“I’ve Never Had Wine Before”… What?

September 4th, 2024

In customer service you get a lot of questions, some are pretty common, others are more unique. Over the weekend someone came in looking for a wine recommendation, because they had never had wine before and figured it was time to give it a shot.

What?

I found this almost as surprising as the time someone tasted a wine at one of our Friday afternoon spotlights and said, “Wait, they make white wine?” I was most flabbergasted because presumably in this case the fella in question had tried wine before and somehow missed one of the primary colors of wine.

How do I even go about recommending a wine for somebody to try that has never had one before? Do I suggest starting where I did with wine, three liter jugs of sangria? A lot of us wine enthusiasts start in places of necessity not preference. When you’re 19 and all you can get your hands on is a bottle of Wild Irish Rose or a pint of what you would later realize was cooking rum (the bottle was in another language, how were we to know?) you work with what you’ve got. And in the process you learn not to return to the 100 proof banana schnapps.

The low hanging fruit would be to recommend something sweet, since sweet wine has a relatively low barrier of entry. I figured why not ask what else they preferred for their libations, perhaps there I would glean some information of use. Someone who likes drinking amaretto sours may have a differently inclined palate than someone who only drinks barrel strength whiskey neat.

Since our contender was a fan of margaritas and rum & cokes, it gave me a little direction to go in. Perhaps something with a strong citrusy character, or maybe a deeper, bolder wine more driven by fruit and power as neither rum nor coke are delicate in profile. The other consideration was whether or not to go conventional or avant garde. If one must learn the rules to break the rules, starting with a common grape like Chardonnay or Merlot might be safer than a Slovenian Malvasija or a solera blend of Xarel-lo and Garnacha Blanca from Spain. Both of which, of course, we have.

Something I appreciated while getting into wine was when I could actually smell or taste what the wine writers wrote about. They used all those nice words of fruits and plants that I knew, but I could never smell the damn stuff. The problem was less with their writing and more with the wine that I was choosing to experiment with. If the wine retails for $9 and you can buy it in a gas station, it isn’t likely to have enough varietal typicity to have complex layers of fruit, flowers, and beyond.

I gravitated to some of the more easily accessible grapes, in terms of aromatics, when I started out. I really enjoyed Gewurztraminer and Sauvignon Blanc because they really smell the way that they are described, no question about it. When they say lychee and rose petals for Gewurztraminer, you bet your sweet bippy that you’re going to smell it.

With that in mind, I did wind up going with a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. The grapefruit is prominent, the cut grass is often evident, and it’s still summer, so why not? Maybe we’ll have a new wine drinker on our hands.

-Joe Buchter, Import Wine Buyer

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