Keeping Wine Relevant
Why wine lovers can make you feel stupid, even if they don't really mean it...

By Jonathon Alsop
October 15, 2004

I'm no linguist -- I'm just a simple wine taster/typist -- but I like to be understood.

When I was a lad and wrote something people didn't understand, I said, "It's obvious what the problem is: I'm a genius and everyone else in the world isn't."

Eventually, my desire to be understood overtook my vanity, especially once I stated writing about wine, a hard-to-understand topic that can make people cringe as it is. Credit weird etiquette and lots of foreign language labels.

There's a rule in linguistics that says everything has to be relevant, and much of the time, relevance is exactly what wine talk is lacking.

For instance, if I say, "Want some peanut butter?" and you say, "Water freezes at 32 degrees," there's no relevance and we're on the earth for no reason. But if I'm standing by a convertible and say, "Want to go for a ride?" and a woman with a bouffant answers, "I just did my hair," something that could make no sense on the face of it instead has tremendous meaning.

We understand the relevance. Best of all, we take a shortcut to get there, which tweaks the mind of another and makes us all cleverer. You could have just said no, but where's the charm in that?

People who are not wine lovers will ask a reasonable question, "What's this wine like?" or "How's this wine taste?" Because of all the shortcuts we take linguistically, the answers sound exactly like, "I just did my hair."

"It's malolactically fermented," means awesome. "Aged in oak," equals excellent. "It comes from the smallest vineyard in who knows where," says it's special. The next question you ask -- "Oak? Why's that important? -- establishes the relevance. The breakdown in the system is that you -- the middle-of-the-road wine lover -- end up in the position of keeping the conversation going by saying things like, "Smells like hamster cage does it? Tell me more!"

This explains the almost universal experience of seeming to be made to feel stupid in the presence of wine lovers. The vignette is a guy with a wine glass a little too big speaking a little too enthusiastically about wine.

Instead of inspiring, the wall of jargon repels the listener. As much as you may love wine, you can tell from the attitude that you're just not going to be able to love it enough.

Jargon and attitude alone are not to blame for wine's uncomfortable, almost irrelevant place at the American table. Wine language is one of the fun, freewheeling parts of the wine world, if only it can be made relevant to things people actually know.

To get a sense of how much more relevant wine could be in the world today, think about food. "How were those ribs?" elicits "So good I ate them with my hands and then licked the plate," an unequivocal response. I can picture myself there, except for licking the plate perhaps.

Some day, wine will make as much sense. A post-modern Norman Rockwell will paint a new Thanksgiving, and this time, wine will be at the table.

Wine On Target

2001 Arrowood "Grand Archer" Syrah (about $20, available nationally)

Winemaker Dick Arrowood is quoted as allegedly saying in his youth he made wines so great they'll never be drinkable. In this incarnation -- Grand Archer is his second label -- he's made wines that are both great and drinkable and in the $20 range, some sort of wonderful wine trifecta.

Deep purple-black in color, this Syrah has great aromas of cream and cinnamon, earth and wood. It has fragrant, aromatic, delicious, big round mouth-filling fruit like pear, plum, fig, and date. Interesting soft focused tiny tannin crowd the front of the mouth. Tastes like an old world Syrah: you can smell the sap and taste bark, the woods, and forest floor. The wine is dark and brooding, very un-California where things should be sunny and bright and happy. In this way, it's a little un-beautiful, but attractively so. Fantastic with a roasted garlic chicken, or even a tangy cheese course.

Harvest Of Fine Wines

Brookline Liquor Mart isn't in Brookline -- it's in Allston on Comm Ave. just west of Harvard Ave. The liquor it sells takes up about 1 percent of the shelf space, by my eyeball calculation. I'm not sure how much overall square footage you need for market status, but I'm pretty sure the place is so big it's not technically a "mart" either.

In spite of its out-of-date name, BLM is a top-drawer wine shop, and has been for decades. Fifteen years ago, it was the retail operation for a big importer/distributor, and after some years of transition, it's emerged as an independent store with that original big-picture perspective intact.

At BLM, you're always tasting the next great thing, literally, on Saturdays from 1 to 5 pm. Normally, there are up to a dozen great wines open every week, a tremendous free education if you just put in the time and ask the right questions.

Brookline Liquor Mart, 1354 Comm Ave., Allston, 617-734-7700, www.blmwine.com, free tasting every Saturday, 1-5 pm.