Duncan Gammie on Wine

Wine is the thing I love most and the thing that nearly finished me. I did not give it up. I gave up the swallowing.

How I read a glass

Sight first, and briefly, because colour tells you less than people think. Then the nose, twice: once still, once after a swirl, because the second pass brings up everything volatile that the first one left behind. Then the palate, held and aerated, and then the finish, counted. I count it. Anything under four seconds is a wine that was made to be sold, not kept.

What I am listening for is balance. Acid against fruit, tannin against weight, alcohol against everything else. A great wine is one where no single element is shouting. The rest, the vineyard, the vintage, the name on the label, is context that helps you predict what the glass is going to do. It is not the thing itself.

What I actually recommend

For people still drinking: buy less, spend more, and drink it with food. A twenty five pound bottle opened on a Friday with something cooked properly will do more for you than five twelve pound bottles across a week. Most of what makes wine worth the trouble only shows up at the table.

For people not drinking: the non alcoholic category has moved a long way and most of it is still bad. What works are the wines built as low alcohol from the vineyard rather than stripped afterwards, and the fermented non grape drinks that never pretended to be wine in the first place. Verjus, good kombucha, alcohol free sparkling made by traditional method. I taste them the same way I taste everything else.

Tasting without drinking

You can do everything a sommelier does without a drop going down. I have taught the method to sommeliers, to people in recovery, to a wine director in Texas who wrote to me, and to hosts on camera in under a minute. It takes about a week to stop feeling strange and about a month to stop noticing.

The appendix of The Sober Sommelier is the whole thing written down: how to hold it, how to aerate it, how to spit cleanly in company, and what to do at a dinner where everyone is watching.