Most people don't struggle to taste wine. They struggle to trust themselves.
The wine tasting started at eleven in the morning.
Too early for everybody pretending this was casual.
Long folding tables.
White paper over the tops.
Thirty glasses at each seat lined up like a lab experiment.
The room smelled like coffee, cardboard boxes, and somebody's cologne that got stronger every time he walked by.
Nobody ate enough breakfast.
You could tell by the speed people reached for the crackers.
A woman across from me kept taking photos before every pour. Not of the wine. Of the setup. The rows of glasses. The booklet. Her name tag.
Proof she was there.
Two seats down, a man in a quarter-zip kept using the word "serious."
"That's a serious wine."
"Very serious producer."
"Serious structure."
Nobody asked what he meant.
Everybody nodded anyway.
That happens a lot in wine.
People learn agreement before they learn honesty.
The instructor stood at the front of the room with a microphone clipped to his shirt collar. He talked about balance and precision and typicity while servers moved quietly behind us filling glasses in rows.
Taste.
Dump.
Taste again.
Write notes.
Move on.
The room slowly got quieter as the morning went on.
Not thoughtful quiet.
Nervous quiet.
People started watching each other before writing things down.
You could see it happen.
One person would smell the glass first and suddenly everybody else would too.
One person would nod and pens started moving.
Half the room spent more time studying reactions than tasting wine.
A guy beside me crossed out his own note after hearing somebody at the next table say "underripe."
He stared at the page for another few seconds before rewriting it completely.
I looked down and could still see the original words pressed hard into the paper underneath.
At lunch they brought sandwiches nobody really wanted.
Turkey.
Wilted lettuce.
Pasta salad sweating in little plastic cups.
Everybody loosened up after that.
The conversations got more honest once the scoring stopped.
One woman admitted she liked grocery store Pinot Grigio more than most of the wines we tasted all morning.
She said it quietly at first like she was confessing something embarrassing.
Then another guy laughed and said he still drank cheap Rioja out of a coffee mug when his kids finally went to sleep.
A few people smiled with actual relief after that.
Like somebody finally opened a window in the room.
The instructor walked by during lunch and everybody straightened back up again.
Voices lowered.
A few people flipped their tasting booklets back open like they'd been caught doing something wrong.
That was the part I kept thinking about on the drive home.
Not the scores.
Not the tasting notes.
Just how fast grown adults can start looking for permission around things they already enjoy.
At a gas station outside town I grabbed a bottle of water and stood behind a couple arguing quietly near the counter.
The man held up two cheap wines from the endcap.
One had a gold sticker on it.
One didn't.
"You always care about those awards," the woman said.
He shrugged.
"I just don't want to get the bad one."
The cashier rang them up without looking up from her phone.
Outside, the heat hit hard enough to fog my glasses for a second.
By the time I got to my truck, they were already drinking from a plastic cup between them in the parking lot.
They never talked about the award sticker again.
No notes. No booklet. No instructor walking by.
They just drank the wine.
That's the whole thing.
© Jake Ruse — The No B.S. Wine Letter / Austin Texas Wine Society. All rights reserved.