There is something else

As with a lot of things in my life, I came to the world of wine somewhat arseways.

I started working in wine more than a decade ago, though it took me a while to recognise that I was actually working in wine.

In Bordeaux, where I spent three years, I rubbed shoulders with people who seemed to have been born into top châteaux. Some literally had. Even my fellow international students often came with glittering backgrounds: they’d been sommeliers, they’d made wine, they’d done everything.

I’ve spent even longer in London, where there is a traditional and well-trodden path into “the trade” and it often involves membership of exclusive clubs – only sometimes of the bricks-and-mortar kind. At least some of these people own top hats. Virtually all of them grew up with wine cellars.

My own story isn’t quite as linear as all that. It starts with three wine tastings in my native Dublin, Ireland.

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I’m in a small hotel conference room. There’s a nice Australian woman here. She works for one of those very, very big Australian wine brands, and she’s here to present an exciting new range of wines to me and a roomful of colleagues I barely know. She says they pick the grapes at night because it’s too hot during the day. I don’t really know anything about wine or how you make it, though this sounds plausible enough.

This is my first proper wine tasting. It’s sometime in 2013, and what I remember more than any aroma or flavour is the novelty of being physically away from my place of work.

Work at that time was a supermarket in North Dublin, and for 18-39 hours a week, that’s where you’d find me. Now and then I would travel slightly further afield: another branch, a training day at a motorway hotel. Stepping outside the routine day-to-day always had some appeal, like jury service or a snow day. Those infrequent jaunts provided a glimpse into some liminal space, offering the slightest suggestion that there just might be something else out there. You’d be amazed how quickly you can convince yourself there’s not.

Tomorrow, I would be back keying orders and rolling cages around a shop floor. But for today at least, I was elsewhere. And there was a winemaker from the other side of the world and she’d brought branded pens and tasting booklets.

Any memory of those wines has long since left me. Having done precisely no formal wine tasting until this point, I would’ve had no frame of reference anyway. I remember there were spittoons, for actual spitting out of your actual mouth. I remember thinking that was very odd altogether.

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That was my first proper wine tasting, but it was not in fact my first wine tasting. My first actual wine tasting was hosted not by an accomplished winemaker, but by some guy at the supermarket: me.

A year or so earlier, I was at work – barely a month into the wine career I didn’t yet know I’d started. I had recently taken a promotion and the breadth of my domain had expanded to include the wine department.

Having already worked in grocery retail for seven years (humble brag), I was a dab hand at dealing with virtually any customer enquiry you might reasonably expect to encounter in a leafy-ish Dublin suburb: this milk is expired; that sirloin steak is supposed to be 20% off; I’ve forgotten my loyalty card, my credit card, my cash; that cashier tutted at me; this place has gone to the dogs. I’d heard it all. Well, almost.

“What’s this wine like?”

Face-to-face with an earnest, inquisitive woman waving a bottle of Beaujolais-Villages, what was I supposed to do? I dunno what the wine is like, I thought. I haven’t tasted it; I haven’t really tasted any wines, ever.

Sensing perhaps that I didn’t have an answer (there may have been cartoon stink lines coming out of me), she asked if it was possible to try the wine there and then. Before I knew it, I was clumsily opening a real-life bottle of wine, cork and all. I filled her up a little plastic shot-glass. I tasted, too, and so did a couple of other random hangers-on.

Through no fault of my own, I was hosting a wine tasting.

There wasn’t supposed to be any wine tasting; a moment ago, there wasn’t one; and yet, there we were. I can’t remember what the wine tasted like, of course. The back label probably said something like “kirsch and banana”. Instead, I remember new possibilities and a strong sense of autonomy. Existential freedom.

I had just, for the first time ever, opened a bottle of wine with a waiter’s friend (having only very recently learned what that is). And I’d done it in front of a little audience, while imparting some of my nascent wine-knowledge. I knew from reading the in-store leaflets that Beaujolais-Villages is a bit different – and a bit better – than Beaujolais Nouveau, which I’d also heard of and could pronounce. So I said something about that while gingerly filling up additional glasses.

At least two, maybe even three, people nodded their heads accordingly. This was a masterclass.

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Since then, I’ve been to lots of wine tastings. To my surprise, I’ve even gotten quite comfortable hosting them. There are moments and situations that I’ll never forget: speaking at the Vancouver International Wine Festival; leading a wine dinner in Seoul with a private dining room of shit-hot sommeliers; my first taste of Château Palmer on my first day working there. Dozens more. One looms above them all.

My earliest tasting where I can still really remember the wine was also probably the most profound and significant of my entire life. It took place on a random evening in 2013 at my parents’ kitchen table in Raheny.

I’ve bought a bottle of wine from work. It’s got an illustrated label of a little kid flying a wine bottle through outer space, past an exploding star. The design has contributed approximately two-thirds to my purchase decision, the remainder being the intriguing descriptor of “animal” in a tasting note I read in the in-store leaflet. The wine is called Supernova and it’s a Malbec from the Loire Valley, from a producer called Domaine des Grandes Espérances (fittingly, maybe: French for “high hopes”).

There’s no special occasion today, but I open it up. Opening bottles of wine is something I’ve still not quite got the hang of, and to make matters worse, this one has a wax seal. It’ll be a few years yet before I learn that the best thing to do is go straight through the wax with your corkscrew rather than bothering to chip any of it away.

The table is a wasteland of black wax bits before I manage to prise out the cork and pour myself a taste. The liquid is thick, inky and black, darker than any wine I’ve seen before. It is easily the most complex and interesting thing I’ve tasted yet: spicy and rich, savoury rather than fruity. But there is fruit, and it tastes like heavy, small blueberries. And fur and blood and charcuterie. It’s drying in the mouth in a way that I lack the vocabulary to describe.

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I’m almost certain that this was the bottle that convinced me to truly get into wine. For a year wine had been this peripheral thing in my life: something different to do at work, something new to talk about, something to learn about, even.

But at this exact moment, something seemed to click. Something fell into place. I wanted to know more about wine. I wanted to know more. I wanted more.