Wasting Wine Money

One of the things that constantly amazes me is when I read or hear wine lovers balk at the cost of education. These same people will think nothing about “investing” thousands of dollars on wine, but balk at “wasting” a few hundred dollars on educational tools that will possibly immeasurably increase their understanding and appreciation of fine wine.

A lot of this resistance is caused by the proliferation of free information on the Internet. Wine geeks take the position, “information is free so why should I pay for it” and to a great extent that’s valid. But equally, in many cases you get what you pay for and whilst there are some great wine sites with lots of free information, most of it is free flowing, unstructured and undirected. The information you gain from these sites will increase your overall understanding and wine knowledge and may even provide great tasting notes, but let me repeat it’s unstructured and unspecific.

Yes you can learn a lot from the Internet’s free information but you can learn a lot more, much faster and in much better detail from specifically designed tools, and these tools take many forms. Books, more books, guides, encyclopaedias, crib cards, tasting sets, fault guides, TAFE courses etc. All these cost, but are they worth the money. ABSOLUTLY! And anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.

Let me provide some examples from my own experiences. Back in the Old Stone Age before I became a red bigot, I loved wine and was “self educated” and knew what I liked and what I didn’t like, but that was about it. Then I did a couple of wine tasting courses through The Wine Society and I started to realise that I knew absolutely nothing about wine. The courses taught the absolute basics about wine and increased my thirst for wine knowledge (another bad pun.)

Then came a few very basic wine books and magazines. Slowly I was learning more. These sources of information were all inexpensive and (that’s important because) I didn’t mind paying for them. As my knowledge grew I started to have more questions and the more I learnt the more I realised I didn’t know. Then a few years ago I bought a book that cost well over $100 called “The Taste of Wine” by Emile Peynaud. Whilst reading this book, I realised the course I did at The Wine Society whilst very useful at the time was “wine kindergarten” when it came to tasting and appreciating wine. This was at least high school material. I had managed to muddle through “wine primary school” on my own through my own resources, but if had “wasted some money” (which I could have spent on wine) on this sort of material years earlier my vinous education would have been infinitely faster and better.

Next came wine encyclopaedias (which are not inexpensive) and a fair bit of other material which all helped me to understand this subject in much more detail than had previously been possible. The next most profound purchase was Le Nez du Vin Red Wine and the Fault sets. No way I was going to pay for the Deluxe Edition - that was real money. Well, after one week with the Red set, the decision was made to sell it and buy the Deluxe Edition. The purchase of the complete set turned out to be one of the best wine investments I have ever made.

Over the course of you life now many $$$ worth of wine will you drink? Don’t you think it worthwhile “wasting” some of the money that you could spend on wine on education?

Keep Drinking

Ric ©