Mix genuine enjoyment with some background knowledge and stir in your parents’ wedding anniversary: The secret, as is often the case, is in the mix. The Times’ celebrated wine expert offers advice for enjoying the popular drink. Excerpt from “How to Love Wine,” November 13, 2012.

ERIC ASIMOV, Chief Wine Critic, The New York Times; Author, How to Love Wine

In conversation with VIRGINIA MILLER, Head Food and Drink Writer, Bay Guardian

MILLER: Why did you write How to Love Wine, and why now?

ASIMOV: I’ve been the wine critic at The [New York] Times since 2004. Naturally people want to talk to me about wine, and it seemed to take the form of people confessing their troubles to me as if I were a shrink at a cocktail party.

People would say, “You know, I like wine, but I just don’t get all those flavors and aromas that everybody talks about. I don’t know; maybe I just don’t have the right equipment for it.”

There was a sense of anxiety and inadequacy that people were expressing to me that, after a while, began to really bother me. This is particularly so because right now we live in the greatest time in history to love wine. We have a greater diversity of wines available today from more places around the world, in more styles, from more grapes. With all this pleasure available, it hurt me to see people having obstacles in the way of their pleasure.

MILLER: A quote that I love near the beginning of the book is, “Wine is not the sort of thing that requires book learning, academic training or special classes, but rather an elemental pleasure that satisfies emotionally and physically.” Could you expound upon that for our audience?

ASIMOV: As I started to think about why people were feeling this sense of anxiety, I looked at the way our culture talks about wine, thinks about wine, tells people they ought to educate themselves about wine.

It seemed to me that we’re conveying the idea to people that before they can just enjoy wine in the simplest possible way, they have to know everything there is to know about it. Essentially you have to become a connoisseur before you can just enjoy a glass of wine.

To me, that seems backward, and not just with wine: with anything. If you want to take up skiing, for example, you try it out and you fall in love with it. That’s when you pursue it. Music, sports, books, art – anything. Why not in wine? You want to establish an emotional connection to wine first, fall in love with it and then, if you decide you want to plunge in more deeply, that’s the time for the books and the classes and everything else.

MILLER: For those of us who are already starting with the intimidation – we’re hearing the noises, we’re hearing everybody’s opinion about wine and we’re not confident in our own – how do we start and just get that pure appreciation and pleasure in it?

ASIMOV: That is the question. It’s not a simple answer, as much as we want it to be. One of the common themes that you see in the literature about wine is attempts to demystify wine, as if all of these words and nomenclature we use simply fog everything up and that in reality it’s a simple thing. That’s not true, really. The initial pleasures from wine are very simple. All you have to do is drink it and enjoy it. What could be simpler than that? But that’s really just the beginning of it.

Demystification suggests that that’s where it ends. The fact is that wine at its heart really is a mystery. As much as we know scientifically about how wine is made – the fermentation, which was a mystery for so many millennia, is now understood for less than a century – there are a lot of things about wine that we don’t understand. We don’t understand how it ages, how it changes, why certain processes take place, why certain flavors are in the wine, where they come from. So to suggest that you can demystify wine doesn’t square with people’s experience with something that is mysterious.

MILLER: In the book you get into the longing all of us have for certainty. We want things to be certain, spelled out, black and white. The opposite of that would be doubt and uncertainty, which you are saying are friends of wine.

ASIMOV: We’ve just all been through the ordeal of the presidential election and political commercials and that sort of thing. Doubt never creeps into politics. That would cause an extreme dislocation. The world is an uncertain place. If you’re being honest about issues and processes in the world, you have to look at the complexities, you have to look at both sides, you can’t be certain about things, and certainly not about something as complicated as wine. Instead of predicting that this wine is going to be just right to drink three years from now, you have to allow that that’s a guess.

I don’t think it’s good for the business of being a wine critic to allow that. You don’t want to undermine your own authority, but you have to ask, Why are people so desperate for this daddy-like authority when it comes to wine?

Bad taste

MILLER: The guides that a lot of us go to are tasting notes, or we’re relying on blind tastings from the experts, wine ratings – and you get into all of these in your book. I think they’re some of the most interesting passages. One of my favorite quotes is, “At best, tasting notes are a waste of time. At worst they are pernicious.” I thought maybe we could dive right in and discuss tasting notes, blind tastings and the rest.

ASIMOV: When I started to think about why people were experiencing this sense of intimidation – and this is nothing new, everybody in the wine industry understands that the public is intimidated by wine – I started thinking about the way we talk about it. It’s always in the flowery language of tasting notes. There are wine writers who have been making fun of tasting notes forever. It’s the perfect grist for satire, so it’s nothing new to take them on. But people wave off the criticism, and if you really look deeply at tasting notes you have to ask yourself if they actually convey anything useful about wine whatsoever. If you look at a description – this wine tastes like black cherry, this wine tastes like raspberry, this wine tastes like a combination of the two, and the fourth one tastes like boysenberries and cloudberries – would you make a buying decision based on the various incremental berry differences? Probably not. Nor would you be able to taste those differences in the wine.

