For about two years, I nodded along.
Someone would swirl a glass, hold it up to the window, sniff twice, and say something like “gooseberry and wet slate.” And I would sniff my own glass, find grape juice and alcohol, and nod. Wet slate. Sure. I had licked exactly zero slate in my life, wet or dry, but I nodded, because the room was nodding, and I was 26 and terrified of being the one who didn’t get it.
The nodding is the disease. I want to tell you how I got over it, because it took me embarrassingly long and the cure was simpler than I expected.
Here is the thing nobody in those rooms said out loud: they were mostly nodding too.
I found this out by accident. I was pouring at a small trade tasting, filling glasses of a Loire Sauvignon Blanc, and a very confident man in a good jacket told me it had a “classic Sancerre minerality.” The wine was from Chile. I had poured it myself. He wasn’t lying, exactly. He was doing what I had been doing. Reaching for the words that sounded right and hoping they landed. That was the moment something loosened in my chest.
So I started over. I threw out the vocabulary and kept only my own mouth.
The first real practice I did was stupid and it worked. I bought oranges, lemons, a green apple, a jar of honey, a bag of coffee beans, and a fistful of fresh herbs. I smelled each one with my eyes closed, slowly, on purpose, the way you’d study a face. Most people move through smells at highway speed. Coffee in the morning, we barely register it. When you slow down and actually stay with a smell for ten full seconds, it opens up. The lemon has a bitter pith part and a bright oil part and they arrive at different times.
Then I went back to the wine and did the same thing. Not “what am I supposed to find here.” Just, “what is actually happening in my nose right now.” And things showed up. Not slate. But lemon, yes. A little bruised apple. Something that reminded me of the smell of a struck match, which I later learned has a real name and a real cause and made me feel like a detective who’d cracked a small case.
The mouth came next, and the mouth is honestly easier once you stop performing. Wine does a few plain, physical things in your mouth. It can make you salivate, which is acidity. It can dry out your gums and the sides of your tongue, which is tannin. It can feel thin like skim milk or thick like cream, which is body. It can taste sweet or bone dry. None of that requires poetry. You can feel all of it with the same equipment you use to tell hot coffee from iced.
I leaned hard on those four things for a whole year. Does it make me drool. Does it dry me out. Is it thin or fat. Is it sweet. That’s it. Four questions a five-year-old could answer, and they told me more about whether I’d enjoy a bottle than any tasting note ever printed on a shelf-talker.
Somewhere in there I read the actual mechanics of how this works, the way retronasal smell carries most of what we call “flavor” up the back of the throat, and it turned out the fancy people and the plain-mouth beginner were doing the exact same biological thing. If you want the real version, the wine tasting entry lays it out without the jacket-and-swirl theater. Reading that did more for my confidence than any class, because it told me my nose was not broken. It was just untrained and honest.
The words came back eventually, but on my terms. Now when I say a wine smells like crushed raspberry and a struck match, I mean it, because I put raspberries and matches through my nose on purpose and I know what they do. When I don’t have a word, I say “it smells red” or “it smells like the inside of my grandmother’s spice drawer,” and nobody has ever thrown me out of a room for it. Usually somebody laughs and says yeah, actually, it does.
I think a lot of people quit wine before they start because that first room scared them. The swirling, the slate, the price lists, the sense that everyone else got a memo. I ran a shop for a few years after that trade tasting, and the single most common thing I heard across the counter was “I don’t really know anything about wine.” From people about to spend real money. Every time, I wanted to lean over and say, you know how a lemon smells. You know when something makes your mouth water. You’re 80 percent of the way there and you have no idea.
Tasting well is not a talent you’re born with or a secret club you buy into. It’s paying slow attention to something you’re already putting in your mouth. That’s the whole trick. Slow down, smell it like you mean it, ask the four dumb questions, and say what you actually find instead of what you think you should find.
I still get it wrong. I called a Barolo “young and closed” last month and it turned out I’d just served it too cold. The wine was fine. I was the problem. But I said what I found, I was wrong out loud, and I learned something. That beats two years of nodding at slate.
Trust your own mouth. It’s been telling the truth your whole life.