Wine: Facing the Fear

I am often asked why I don’t write about wine more on this blog, considering the fact that I drink so much of the stuff. Well, that’s because I only drink wine to get pissed.

Only kidding. In the past year or so I’ve been making a real effort to tackle the vast topic head-on but in doing so found something rather unexpected waiting for me: fear. I had identified the problem as akin to standing on the edge of a huge cliff, looking out into a vast sea of information; the bit I already knew was a little speck on the distant horizon. When I came down to the real business of it though, I felt a different kind of intimidation: a fear of the ‘wine world’ in general. There seems to me to be a lot of old guff surrounding rituals of opening, tasting and being ‘qualified’ to even talk about wine, like some of the people involved are trying really hard to make the subject more complicated than it is, with the apparent aim of making themselves feel a bit more important. Are you getting the impression this annoys me yet? Yes it does.

In the past year or so however, I’ve met people who have t

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- Source : http://helengraves.co.uk