Brian St Pierre reviews Wine Confident: There’s No Wrong Way to Enjoy Wine by Kelli A White.
First, some news: Many social media platforms are now allowing wine advertising and marketing. If you’re onboard online, be prepared: Wine information—of sorts—is now beginning to flow your way from a new direction, mostly in a deluge of cheery snippets that may put a smile on your face unless you’re one of those grumpy realists. This is courtesy of an array of influencers (usually winsome young women in sunny locales that require little clothing) who scatter bits of vinous information like stale breadcrumbs to pigeons, before promoting the virtues of a certain bottle to millions of people in an enthusiastic, every-day-is-Christmas manner. The newest outreach has arrived, with a big, tempting smile and as much useful information as a political promise.
In a way, this “modernization” is a continuation of a trend that had been building for quite a while, as Santa Clara Valley—once northern California’s abundant fruit and veg supplier and source of a wide variety of sturdy, reliable everyday (and some lovely Sunday) wines—has steadily morphed into Silicon Vally, the overbearing, paved-over source of… Well, you know: a different sort of pleasure principle. There’s an app for that, allegedly; see the terms and conditions, and don’t look back.
Fortunately, there are some antidotes, and here’s a very good one: a wine primer for the 21st century that’s sensible, quite readable, and up to date (smoke taint, Covid damage, orange/natural wines, permaculture, no Western or old-boy bias, smartphones, auctions and investing, and creating communicative tasting notes). Kelli White—a former grape-picker, wine shopkeeper, sommelier, instructor, and now also first-rate writer—doesn’t waver from her simple ardent mission: reminding us to enjoy wine to the max—the word “enjoy” is ever present—and sharing that enthusiasm in an accessible way. Unlike so many similar wine books, Wine Confident isn’t dogmatic; it tells stories rather than lectures, and it cheerfully disperses flurries of enlightening metaphors, observing, “Wine conjures many things it does not contain,” before mentioning a few that might frighten a marketing department but bring a knowing smile of approval from an alert and open-minded wine lover who knows good information keeps the door to enjoyment open: “Poetry sneaks in while we’re counting the blueberries.”
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Wine Confident’s format is also right-now and right-on, in the style of upmarket, casually sophisticated lifestyle magazines, with colorful subject headings, internal headlines, occasional Q&As that move the reader along briskly, illustrative quotes that emphasize some highlights, and a series of useful asides within the various categories that are billed as “Inside Track” (somewhat more aesthetic advice, though still down-to-earth) or “Pro Tip” (fairly strategic stuff, including debunking past-their-prime traditions). The progression is also an unusual but effective first-things-first: Tasting Wine, Talking, Buying, Handling, Collecting, and Understanding build the no-nonsense pleasure principle, and then finally, clear and concise, comes Making and Growing. Information on grape varieties is also in back, with the index. There is no esoterica, no national or regional arcana, no omnipotent showing-off (“there are no universal truths in wine,” notes White), and only one footnote in the whole book. The final chapter in the main text is called “Take the List!” and is about making a well-honed passion for wine a passport, and how to choose the destination.
It helps greatly that White is also unafraid of being amusing, if that will make a point. On a dinner date when she was young, White’s companion ordered a “perfect” bottle of wine—he had a system, it seemed. Subsequently, however, he went for a string of duds, and she finally asked about his “system.” It was, he confessed, to order the wine with the most accent marks. Later, as a sommelier, she often encountered what they called wine widows—“the abandoned date who would look around politely while their partner combed over the wine list or endlessly grilled the sommelier.” Familiar?
Wine Confident: Commonsense advice
Above all here, there’s an emphasis, straightforwardly and easily, on context. On ultra-biodynamics: “Burying a cow horn full of manure, digging it up several months later and using it to make a tea, then spraying that tea on the vines, feels as baroque and supernatural as a witch’s spell. But is it so really different to taking a yoga class, drinking some chamomile and checking your horoscope? Modern life isn’t always so modern,” writes White, and then, typical of her approach, proceeds to place Rudolf Steiner’s often-derided philosophy into a cogent historical context, better and more usefully than I’ve ever seen it, in just three paragraphs.
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Common sense can come with a smile here, as when White points out that every step in harvesting, making, and storing wine is carried out in cool circumstances, so we ought to continue that when we serve it; or that opening Champagne is easier if we give it a thumbs-down, and definitely leave your sword at home. Elsewhere, addressing acidity and sweetness, she asks us to consider lemonade: “We add sugar to lemon juice not to make it sweet, but to make it palatable.” The image, typically, helps cradle and imbed a passage on our perception of one of tannin’s roles and of Champagne’s dosage.
Language, obviously, comes up in various contexts, especially the considerable challenges of clearly articulating what’s in our glasses: “A good example of this is the way that chicken soup smells like chicken soup, rather than chicken+carrot+onion+parsley+broth+bay leaf […] it is significantly harder to tease out the ingredients than it is to recognize the whole,” White writes, adding, “it is almost impossible to separate flavour from emotion, especially when you consider that preference is an emotion.” What you’re tasting, she concludes, is metaphors. Her commonsense advice? Sample broadly, pay attention, find your meaningful metaphors, and build your own well-informed context—“your palate, your voice,” she asserts. Using someone else’s language to evaluate wine can equate to using someone else’s palate to assess it. (And worse—as I discovered with a few exercises with members of a large and heterogenous tasting group after reading Professor Adrienne Lehrer’s dissection of the wildly varying semantics of wine—few people have the same definitions of anything much regarding taste, flavor, sensory perception, “fruity,” or cultural origins. It’s a dense and dangerous jungle out there in the world of wine-speak, and White’s advice is right: It’s best to pitch your own tent.)
I’ve learned a lot over the years from sommeliers, but most of it has been after hours, off-duty over a glass (or a few glasses) of wine, away from work, practical and sensible, sometimes funny, but private—perhaps too much so. I thought of those conversations as I read Wine Confident, remembering the useful pleasures of the stories. Now, here’s another set of similar reminders, but out in the open. Sometimes we just have to surrender gravitas to joy, and this is a perfect guide.
Wine Confident: There’s No Wrong Way to Enjoy Wine
Kelli A White
Published by Académie du Vin Library; 236 pages; $35 / £25
