What Sort of People Take French Wine Tasting Courses?

At first, naïveté makes everything like Christmas - all newness and wonder. But when it comes to wine tasting, after a while you get tired of knowing less about wine than even your glass does.

When we lived in France, every night at dinner, my French husband Maxime would retrieve a bottle of wine from his wine safe. Then he'd hide the label, make me taste the wine and try to guess what it was. These incessant wine tests and my incessant failing of them reached the point where I’d had enough. I didn’t want to stop drinking the lovely French wines, but I did want to stop getting a headache every time I did.

So I came up with a plan:

‘Tonight, I’M choosing the wine,’ I announced to Maxime one evening. ‘I mean, it’s not fair, you get to choose every night!’

And if I chose it, I was certainly not going to test myself on it.

Maxime looked at me dubiously. ‘OK …’

I grinned triumphantly and jumped up to grab a bottle. But um … which one? Oh God, I could feel another headache coming on. I could imagine several things happening:

a     a. I’d inadvertently choose a sweet wine

b     b. I’d inadvertently choose something that wasn’t ready to drink

c     c. I’d inadvertently choose something Maxime was saving for a special occasion

Luckily I had a solution. It was to say ‘oh bugger it!’ and pick a wine at random.

I ferried the random bottle to Maxime, flinching a bit as I handed it over for inspection.

‘This is undrinkable,’ he announced.

Oh. At least that particular answer was unexpected.

‘Well, what are you doing with an undrinkable wine in your fridge?’ I answered back.

‘I was given it by a friend.’

The poor friend, I thought.

‘You can drink this if you want, but I’m not,’ Maxime said, and marched stiffly off back to the wine safe.

I sighed. Here we bloody go again. Then something occurred to me. Maxime couldn’t have been born knowing about wine (although you could certainly be forgiven for thinking so). He must have learnt somehow.

‘How come you know about all these wines?' I asked him. 'How come whenever anyone makes you guess a wine, you always get it right?’ (I can’t tell you how annoying that is. You’re just hanging out for the Wine Lord to take a fall.)

‘I did a wine course.’

Oh. Oh good! I thought. Maxime’s not really a supernatural wine freak. He had to learn like a mere mortal! And … I’m a mere mortal. Maybe I could learn too …?

And so it was that every Friday evening after that, I drove to the Alsatian town of Rouffach on the wine road. I would spend a couple of hours with a room full of others in an building that looked like an old schoolhouse, covered in shaggy stork’s nests, and listen to Alsace’s wine experts hold forth. ‘Apple taste, malic acid, in Sylvaner grape,’ I would write. ‘Chaptalization - adding sugar - what some naughty winemakers do in Alsace.’ After the theory, there was the practice: we students went to our benches, each with a sink for rinsing, and the teacher would pour samples of wine for us to guess and describe. We covered the six Alsace white grapes, learning what makes a good wine, and how to comment on it, judge it and detect a range of defects. Sounds good, right?

Not good. The thing was, the course was in French and the other students all worked in the wine industry. I wondered if I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Would Maxime divorce me if I failed a wine exam?

At the end of the course, I went to the Alsace wine headquarters in Colmar for the wine exam. The interior of the building was UFO shaped and laid out like a futuristic parliament. The examiners were seated in the middle on a dais, dressed in official wine robes. They looked like real wine lords, looking down on us with grave faces. No one said a word as the robed ones got up and walked around, silently filling our glasses. With a shaking hand, I took a large sip of the first glass to settle my nerves (that’s the advantage of an exam in wine. I could've done with a big glass of Riesling in year 12 maths. My answers might have gotten a little more creative than is desired for maths, but hey, it would’ve been a lot more fun).

The first task was to identify the grape varieties, and then guess the defects in various wines the examiners had added things to. The finale was a commentary on a mystery wine to be delivered before the examiners. When my turn came for the commentary, I was left in a room by myself to bond with a glass for ten minutes before being summoned before the examiners. I picked up the glass and found myself sniffing and swirling the way I’d seen many a person I’d assumed to be a pretentious git do, and what Maxime does. (But Maxime, when he tastes, doesn’t seem to be out to impress anyone. In fact, it seems that at that moment, he wouldn’t care if he was alone on the planet.)

Having finished my git-like wine swirling routine, I went back into the UFO and stood before the robed examiners. I was to start by giving them a visual description of the wine. We had been taught to begin by saying ‘I am in the presence of a white wine’. But I simply couldn’t bring myself to say something so bloody naff. I said I thought the wine looked dark gold instead. Luckily the wine lords didn’t appear to mind. I moved to the nose, the bouquet.

‘I can smell mushroom,’ I announced. Not very bouquet like, that wine.

‘OK,’ said one of the examiners. ‘And does the wine also taste like mushroom?’

I couldn't taste any mushroom. I panicked. Oh God, should it taste of mushroom? Should it? Maybe he was trying to trick me?

‘No,’ I said finally.

‘Good. It shouldn’t taste like mushroom.’

Phew.

My palms were sweating like two little fountains by the time we finished. Feeling faintly sick after the harrowing session with the mushroom wine (drinking at nine in the morning may also have had something to do with it), I milled about with the other wine students while the examiners marked our papers. Eventually, we were called back into the UFO. The examiners announced who had passed, and who had got the highest mark. Well! Let’s just say the result was a turn up for the books. I came out wearing a smile wide enough to crack my face. I had done EVEN BETTER THAN MAXIME! It was a real David shoves it up Goliath moment.

So Maxime wouldn’t have to divorce me after all. Wait a minute, I thought - Maxime got a lower mark than me, so maybe I should divorce him? Or at least make him do the vacuuming.

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