If you take any three wine critics who use tasting notes and compare their notes on a single wine, their references are completely different. It’s one glass of wine, but you’ve got completely different descriptions. So what do any of them mean? If you take three different wines from one critic, they’ll use the same references time and time again. You know, “This wine tastes like fig compote and tobacco, that one tastes like fig cake and pipe tobacco, the third one tastes like melted fig compote.” The differences are so incremental, but in the end, they don’t speak to the way we experience wine at a dinner table, at a restaurant, with a loved one. There are so many more elements that help us understand what a wine is about.

If you want to figure out how you feel about wine, use what I call the home wine school. Essentially you adopt a new best friend, the wine merchant, at the best shop nearby. Wine merchants are like sommeliers, and they both remind me of reference librarians. They love what surrounds them and if they can get you as a captive audience, they’re going to talk your ear off and tell you about everything that they love and they want to turn you on to their passion, which happens to be the wines that they know better than somebody who is writing from a great distance.

What I suggest doing is making a small investment, making a budget for a case of wine, 12 bottles, and tell the merchant to mix up a box. He or she will probably ask you some questions about your own tastes, which you may or may not be able to answer but it doesn’t matter. You’ll take home a box of 12 different bottles and over time you’ll open a bottle, every night with dinner maybe, or whatever is comfortable with you, and you take some notes on it, your own reaction to these wines. Maybe you’ll find that this is boring and you’re really not that interested, which is OK, because nobody is really obliged to learn about wine.

If you find yourself interested, then you have an opportunity to gather your own thoughts, go back to that merchant when that first box is finished and do it again based on what you found the first time. The repeated acquisition of these cases of wine and your own thoughts about them will tell you if this is something you’re at all interested in pursuing, in which case there are other things you can do. Let’s say you found out that you loved Pinot Noir from the Santa Cruz Mountains. Now I’m going to buy 12 bottles of that kind of wine and really get deep into this narrow field, or maybe that’s the time to get a book or take a class, because you know that this is something that you really want to do. Now it’s an act of volition rather than an act of obligation.

MILLER: Going back to the tasting notes, the critics, the voices and tuning that out, doesn’t that essentially put you out of a job?

ASIMOV: I hope that that’s not the message that I’m conveying to people in my writing in the Times. I’m trying to get past tasting notes. It’s hard, because it’s ingrained in us. We’ve learned about wine by reading that sort of wine writing. There’s a lot more out there.

One of the things that really bothers me about tasting notes, going beyond what I said before, is that the process isolates wine to only what’s in the glass. From the Consumer Reports point of view, that’s all that matters. If we don’t know who produced it, where it came from, how much it costs, we’re not affected by bias. As a writer I find that infantilizing. Why aren’t movie reviewers forced to review a movie without knowing who directed it? Why aren’t reviewers given books with the cover torn off and all information masked so they’re not influenced by what they know? No, because it’s ridiculous. You want to bring your knowledge of context, of a director’s predilections and past work, of an author’s influences. That helps you make sense of what you’re tasting. Good wine is not just a beverage – this makes it almost unique in terms of beverages – it’s really an expression of culture. People have been making wine in some places for thousands of years. It’s the product of the soil on which the grapes are grown, it’s the place and the community, the people who make it. If you ignore all these things, you’re missing out on a significant part of what makes wine fascinating.

MILLER: People are asking about the difference between a $1,000 bottle or a $100 bottle and a $20 bottle. Does price matter?

ASIMOV: That’s an important question, and the difference is inversely proportional to how much money you have in your bank account. If you’re a zillionaire, there is no difference. If you don’t have a lot of money, a $1,000 bottle is unimaginable.

There is no direct correlation between price and bottle – but occasionally there is.

When I was first learning about wine in the late 1970s and ’80s, you would meet these guys who would reminisce about the case of ’61 Latour that they bought for $25, and you’re banging your head against the wall because that was a classic vintage of great Bordeaux that in the ’80s cost hundreds of dollars.

I remember wanting to buy a 30th anniversary wine for my parents in 1985. I had never had a great bottle of wine, so I thought this was the opportunity because I needed to have that. I thought they would enjoy it, too. [Laughter.] I found a bottle, through a guy I knew who worked in restaurants, of 19[55] La Mission, a great Bordeaux; and the ’55 was 30 years old, from their wedding year. The price I was quoted was $185. I was like, “Oh my god, $200 for a bottle of wine? That’s insane.” It was something that I could splurge on. Nowadays that bottle would be worth $4,000, or something like that. A great old Bordeaux like that would be out of my splurge zone, unfortunately.

It was worth it to me, because the meaning and the memories of that bottle have always stayed with me. My mom still has the bottle and a portrait of my dad next to it.

That’s the context of wine, and that’s why context is so important and why wine is so meaningful. I don’t remember the water we drank that night, and if we’d had a beer I probably wouldn’t remember that either, but this bottle represented something and it was deep and memorable, and in the whole context of that evening it was incredibly worth the price.

This is one of the reasons I always try to think of wine not in isolation, but as part of this tableau with food, family and friends. It’s an environment in which wine is always a part, like bread or salt. It’s a staple of this gathering. That helps give it meaning.