I expect all of us who work in wine journalism have had some variant of the following conversation:

“What do you do?”

“I’m a wine writer.”

“Is that a job? You mean you spend all day drinking and get paid for that?”

“Well it’s a tough gig but someone’s got to do it.”

The “tough gig” line tends to get undercut by an inadvertent smirk: we know, and we know they know we know, that this is not the toughest of gigs. It could even be described as cushy.

When I started reading a long, thoughtful piece on his life as a wine taster by a respected colleague, I thought at first that he was performing an elaborate version of this tongue-in-cheek feint. But as I read on, I realised that he was serious. This was a piece about the toughness of wine writing as a gig.

It began with a horrifically graphic account of spittoon etiquette, or the lack of it. The descriptions of accidents involving overfilled stand-alone spittoons were grimly funny – David Williams is an excellent writer – but didn’t make for an uplifting opening. At least there was no mention of anyone trying to drink the contents of a spittoon, as Jack does in Sideways.

The article went downhill from there, moving on to detail the devastation to David’s teeth caused by tasting. By now I was getting thoroughly depressed. But the worst thing was the numbers. David reckons he tastes 18,000 wines a year, and on very many days in the busiest seasons for tasting in London, the spring and autumn he will taste 100 or more wines in a day. I was reminded of Leporello’s catalogue aria in Mozart’s Don Giovanni detailing the Don’s conquests (“in Ispagna, son già mille e tre”) but without any of the transgressive energy and eroticism.

David Williams loves wine, without any doubt, but this dutiful daily treadmill of tasting was made to sound more like a chore than a pleasure. “Tasting 100 wines in one sitting…,” says Williams, “is, if not exactly hard work in the grand scheme of 21st-century labour, then at least tiring at times. There is a special kind of dread that comes with facing a line-up of dozens of thickly tannic red wines at 9am on a winter’s morning if you’re feeling even slightly under the weather.”

I’m familiar with that feeling. There was time, decades ago, when I quite regularly used to taste 100 wines a day, either at supermarket tastings or at the comparative tastings organised by Wine magazine. Every now and then I will still, to use an absurd metaphor, gird my palate and go out to do battle with several scores of wines at a single tasting.

Increasingly, however, I’ve found that this is neither an especially efficient nor satisfactory way of going about things. Or I might say that it’s not good either for the body or the soul.

How many wines can you really do justice to in a single sitting? This question is analogous to one I have often asked myself, and written about in other contexts, about “blockbuster” exhibitions. The blockbuster exhibition usually advertises itself on size – “the biggest Kahlo/Van Gogh/Kiefer show you will ever see” – but how many paintings can you do justice to in a sitting, or standing? In one of the first columns I wrote under the banner Slow Lane for an international newspaper, I suggested going to the National Gallery to see just one painting.

It’s physically possible, of course, to see 150 paintings at one go or to sniff, slurp and spit 120 wines then write some kind of tasting note on each; the real challenge is mental, or even spiritual. What qualities of mind and spirit are you bringing to the 117th wine of the day?

Supermarket tastings – increasingly dispiriting, I’ve found, as buyers are under such relentless pressure to meet price points, and corners are cut – are only part of the wine taster’s life and schedule. There are also importer tastings and wine fairs – generally nightmarish, as the problems of scale are intensified – and regional wine trips.

Regional wine trips, as David Williams points out, are one of the perks of the job. He is referring to the ones organised by the big wine promotional bodies, and he goes on six or seven a year. He is right that there is no substitute for visiting estates and producers, tramping vineyards and tasting in cold musty-smelling cellars. But even regional wine tasting trips can suffer from the same “blockbuster” effect: there is pressure on the regional bodies, which is transferred to the journalist, to cram too much into too short a time.

What is the solution? What am I proposing? Any activity we engage in very regularly can become routine; things that start off wonderful become dulled by repetition. Kafka expressed it in one of his most resonant aphorisms: “Leop­ards break in­to the tem­ple and drink all the sac­ri­fi­cial ves­sels dry; it keeps hap­pen­ing; in the end, it can be cal­cu­lat­ed in ad­vance and is in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the rit­ual.”

There’s bound to be a bit of drudgery in our professional lives, but if we’re trying to communicate sensory pleasures, and beyond them, something like artistic excellence, we need to keep that drudgery at bay. We need to be reminded of what led us to this strange vocation in the first place.

For me it started with growing up in a house full of wine with a wine merchant father who thought of wine as part of culture, and took me with him on wine-buying trips to Germany, Burgundy, Austria, and Spain from quite a young age. A little later it involved setting off on my own, on trips I organised myself (sometimes I got an article or two out of them), to places such as the Douro, Alsace, the Langhe, the Sherry country. There I could taste and explore at my own pace and leisure. And it has also, always, involved spending quite a lot of my own money on buying wine. When I opened my last bottle of Domaine Combier’s St Joseph Cap Nord 2016, bought in its extreme youth, with a friend the other day, its combination of haunting florality and animal wildness brought intense pleasure mixed with a pang of sadness, that nothing lasts for ever. Or in the words of David Williams, finally reminding himself and us why he loves wine, it achieved “a kind of vivid transportation to the scents and flavours of another place, a simultaneous, almost transcendental stimulation of mind and body.”

Photo by Amir Arabshahi on Unsplash