How Do You Be A Table Wine Connoisseur?
The greatest shame about wine (and wine-drinking) is that for so long it was dominated by people with more money than sense. If you did a cold-eyed analysis of the real cost of an expensive bottle of wine (something over, say, $50), you’d find that most of what you’d be paying for was either marketing or make-believe. The simple truth is this: you can get great wine for under $15 these days. Often for far less than that. Wine appreciation is completely subjective. The most significant difference between your taste in wine and the taste of an ‘expert’ is that they’ve sampled a lot more wine than you. It’s not necessarily a matter of drinking more wine – but of drinking different wines – going beyond cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay – in order to educate and expand your palette. Lots of wineries (especially American wineries) experiment with unusual varietals – grapes like malbec or cabernet franc which are used most often for blending. These grapes can produce interesting (and often in
