Who's afraid of wine talk?

Wine tasting - it's a game of two halves.

At this time of year, some of my friends start behaving strangely: they have terrible mood swings, one moment singing bawdily, the next moment heads bowed, disconsolate. Their speech changes too—the accents become more Cockney, Yorkshire or Mancunian depending on where they're from, and they start shouting gibberish such as "kerm onnnn!" or using odd phrases like "the mercurial Ukrainian" or "at the end of the day."

For a moment I think it might be some sort of recurring venereal disease, but then I realise it's the start of the football season. As a non-football fan, it's interesting to see how, when talking about football, normal people start to use a different language—both verbal and physical. Football isn't an especially complicated game; I know how to play it badly and I can understand the offside rule. But there is a shared culture that the more you get to know the game, the more you understand.

Sport fans in particular revel in the specialist vocabulary of their game of choice. Watching alien games like American football, it's almost as if they're speaking an entirely different language: "scrimmage," "passing pocket" and, most terrifying of all, a "smashmouth offense." The mind boggles!

In contrast, wine with its "long finishes," "lovely legs" and "minerality" seems relatively straightforward. Yet people are afraid of wine talk. They're afraid of looking pretentious or appearing ignorant. There are complaints if you say "palate" instead of "taste" or "aroma" instead of "smell." That's understandable amongst non-wine-bore friends, nobody wants an amateur hour Robert Parker at a dinner party, but what I do find odd is that many within the wine business are afraid of it. Wine merchants, journalists and sommeliers fall over themselves to say that wine should be as accessible as possible. “There’s no right or wrong answer” repeated like grace before every tasting. Nobody wants to look like a snob.

But wine talk can function in exactly the same way as football talk: to show belonging, to share knowledge, to boast and, yes, sometimes to feel better than other people because your team won. Or you correctly guessed a wine was Breaky Bottom when someone gave you a glass to taste blind—as happened to me recently.

Some of this will be by its very nature exclusionary. As someone whose football talk begins and ends with Gazza crying at Italia ‘90, I accept that I’m not going to be accepted into that tribe. You can't have a club if everyone is a member, just as you can't support every team. It can all be a bit intimidating at first. For anyone seeking to gain entry to a slightly arcane field, that is part of the fun. Your first day at the Games Workshop was probably a bit nerve-racking too. I don't know because I was too busy smoking and trying to talk to girls.

Angling, motor racing, cooking (pan-fried, reduction, using the word "plate" as a verb) have their own jargon, yet no one thinks that they're snobbish. If you're interested in something, then be prepared to learn. Once you get to a certain level, wine's very complexity becomes an appeal.

Wine is a language and a difficult one at that. It requires study, practice and confidence. Despite over 25 years of semi-serious wine appreciation, I still feel incredibly ignorant when sitting next to Oz Clarke or Jancis Robinson, but again the nerves are part of the fun. Yes, you'll feel like a dick when you first say "on the nose" or "well-integrated tannins," just as lisping all those 'c's in Castilian makes you feel like an effete, inbred Habsburg. With practice, it will become second nature and the word Cenicero (a town in Rioja) will dance off your tongue.

Of course, wine has the added problem of class. Traditionally in Britain and the US it was drunk by the elites while the rest of us had gruel. But this hasn’t been true for 30 years or more. Wine has been a more-or-less democratic drink since at least the 1990s and yet our perceptions are stuck in the 1970s. Despite the enduring stereotype of the red-trousered middle aged wine bore called something like Jasper or Rupert, the leading wine writers, buyers, and winemakers today are often women and have been for years. See my article on Jane MacQuitty.

Wine isn't going to throw its snobbish connotations off by pretending it's simple or by—dread word—"demystifying." It will do so by confidently asserting its complexity. In fact, those arcane rituals, the decanting, the right glasses, the passing the port to the left (or is it the right?), are part of the fun.

They also serve an important role. As the ancient Greeks understood with their symposiums, these rituals aren't solely about elitism; they create a formalised and relatively safe way of consuming what can be a dangerous intoxicant. That’s one thing that the wine trade never shouts about (for legal reasons, probably). At the end of the day, slipping a bit of football talk in there, wine tasting is just a way of getting drunk in a slow, ritualised way.