The Art of Wine - Using Knowledge Confidently - Volume 2 of 3

There is a particular silence that falls when a wine list lands on a restaurant table. The conversation pauses. Someone — usually the person who knows the least about wine — picks up the leather folder, opens it, and looks at it the way one looks at an X-ray of one’s own knee. Polite. Slightly worried. Trying to project competence. The waiter hovers. The other diners pretend to study the menu. The list, meanwhile, is forty bottles long and organized by region, and the silence stretches by the second.

If you read Book One of this series, you already know more than enough to choose well from that list. You know what the regions mean. You know what the grapes do. You know how to taste. What you may not yet know is how to use any of it — in that exact moment, with the waiter waiting and three people watching.

That is what this book is for.

Foundations of Wine gave you the conceptual layer. The Art of Wine is the application layer — the deployment of what you already understand into the situations where wine actually shows up. The restaurant. The wine shop. The dinner party. The winery. The gift purchase. The bottle you’ve been saving from a trip. The conversation, at a kitchen counter, about whether the Beaujolais is any good.

Most wine education stops short of this layer. The textbooks teach you what Sancerre is, and the magazines teach you which Sancerre to buy, but neither teaches you what to do when the sommelier walks over and asks if you’d like to start with something sparkling. There is a small social vocabulary that goes with wine — a set of moves, gestures, and phrases that mark someone as comfortable rather than performing. The vocabulary is not difficult. It is also not in any wine book that I have read. So this is that book.