The Immortal's Guide to Wine

In more than five centuries of drinking, I have accumulated a great many opinions about wine. I hold them the way one holds a glass: firmly enough not to spill, loosely enough to set down. Mine have served me well. Yours will serve you better.

There is a certain kind of wine snob who treats your palate as a renovation project, a crumbling manor to be gutted and rebuilt until you taste what he tastes and swoon where he swoons. I have met this man in every century. He wore a ruff in 1590 and a quarter-zip today. He has never once been right about what you should enjoy.

Your palate needs no correcting. It is already doing its job, which is telling you what you like. The goal is not to taste like an expert. The goal is to notice what delights you, and then pursue more of it with the single-mindedness of a creature who has all the time in the world.

How to Build It

Drink widely, and pay a little attention when you do. I don't mean stopwatch-and-spittoon attention, just enough to catch what rises to meet you.

What do you smell before the first sip? Does the wine feel light and crisp on the tongue, or heavy and round? When the glass is half gone, do you reach for it again at once, or are you content to let it rest?

Ask those questions often enough and patterns emerge, the way a face emerges from candlelight. Perhaps you keep returning to wines with bright acidity. Perhaps green yellow chardonnay grapes calls to you more than blueish purple cabernet sauvignon grapes. Perhaps texture matters more than you suspected, and anything thin leaves you cold. None of this is random. It is your palate speaking in a steady voice, telling you what it hungers for.

Write It Down

Even the briefest note earns its keep:

"Pinot Noir, Napa. Red cherry, silky. Wanted a second glass."

That is enough. Three months from now, standing in a shop with no memory of what you loved, that single line will be worth more than any hundred-point scale.

Your phone's notes app will do nicely. A leather-bound tasting journal is not required, though if you enjoy that sort of thing, it is a perfectly respectable rabbit hole. I have filled several hundred.

Surviving the Grand Tasting

Everything above applies to a quiet glass at home. A grand tasting is another creature entirely: a ballroom of tables, hundreds of open bottles, and pourers eager to fill your glass. I have attended more of these than I care to count, and I offer the following counsel, including one piece no one else will volunteer.


– Mind the arithmetic. A tasting pour is about an ounce, and twenty-five of them add up to a full bottle. That arrives far sooner than you would think, which is why you will see professionals tasting and spitting.


– Let your nose decide. I can usually tell whether I will enjoy a wine from the aroma alone. If you lift a glass and the smell does not win you over, set it down. Do not waste a sip on it. Move on.


– Spit, or don't. Spitting keeps your head clear for the next hundred wines. It can also spoil a bit of the fun. Either way, you cannot go wrong.


– Taste what you may never meet again. Here is the secret. Your sips are limited, so spend them wisely. If the room holds rare, obscure or costly bottles, go to those first. The garden-variety wines on every supermarket shelf will be waiting for you next week. That tiny-production Napa Cabernet with a years-long waitlist will not.


– Photograph the bottle. When a wine thrills you, take a picture of the label. It may bear a name you cannot pronounce and will not remember. (Not ours, naturally. No one forgets a Vampire.) That photo is the grand-tasting version of your one-line note.

On Being Told You Are Wrong

You are not wrong.
If a $200 bottle leaves you unmoved, you have not failed some secret test. You have had an honest response, and honesty is rarer in wine than any vintage. Trust it. Only one palate has to live with your choices, and that palate is yours.

Start your notes with something worth remembering. Our Vampire Pinot Noir took Best of Class and 93 Points at the LA Invitational, and your own verdict is the one that counts. — shop Vampire Vineyards at vampire.com

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At some point, someone 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.Vampire Vineyards has been making gold medal-winning wine since 1988 — not because we followed the rules, but because we ignored the ones that didn't matter and obsessed over the ones that did. The fruit. The winemaking. The experience in the glass.This series exists to share everything we have learned. No pretension. No forest floors. Just wine, explained honestly, by someone who has had rather a lot of time to figure it out.

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