The times we live in being what they are, I need to start with a few disclaimers. No, I don’t doubt at all that there is a dark side to the wine industry, especially when it overlaps with hospitality. Also no, I have never worked full-time in the wine industry, so you could argue, if you were so inclined, that I do not see the whole picture. And finally, of course my views are based on my experiences, which, unavoidably, are a function of who I am so, sure, for others it might well be quite different. I do not claim to be a holder of some absolute truth, only a purveyor of opinions. And the opinion I am trying to qualify is that I like wine people.

It is useful to define what I mean by wine people in this context, so you see where I am going with this. To my mind, wine people firstly think of wine as something more than fermented grape juice. They consider its intoxicating properties a largely pleasant, occasionally unfortunate, often limiting side effect, but certainly not its prime attraction. They also couldn’t care less if in some segments of some societies it is vaguely associated with prestige. Real wine people would happily trade social cachet with beer, tequila, or eau-de-vie, if it meant Bordeaux prices came back to orbit.  For them, the first few pages of any wine book, where the multi-faceted fascinations of the drink are explored, is not marketing or poetic licence. It’s a self-evident truth.

Secondly, wine people know a lot about wine. By this, I don’t mean they once memorised a lot of trivia about wine, and now carry around a post-nominal as a sepulchral symbol to a morsel of knowledge fleetingly held. I don’t even mean they are trained in viticulture and winemaking, though this can be metamorphic in the right hands. I mean that they have a wide understanding of the wines that are out there in the world. That they have imbibed a lot of them, carefully and critically, paying attention to detail and honing their tasting acumen. And I mean that, after having acquired the wide and swallow, they proceeded to the deep and narrow, having enough understanding of the global to appreciate the local. (The ancient preparator of poisons having warned that the wide and deep is unlikely in the short human lifespan.)
But mostly, wine people spend a disproportionate part of their time thinking about wine.

This means that, by necessity, most wine people will be wine professionals – but not at all that most wine professionals will be wine people. I am confident that most McDonalds executives or Tesco buyers or poultry farmers go for days, or months, or years, without ever thinking of food as anything other than numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s no different with wine. Beyond those that make a living out of wine, there will be some that have some tangential relationship with it, semi-professional if you are generous, hangers-on if you are not. And then there will be those that were bitten by the wine bug, never recovered, but never thought of monetising their infection and affection either. Some people collect West End tickets, some Warhammer figurines, some Barolo labels.

Why then do I like real wine people? There is something romantic, and contagious, in an enthusiasm for something objectively trivial. I am hardly objective, but I find something additionally noble in earnestly engaging with an activity that, in many contexts comes with so much societal baggage. After all, the real-life crochet fanatic or fusion jazz enthusiast are largely in line with societal expectations. But the wine person has to contend with the spectre of the dreaded wine snob. It doesn’t matter that credibility in wine circles is not the £300 Napa but the £30 Chenin Blanc, or that you would never judge what non-wine people drink. Wine is one of the few interests that others are not content with simply professing a lack of interest in it – they find it suspicious you don’t.

Here is something that will need a few more disclaimers. I like wine people, because of the variety of their backgrounds. No, I am not saying it’s an EDI paradise, or that it has brought peace upon the world. But, from where I am sitting, I have never seen a discipline that will have aristocratic scions next to people that left school at 16, that will make rock stars out of farmers and have paper qualifications pale in the face of a well-trained nose. And while there is no doubt that wine used to be a largely European (read: white) business, that’s hardly the case today. When I think of wine in pop culture, I think LeBron and JJ Reddick discussing Burgundy, or Steph Curry stopping by Anhydrous during his Santorini visit. Over here in Birmingham, I have had much more success getting Chinese or Indians into wine than so-called white English, the latter being much more confident that if Marks & Spencer stocks it, then it must be sophisticated. If you think wine is still run for the benefit of a couple of SW1 addresses, maybe you need to get out more – and I don’t mean to your club.

It helps that wine can have so many entry points. It can be after school, after university, after a few years of doing not much or after many years of doing a lot. More than any other activity I’ve seen, wine seems to have a lot of people who entered it later in life. I could enumerate the backgrounds. From mathematicians to jockeys and from merchant sailors to pianists, there is usually a fascinating story behind them – and then there is the fourth generation winemaker, a different type of fascinating story all by itself.

One reason for this diversity is that it is a very accepting community. Sure, it is not perfect – but what is? I’ve wandered the wine world for a while, armed with little knowledge and less understanding and, while I’ve encountered many gatekeepers of the wine business, I’ve encountered few of wine connoisseurship. Indeed, the only people that have ever been actively unpleasant, actively exclusionary, or brazenly pulling rank are self-declared consumer champions. You know the type. The ones that will tell you that you don’t need to worry your pretty little head with all the boring wine knowledge thingies – they have done this for you, all you need to do is buy the stuff. Not wine people, but salespeople, incidentally of wine today, maybe of aquavit, tarot cards, or party hats tomorrow.

So, if you don’t know wine people, I suggest you meet some. If you do know wine people, I suggest you show them some good will. They have the endearing charm of those that spend an inordinate amount of time on something that few appreciate and even fewer understand. They come with interesting stories and even more interesting backstories. They are surprisingly humble, perhaps because they know that, in their world, everyone is only as good as their next blind tasting. And they are fun. After all, there is no other community whose members introduce themselves with “we should really share a bottle of wine some time” – and you know that bottle is going to be good.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash