Ben Thompson of Stratechery has an interesting observation about Twitter and Instagram. Twitter is a lean-forward experience where you pay attention to the points and want to engage with the conversation. Instagram is a lean-back experience, a TV substitute, for when you just want entertainment.
Wine can be both a lean-forward and lean-back product.
The canonical “Tuesday” wine is a lean-back product. It’s background music to your meal. It’s not supposed to be challenging or memorable. It’s just supposed to be delicious or at the very least not detract from the meal and the conversation.
But wine can also be a lean forward experience. Probably more so than any other agricultural product. The huge matrix of Locations x Grapes x Production choices x Yearly variation makes wine the ultimate lean forward product. If you just want consistency, then it can be annoying that this years bottle of your favorite wine is different than last years. But then again, if that annoys you, you should probably drink wine that is produced to be consistent. The maddening differences are the delight.
What You Need To Know To Buy Wine
Unless you always drink the same kind of beer, you need to know about six types of beer styles to order the kind of beer you're in the mood for and the occasion calls for.
If wine is only background music to your meals and gatherings, you only need to know red, white, sparkling, and rose. To get to the next step you need to know about 13 different wines: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Zinfandel, Syrah, Malbec, Chardonnay with and without oak, Pinot Gris, Sauvignon Blanc, and maybe semi-sweet riesling. Plus Champagne (all sparkling wine) and rose. That’s about twice what you need to know for beer. But still quite manageable. At this level you “know something about wine”.
To get to the next level you start climbing Everest. And you keep climbing.
With a changing wine consumption landscape with lots of challenges, we could make wine easier or we could change the language from knowing every producer, region, grape, and production method to focus on the experience that the wine drinker wants to have. Let me give you an example.
You’re in a wine store. You look at the shelves. They are probably ordered by region and grape. You have no idea what 90% of the wines are. The merchant ask you good questions about what you like and you walk out of there with a bottle that probably taste pretty much like what you have had before but may be from region you haven’t tried before. Not bad. But great? Nah.
You walk out of that store with something that gives you more of the same. A baby step outside of your current experience. And without a framework for what to do with that new knowledge.
An Experience Framework For Ordering Wine
Let me introduce you to a framework for how to talk about what you want out if a wine next time you’re in a wine store or restaurant. This framework has two axis.
The x-axis, the horizontal axis, is about Grape Expression. The left side is “As Expected” and the right side is “Surprising”.
The y-axis. The vertical axis, is about taste and at the bottom we have “Safe” and at the top we have “Challenging”.
Grape Expression
A $15 pinot noir that tastes like a pinot noir tastes as expected. A $300 burgundy master piece also tastes as expected. They both taste like Pinot noir. One may be merely good and the other a benchmark, but they both taste as expected.
A white wine made from a red grape like Savage Grace’s Blanc Franc is a surprise. A wine from a grape you don’t normally see like Chateau Morrisette’s Chambourcin or Öömrang’s Siegerrebe is a surprise. So is a grape from a region you wouldn’t expect like a North Coast Trousseau.
None of this is about the quality of the wine. It’s about what you want out of a wine. Maybe you are early in your Pinot Noir journey and want to try more pinot noirs from different places. In that case you want wines that taste as expected so you can expand your thinking about what a Pinot Noir should taste like.
Perhaps you are well into your Syrah journey and want to try a carbonic Syrah just to see what that method does to a grape you already know well. In this case you want a surprising grape expression.
Taste
The $15 Pinot Noir and the $300 Burgundy are both safe choices if you like Pinot Noir. So is a Cabernet Sauvignon, a Gruner Veltliner, or an Albariño. These are generally delicious wines that are pretty easy to approach.
On the other hand will most people agree that orange wine and natural wine are not necessarily easy to drink. They are acquired tastes. I would suggest that dry rieslings need some getting used to. Very mineral and austere whites will also not please everyone.
Again, there is no value judgement here. All these wines can be great and just right for you, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Sometimes you are in the mood for something easy to drink and sometimes you want to be challenged. It’s all part of the wine journey.
Using The Framework
Let’s go back. You’re in a wine store. You look at the shelves. They are probably ordered by region and grape. You have no idea what 90% of the wines are. But now you have a framework for expressing what you want. You could say:
I like wine x, y, and z. And I’m in the mood for something that’s easy to drink, but I’d like to be surprised either by trying a grape I know done in a different way or a grape I know should taste very different, taste like something I like. Surprising + Safe.
Or perhaps you could declare that today you want to be challenged. But you want to be challenged in a way that helps you build your vocabulary. And the wine merchant may give you an orange wine from Pinot Gris and tell you that Pinot Gris is one of the most common orange wines and this particular wine is in the middle spectrum of how orange wines taste. Expected + Challenging
Lean Forward
Wine is the ultimate lean forward product. It invites conversations about nuance and finesse, about geography, people, and climate. It’s inherently complex. And it’s worthwhile learning some real wine language. Still, let’s acknowledge that it’s hard to go from ground level to the top of Everest and acknowledge that we can use a framework like this to describe what experience we want out of a wine and use it as scaffolding for learning more.