Wine: It Tastes Good to Me

There’s a scene in Sideways in which Miles, played by Paul Giamatti, tastes a wine and compares it to the back of an LA school bus, tar, turpentine, and Raid.

His sidekick, Jack (Thomas Haden Church) replies, “It tastes good to me.”

I’m taking a break from blogging things religious today to write a bit about wine, which, I must admit, mostly tastes good to me most of the time.

For many years now, Courtney has been the official photographer of the Texas Sommelier Conference, better known as TexSom. For the last couple years, I’ve attended TexSom, ridden on Courtney’s coattails enough to get a couple nice meals, a little free wine, and a couple nights’ stay at the Four Seasons Dallas.

But I’ve come to know the organizers, James Tidwell and Drew Hendricks, over the years, and this time around they asked me to give a social media seminar as part of a pre-conference day of social and traditional media training (my presentation is here). As a presenter, I am afforded more opportunities than a freeloading spouse sitting by the Four Seasons pool. I went to a couple wine seminars yesterday, and I’m going to a couple today.

At first blush, the seminars — on wines from Spain and from South Africa — could be seen as the making for parody, with people swirling, sniffing, and spitting, and talk of “hints of wet Band-Aid” about a particular wine.

But in fact, as the sommeliers who were leading the seminars showed powerpoint slides of different rock, I could begin to taste the “minerality” from a certain type of granite in the wine.

Wine talk is a discrete language, and one that must be learned. Me sitting in the seminars would be much like a sommelier sitting in a theology seminar — much goes over my head, but what I can catch increases my appreciation of wine measurably.