At some point, someone may have convinced you that wine was complicated. That it required the right vocabulary, the right knowledge, the right reverence. They were wrong. And I have had five hundred years to be certain of it.

I have watched empires rise and fall, survived every trend the industry has inflicted upon itself, and outlasted every sommelier who ever tried to make me feel underdressed for the occasion. In all that time, one thing has remained stubbornly true: most people enjoy wine far less than they could, simply because they were made to feel they weren't doing it properly.

Consider the moment you've probably experienced more than once. You're at dinner. Someone across the table swirls their glass with quiet authority, leans in, takes a long and considered sniff, and then announces — to no one in particular but also somehow to everyone — that they are detecting notes of forest floor.

Forest floor.

Not the wine. The floor... of a forest.

Unless that person has spent an unusual amount of time lying facedown in damp woodland, we may have strayed slightly from what is useful.

At Vampire Vineyards, we decided early on that we were not going to participate in that particular tradition. We have been actively refusing to participate in it since 1988, when our founder first had the vision of a wine called Vampire and brought it to the industry with some enthusiasm. The industry, for its part, was not enthusiastic back. A vice president at one of the nation's largest wine distributors sat through a brief portion of the pitch, stood up, put both hands flat on the table, and shouted — and this is a direct quote — “You're spoofing the industry.”

That was the end of the meeting.

We took it as a compliment. We still do.

Not because wine itself is pretentious — wine is just fermented grape juice, and fermented grape juice cannot be pretentious any more than a tomato can be arrogant — but because the conversation around wine has drifted so far from reality that many perfectly reasonable people feel genuinely intimidated by the prospect of ordering a glass in a restaurant, picking a bottle off a shelf, or simply admitting that they liked something without being able to justify it in the appropriate vocabulary.

That is unnecessary. And it ends here.

Wine does not require a vocabulary. It does not require a course, a certification, a set of the correct glasses, or a subscription to a magazine that uses the phrase 'muscular tannins' without apparent irony. It requires a glass, a reasonable temperature, and a willingness to pay attention to what you're drinking.

That's it.

This series — The Immortal's Guide to Wine — is not a wine course. It is not an attempt to turn you into the person at the dinner table talking about forest floors. It is an attempt to do the opposite: to strip away everything unnecessary and leave you with the things that actually help you enjoy wine more.

Because enjoying wine more is the only goal worth having.

We will talk about smell, which is where the whole experience really lives. We will talk about temperature, which matters far more than most people realize. We will talk about grapes, because understanding that different grapes produce different wines makes everything make sense rather quickly. We will talk about food pairing, but gently, and without making it seem like there are consequences for getting it wrong. We will also venture beyond wine entirely — into sangria, into prosecco, into the art of the red blend — because the world of what you can drink is larger and more interesting than the stuffier corners of wine culture would have you believe.

Drink what you like. We'll explain the rest.

Cheers!— The Count

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