Like me, most North Americans don't know much about wine, but we talk about it endlessly. Why talk about wine? Beer is usually associated with sports, liquor with aggressive cocktail parties and wine with reflection.

These reflections required reflective, inductive and deductive thought, but moderate wine drinking promoted reflective discussion that helped crystallize my ideas.

 In 1748, Montesquieu published "The Spirit of Laws;" his estate also produced wine. The English bought many copies of the book and wine sales increased which led Montesquieu to quip: "The success of my book in that country contributed to the success of my wine, although I think the success of my wine has done still more for the success of my book."

A major benefit of living in the Frankfurt area was proximity to vineyards. We learned about wine by drinking it. When people came to visit, we drove along the Rhein river through to Koblenz, turned left and drove along the Mosel river stopping frequently at vineyards to taste and buy wine. One might ask - "How could you drive and drink all day?"  Sip, don't drink wine if you intend to buy cases of it.

 For my first wine tasting, I drank all of fifteen 0.1 liter glasses that significantly numbed my taste buds. As a result, I bought 50 bottles of wine that tasted like pee. There are many grape varieties, but most red wines are made from Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Syrah (Shiraz) and Zinfandel grapes; white wines are made from Riesling, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Semillon, and Chenin Blanc grapes.

In most countries, the grape used to make it describes the wine; except in France, where it is described by region: Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, Beaujolais, etc. Making wine is more complicated than stomping grapes into juice, letting it ferment and then bottling it.

Fine wine is like most fine art: a combination of the best materials (grapes), the best technology, and well-defined processes that are used to create wine by the artist/vintner. The weather must help: too little or too much sun, too little or too much rain, too high or too low temperatures can result in bad grapes. Growing, harvesting, fermenting in a stainless steel barrel, aging in oak barrels and bottling take more than a year.  

 The best wines in France grow in lousy soil. Rocky, chalky and mineral poor soil force the vine roots to go deep and struggle to stay alive. The stress of this struggle sometimes produces the best grapes; other times they whither or rot. When problems make you struggle, you can grow to greatness like a fine wine; or you can just whine; your choice.

If we are going to give the appearance of knowing something about wine, we need a little more terminology:

•  Varietal character - each grape has a specific smell and taste but reflects many flavors; some wine experts think Sauvignon Blanc should smell a little like cat piss (honest).
• Integration - components of the wine (acid, tannin, alcohol, sugar) are interwoven to balance the flavor.
•  Expressiveness - wine's aroma and flavors are well defined.
• Complexity - multiplicity of flavors change with each taste.
• Connectedness- bond between wine and its terroir: land, soil slope, elevation, and climate where the grape is grown. When you read a wine label, it describes how wonderful the wine is and lists a bunch of flavors which I always thought were artfully made up by an English major. They are not; there is actually a list. Here are a few for:

• Whites: apple, apricot, banana, coconut, fig, lemon, lime, orange, asparagus, olives, almond, hazelnut, yeast, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, white pepper, gardenia, geranium, honey suckle, rose, chalk, flint, hay, straw, oak, toast, vanilla, piss.
• Reds: blackberry, blueberry, raspberry, strawberry, prunes, asparagus, olives, truffle, all types of chocolate, coffee, mocha, espresso, black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, licorice, cedar, pine, geranium, rose, violet, oak, toast, vanilla, cola, game, tar, leather, manure.

Now we know five important words and a bunch of flavors; never mind that we don't know exactly what they mean, few do. It's like talking about politics, astrology or abstract art; it's not the content of what you say but how you connect harmonious sounding adjectives.

It helps to read the wine label to get this partly right. Before we can describe the wine, we must first taste it. Swirling and sniffing the wine is an art form in itself. Swirling will tell you about the viscosity of the wine (how thick it is). The slower it runs down the glass the more viscous. You can say something like: this wine has "nice legs." I don't know what this means, but it will make you sound sensuously knowledgeable.