You can’t appreciate wine without getting a bit drunk

We drink wine because it is intoxicating

When you’re invited to try the finest wines available to humanity are you going to savour every mouthful or are you going to spit? I had this dilemma recently when I was asked by The Buyer to taste the 2022 vintage of Domaine de la Romanée Conti at Corney & Barrow. This might be a once in a lifetime opportunity to experience the most revered and expensive Burgundy in the world. While pretty much everyone in the room was spitting, this seemed completely insane to me especially as there were only eight wines to try. Appreciating the sheer sensory pleasure of DRC, and it really didn’t disappoint, without the feeling of gradual and subtle intoxication would be to miss the whole point of wine. But I didn’t want to get mullered and knock anything over so I alternated between spitting and swallowing, at least at first.

You’d be mad to spit these

And yet if an alien came down tomorrow and read Decanter magazine, it would never guess that the subject being written about was not only meant to be fun but was in fact an intoxicant. I’m not singling out Decanter for special criticism, almost all wine writing no matter how vivid and evocative is written from the point of view of absolute sobriety. I can think of no other activity where the literature on the subject is so far removed from most people’s everyday experiences.

We enjoy wine because it is alcoholic (peddlers of dealcoholised wines take note). None of the culture built up around wine would exist if it weren’t intoxicating. As much as we might like to think that wine tastings are in the words of Dr Frasier Crane “just about wine and clear constitutional procedures for enjoying it”, we should be honest that the reason most people attend them is at least partly to get drunk. How drunk though depends on the crowd.

One of the first tastings I ever ran was at a shop in Brockley. It was grandly billed as a “port masterclass” at my local wine shop. The audience consisted largely of the grandparents of my daughter’s friends. Most had polished off a bottle (not of port I hasten to add) before I attempted to talk them through the ports. Needless to say there were no spittoons; teenagers on a school trip would have been an easier audience to control.

The late Michael Broadbent certainly wouldn’t have approved. He wrote that “it is nothing short of ridiculous to drink one’s way through a tasting.” Of course there’s a good reason why pros don’t taste like south London winos. I don’t want the buying team at the Berry Bros half cut when assessing the new Burgundy vintage.

There is, however, a happy medium between Brockley Bacchanalia and the asceticism of the professionals. A wine tasting when done properly works like an ancient Greek symposium in that you have a formalised way of talking, in this case about wine, and you all drink at the same rate. Overt drunkenness is frowned upon but so is total sobriety. A degree of intoxication helps British people to shake off their self-consciousness and talk freely about wine.

There’s a sweet spot between absolute sobriety and mild drunkenness where the best wines really seem to come alive. All that stuff about terroir, whiffs of mahogany and minerality suddenly makes sense. Wine talk doesn’t seem so pretentious when you’ve had a few in like-minded company. And if you taste sober you miss the interplay between the intellectual pleasure of wine appreciation and the hedonistic side. You’re missing the whole point.

I think that’s something we forget a lot in the wine business when visiting a giant event and trying to taste through as much as we can. I remember my wife telling me ‘Tasting wine with you isn’t fun anymore’. At wine events which were meant to be social, I spent my time frantically scribbling notes, spitting, trying to get round quickly and getting impatient with lingerers. I was tasting like a pro when I should have been drinking like an amateur.

Interestingly it is only wine that has this gap between how a professional and an amateur function. You can’t properly assess a whisky without gauging how it goes down the throat (or so the experts claim) which is why whisky tasters rarely have more than ten in a flight. It’s the same with beer. I judged a beer competition once where I tried over a hundred beers and didn’t spit once. Which is perhaps why you rarely meet a thin beer writer. I’m currently reading a book called The Meaning of Beer by Jonny Garratt which is full of over indulgence and hangovers. I can’t imagine a wine professional including that. Can it be a coincidence that beer and whisky are seen as fun and unpretentious whereas wine still suffers from accusations of snobbery?

Perhaps this is why some of the most memorable writing on wine has often been done by amateurs like Auberon Waugh, Kingsley Amis or more recently Lawrence Osborne - who I’ll be writing about next week. They don’t have the disconnect between wine appreciation and intoxication. It’s the same with television. The most entertaining programme made about drink in recent years was a The 12 Drinks of Christmas presented by restaurant critic Giles Coren and comedian Alexander Armstrong. I wish they had made it into a series. There was not a spittoon in sight. It just goes to show that wine can be fun as long as you remember to swallow occasionally.