But then I would realize that the dark opacity of her eyes expressed a limit, an ultimate chasm, whatever else positive there might be in her being and in our relationship. That’s more or less how I feel about music. I can and do listen to it with great satisfaction; just occasionally I feel that I’m approaching some essence of the piece. But then I’m convicted once again by the cutting remark (the exact phrasing is not agreed upon) made by conductor Thomas Beecham: “The English,” he said, “don’t really like music—but they love the sound it makes.”
If I feel more humorous about my dark opacity, I remember another quotation, from American writer George Ade, about the music teacher who “came twice a week to bridge the awful gap between Dorothy and Chopin.” Probably, as with Dorothy (who might well have adored Chopin, and have suffered agonies at the gap), my inherent musicality is fundamentally limited, and I have long resigned myself to merely loving the sound music makes, the experience augmented by repetition and by a few lessons from, as it were, Dorothy’s teacher.
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How much the worse off am I for that? I can’t really know what I’m missing, of course, but it must involve more than, while including, technical knowledge. On the other hand, I do know, from the academic field of literature in which I was trained, that deep immersion in literary theory can even destroy for some people the pleasure they once had in reading; I’ve seen that happen, and seen many spend their reading time on abstruse and horribly clever explanations of how literary texts work, to the extent that there is little leisure, even if a residual interest survives, for reading novels, essays, plays, and poems. Dorothy might well have been put off Chopin forever by the relentless assiduity of her music teacher.
Misdirected knowledge
As for wine, in the tasting group I belong to there was once a member who had some renown as a winemaker and was certainly a more than proficient taster. The trouble was that he seemed to invoke his skill and knowledge to find faults in wines, along with minutiae of winemaking techniques. He’d presumably gone into the wine business because he liked the stuff, but now all his education and experience seemed to lead him away from pleasure. He moved winemaking positions restlessly until he went into winery administration and is doing an excellent job there. I think, though, that he just didn’t “get” wine.
Ideally, increased knowledge and, it is to be hoped, understanding should lead not to this but to greater and more intelligent pleasure—and usually does. Whether it always leads in any field to a better fundamental apprehension of the subject (whatever that means—the equivalent of musicality) is less certain.
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So, what about people who are not really interested in wine but love the way it tastes? And I’m not really talking about the superficial engagement expressed by the derided and defensive idea that “I don’t know much about wine but I know what I like.” My democratic, anti-elitist impulses, as well as my analogous self-awareness as a possibly unconvincing music lover, make me feel that that’s just fine. But my own experience makes me demur somewhat. I do believe that increased knowledge has given me increased understanding and then increased pleasure.
Knowledge, understanding, and “getting” wine
At some point, or in some process, I feel I “got” wine, whether it was through standing on the bridge over the Mosel at Bernkastel and looking, amazed, at the cliffs of Riesling, or letting the hot red soil trickle through my fingers in a Chenin vineyard in the Swartland, or listening to the great English importer Roy Richards talk about “proper wine.” It all helped me achieve, or develop, the equivalent of what poet and jazz lover Philip Larkin calls an ear for music. Here’s one last quote about music, and acute awareness, that has analogic relevance for wine lovers. Larkin wrote:
“[A] critic is only as good as his ear. His ear will tell him instantly whether a piece of music is vital, musical, exciting, or cerebral, mock-academic, dead, long before he can read Don DeMichael on the subject, or learn that it is written in inverted nineteenths, or in the Stygian mode, or recorded at the NAACP Festival at Little Rock. He must hold on to the principle that the only reason for praising a work is that it pleases, and the way to develop his critical sense is to be more acutely aware of whether he is being pleased or not.”
