Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl - Drink This: Wine Made Simple

I ve been a restaurant critic since 1997, a period of time that has neatly coincided with the rise of email. Ever since I started writing about food and wine, emails from readers have flowed toward me, sometimes in trickles and sometimes in floods. Some of the most simple questions readers asked, and nearly all of the deceptively complex ones, had to do with wine. This book was inspired by those brief, often brilliant questions.

Dear Dara,

Why is wine more confusing than poker? More confusing than football? More confusing than politics, rock and roll, Socrates, Moroccan cooking, or the stock market? Any of those you can get a basic familiarity with on Wikipedia in about twenty minutes. Not so wine. Ive tried. Ive also tried reading wine magazines, talking to sommeliers, and getting help from the dude at my wine store, who seems very nice but sounds insane: Do I like pepper in my wine? Does anyone? Ive been at this on and off for years, so at this point, Ibet no, this will never make sense to me. Is there any hope?

Truly, truly, baffled

Dear BaffledThere is always hope.

I was not born into a wine family, I didnt start drinking wine with any regularity until my midtwenties, but now Ive got so many wine writing awards that the heavy bronze medals are the first thing I reach for to use as weapons when I think I hear burglars in the night. No, actually, I dont, but I could, and its that idea that keeps me feeling safe.

How did I go from zero wine experience to plenty? I entered the workforce during the first George Bush recession, and set about pursuing my dream of becoming a novelist. I earned less than $7,000 one of those first years out of college, working three jobs. Seriously. As a way of putting actual protein on my plate, I became a restaurant critic. At the time this was considered a particularly low-status job. At my Minneapolis-based newspaper real writers spoke truth to power, they didnt speak truth to lasagna.

Yet when I started writing about food I found it both comforting and exciting. I had gotten my first job when I was thirteen as a dishwasher in a Cape Cod restaurant kitchen, and had climbed the hierarchy of the back of the house fast enough that by the time I was eighteen I was working as the sous-chef in a busy Italian place and moonlighting as a part-time pastry chef at a bed-and-breakfast. I also spent time waitressing, both in New York City and later in Minneapolis.

I knew what food was supposed to be, and when it was failing. It pissed me off both as a consumer and as a former restaurant cook when lobster ravioli showed up full of broken lobster shells. It infuriated me as a former server when Id be sitting at a table as a diner with an empty water glass and an empty wineglass while my server sat near the kitchen reading newspapers. Consequently, my columns were pretty gloves-off. Id write things such as:

There I was withered to my bones with dehydration. Tumbleweeds rattled around my water glass. My waiter had apparantly given up the profession and lit out for a better life. The floor manager was busy giving free drinks to another, louder table, to apologize to them for all the things they wanted that they couldnt havelike food, and for them wine, since no one thought to entrust the floor manager with the key to the tantalizing wine cellar. It had been a long hour since I placed an appetizer order, and I may as well have been waiting for a bus for all the fine dining I was doing. I felt like Pamela Anderson at a NAMBLA convention.

My column in the Village Voiceowned alternative weekly City Pages developed a following. Unexpectedly, for someone who was just in it for the protein, I grew to love food writing as much as I had loved cooking. However, the pay left a lot to be desired. The job was taking four to six days a week, between writing, going to meals worth writing about, going to meals not worth writing about, and so on, and I was taking home about $150 a weekplus food!without health insurance. While I was doing something I loved, I needed to figure out a way to make a living at what I loved, or move on.

My boss at the time figured it out for me: He proposed that if I started writing about wine, that would fill enough pages to earn a living wage and health insurance.

Most wine critics do not come into wine writing this way. Most love wine, and then find their way to writing about it. I didnt love wine until I had been writing about it for a few years. I liked it, I loved particular things I tried, but I didnt have a warts-and-all love for it for quite a while. Mostly at first I found it overwhelming. What again was the difference between Bordeaux and Cabernet Sauvignon? What made a good wine list and a bad one? What was the right wine list for a Thai restaurant? Why did some Syrahs taste like jam and others like smoke? After all, wasnt this just the fermented juice of grapes? All apple ciders taste pretty similar, so why are two Rieslings so different?

Once I stopped feeling overwhelmed I did fall in love with the stuff, and I fell hard. Now I think its the rarest of all substances, a magical point where art and nature intersectlike a Renaissance landscape painting, or a bronze flower. But in this case the intersection doesnt just sit there to be admired, its poured right into you and makes you one with workers, thinkers, trees, wind, rain, and sunshine thousands of miles away. Wine is not merely the most marvelous drink on earth, but, considering that the key to making winethe yeastis found right on the grapes themselves, one of the great miracles and wonders of the natural world.

The path from being overwhelmed by wine to understanding it and being able to relax and enjoy its grace wasnt easy for me to find. It required a lot of reading, and a lot of tasting. However, since I needed to turn myself into a wine professional, fast, I quickly grew impatient with wine writing. Wine writers, God love them, are almost all burdened by knowing too much. They cant hear the words Sauvignon Blanc without bringing to mind the flint terroir of Sancerre or the mango-lime bouquet of Marlborough, and they live in such a wine-involved universe that they dont know that most of the other people in the country, even well-educated people, have no idea what theyre talking about.

Now that I know a lot about wine I realize this isnt as weird or arrogant as I once thoughtwe all know culturally specific things that we express in shorthand. For instance, you meet a friend you havent seen in a while in the airport:

Hungry? you ask.

Nah, I grabbed a Reuben in the business-class lounge.

How was it?

Better than youd think.

Chances are, a better-than-youd-think business-class-lounge Reuben conjures up a fairly definite picture in your mind. What is that picture?

Theres an inch or so of corned beef (salted, long-cooked beef brisket sliced across the grain), topped with sauerkraut (fermented shredded green cabbage in the German tradition), Swiss cheese (a cultured, long-aged milk product with a nutty, tangy taste), a pinkish dressing made with a good portion of mayonnaise (a creamy emulsification of egg yolks in vinegar and oil), and ketchup (a dark red concentrated spiced tomato paste). The sandwich [as a whole] is hot; it is contained between slices of rye or pumpernickel bread thick enough to prevent it from exploding; those slices of bread have a fifty-fifty chance of containing small caraway seeds; and so on. You likely know even more about this business-class-lounge Reuben without anyones telling you anything about itfor instance, it probably came with a pickle spear (cucumber brined in pickling spices, including allspice, cut in lengthwise quarters), and thin, deep-fried, well-salted slices of a white variety of a root vegetable that originated in the Andes served at room temperature (potato chips). Finally, you know intuitively, without even thinking about it, that this business-class-lounge Reuben was not consumed with a nice big glass of grapefruit juice but with a big Coke poured over a glass prefilled with plenty of ice.