If You Only Know Wine, You Know Nothing About Wine

Jose Mourinho once said, “If you only know about football, you know nothing about football.” Swap “football” for “wine” and you’ve got a line that should be engraved above every tasting room door and tattooed on the inside of every sommelier’s forearm.

Somewhere along the way, the act of tasting turned into an autopsy. People approach the glass like forensic analysts, dissecting a Riesling in search of petrol while completely overlooking its soul.

Frank Zappa said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. That’s exactly what most wine communication feels like: an awkward attempt to pin down sensations. Aroma is personal. Texture is memory. So why keep producing tasting notes that read like instruction manuals, intimidating newcomers instead of drawing them in? Wine is a social experience, duh.

Good wine writing, and by extension good wine tasting, isn’t about naming the exact clone of Pinot Noir in your glass. It’s about drawing lines between things. If you can’t connect those dots, you’re just reciting flavour notes like a robot.

Yes, technique matters. Nobody wants to be served faulty wine by someone who thinks Brett is a rustic quirk. But the goal isn’t to become a lab technician. The goal is to taste like a human. With baggage. With references. With the courage to say, “This reminds me of my grandfather’s shed—and somehow, that’s beautiful.”

You’ll never really get wine if wine is all you get. What gives it meaning isn’t just what’s in the glass, but everything you bring to it, your cultural baggage, your memories. Without that, it’s just expensive fermented grape juice, sometimes delicious, often overhyped.

And above all, for the sake of everyone new to this world, stop trying to dance about architecture.