Wine Is for Grown-Ups but I Drink It Anyway

I didn't enjoy wine for the longest time. Along with olives, pickled onions and grapefruit I figured it was just one of those things you just grew into, grown-up foodstuffs to be consumed by grown-ups guests at dinner parties while talking about books, art and the stock market.

I didn’t feel grown-up. I’m 42 and I still don’t. These days I love olives and picked onions (grapefruit I still don’t understand, why’s it so bitter?) and finally, wine crept into my culinary vocabulary in my early thirties.

I have a theory, the older you get, the more wine becomes ubiquitous in every setting.

“Shall we share a bottle of Merlot?” someone would ask at a restaurant.

“Anyone fancy a Sauvignon Blanc?” someone would say as Saturday afternoon rolled into the evening.

"Red or white?" I'd be asked at nearly every event I attended.

Am I grown-up now?

Until recently, if someone asked me to list different types of wine, I’d have said red, white and that one in the middle. Oh, and the stock market still eludes me (it's not real so how do you make money?!).

My meagre wine education began a few years ago through a sophisticated and well-to-do man I met through my partner. He knew a thing or two about wines. He had a wine cellar. Well a wine cupboard, but I was still impressed.

He took us to a restaurant chosen specifically because they stocked an Argentinian red he wanted to try. I wish I could tell you what it was, but all I know is it cost a lot and tasted amazing.

This made me realise something... the only time I’d previously dabbled in wine was at house parties when all the beer had gone and I was forced to drink alcoholic grape juice from a box for that retailed at £3.99.

Boxed wine is the sort that makes you grimace with each sip, reds that steal all moisture from the mouth and whites that taste like malt vinegar.

But this Argentinian red was so marvellous - and complimented the steak we were eating so perfectly - my unsophisticated brain couldn’t comprehend the new taste sensation.

What was this crazy alchemy? How can food be improved so much by wine?

So this is what everyone’s been talking about. Now I understand, now I want to know more.

Let's talk about the perfect pairing

Skip forward a few years and I'm sitting in a restaurant in a five-star hotel on the island of Guernsey with my private bank colleagues having dinner in what they pretentiously called ‘The Wine Room’.

That’s right. Five-star. Wine Room. Private Bank. Me.

Maybe I am grown-up.

It sounds snobby - almost objectionable - but the truth is we were four low-level workers making the most of the company credit card on a two-day business trip.

It was also as close to Christmas as you can get and still be working, so we'd decided to have our own festive celebration. As we were in a private room, we set up a bluetooth speaker and played Christmas songs from a Spotify playlist I'd put together (it's here if you want to hear it).

Since it was Christmas, and more importantly none of us were footing the bill, we had slowly been working our way through the wine menu, food being a distant second on the agenda.

One of my colleagues was already worse for wear, and he kept picking up £700 bottles of dessert wine and pretending to drink them to the great dismay of the French sommelier. “Please sir, do not touch the wines, you must pay for them if you break them!” he repeated.

I told you it wasn’t as sophisticated as it sounded.

My inebriated colleague ordered another wine to appease the sommelier as 'Step Into Christmas' by Elton John played on the speaker. Odd that I remember that, but I do.

“It’s only £27 a bottle,” he said to my boss, who tacitly approved the order with a nod.

It was a Sancerre, a French white wine named after the Sancerre region, southwest of Orléans. Wines are often recognised by their home region, Chablis and Champagne being other examples.

I didn’t know much about Sancerre wine until then. What I know now is it’s a crisp, dry white that has very little interaction with oak during the fermentation process, making it taste extraordinarily clean and refreshing.

When it arrived and we had distributed the bottle between us, I had the same taste sensation I'd experience with the Argentinian red a few years prior.

We were eating crab and prawns and the wine pushed flavours into the forefront of our senses, amplifying and overloading tastebuds.

We were lulled into muted pleasure, the only sounds arising were agreeable hums and responding nods.

It was an incredible moment of a perfect wine and food pairing; the sort of perfection that you text your friends about after the evening comes to a close, the sort of perfection you wax lyrical about to bored partners who've heard your story before. Yes, the Sancerre you had, in Guernsey. I remember you telling me.

The saltiness of the seafood, the cleansing bite of the cold, white wine, it is a moment we all still recall, several years later, a sort of mind-meld induced by a collective pleasure overload.

I’d enjoyed a nice Chablis here and there (an oak-based Chardonnay) and a few light reds that danced on the tongue, but this wine had outdone its regional rivals in leaps and bounds.

The meal ended and the bill arrived, revealing the Sancerre was actually £79 a bottle, fifty pounds more than my colleague suggested. My boss, who had to sign off the expenses, would probably have been more annoyed if he too hadn't experienced the near-spiritual transcendence through taste.

Classic Combos

Ok, so it's just food, but we are all human, hardwired for our brains to light up with pleasure when we consume something nourishing.

When my baby son was born he needed a cannula fitted into his arm for fluids. No pain killer was administered, just a dab of sugar on the baby's tongue was enough to distract him from pain. His face lit up as the dextrose mixture touched his lips. That's how hardwired we are to focus on food and drink.

Sancerre and seafood is a classic combo. I implore you to try it.

But of course, there are others; a peppery red with a well-cooked steak, a cold lager with a spicy curry, a fizzy coke with a greasy burger, milk and cookies, tea and biscuits, the list goes on.

It's odd, how these pairings work. I'm not sure anyone knows how or why exactly, but work they do.

I've had Sancerre several times since. It's now my go-to wine, I can order it with aplomb and pretend I know what I'm talking about, but I don't, I'm simply chasing the hit of that first time, that stolen night in Guernsey in The Wine Room. I still don't feel grown-up, but now, I do drink wine.

Perhaps next I'll try the stock market.