Fitness Training for Wine Drinking
Is black stemware to wine as Vibram shoes are to running?
Posted: Oct 9, 2012 11:00am ET
When I took up
running after years of playing team sports, I gave myself permission to not be
competitive: no races, no time-trials, no slippery-slope to marathons. If I
could do an around-the-park loop of 3.5 miles a couple times a week without
collapsing like Scarlett O'Hara after a fight with Rhett, I was totally all
right with myself.
Then last year,
a friend told me about the barefoot running movement. The gist: Human feet
evolved over millennia to run barefoot and the relatively recent development of
padded shoes and arch support changes our gait for the worse and induces
injuries. She recommended Vibram-soled shoes, which simulate barefootedness
(complete with side benefit of being way ugly). Being a fan of not having
long-term injuries, I bought a pair to try.
Readers! After
my first run with them, I could barely walk for three days. I had to hobble up
and down subway stairs sideways and shuffle around as if I was using a walker,
retirement-home style. But it was a good pain, an
I-have-muscles-I-never-knew-about pain. After all these years of running, my
technique was apparently terrible. I began to work the shoes into my regular routine—using
them for a shorter run once a week to train myself to run on my forefoot
instead of my heel and with shorter, quick strides—and soon the pain lessened.
This experience
got me thinking: I didn't necessarily want to get better at running, but what
about a field where I did, such as wine? Had I reached a comfortable plateau
with wine drinking as I had with running around the park and, if so, could some
sort of equipment tweak raise my level of "fitness"?
My focus
narrowed on glassware. I love the colors of wine-the deep gold of aged white
Burgundy, the translucence of Pinot Noir, the brick-colored rim of a Nebbiolo
beginning to age. But could I be using color as a crutch for developing tasting
skills? Certainly when confronted with an unknown glass of wine, it's easy to
make judgments on the body, grape variety and age by color alone (lighter
color, lighter body, etc.).
So I bought
myself a black wineglass to mask the color of wine, to see what I could discern
without falling back on color, and it has been interesting. The enjoyment
factor is muted a little, for sure, as there is an element of feeling
handicapped, like forgetting you're wearing a wrist cast and trying to type on
a computer. (And, yikes, the visual experience is like being in one of Patrick
Batemen's favorite Art Deco restaurants or an extra on the set of a Game of
Thrones banquet.)
But each time I reach to take a sip, I have to remind myself what I'm doing and
concentrate on the aromas, the taste and the weight of the wine.
It's too soon
to tell if this experiment has made me more "fit" at drinking wine. I can say
that it has made me a more mindful wine drinker, which leads to "fitness," I
think. Just as I'm forced to pay more attention to the way I run when I wear
the barefoot shoes, I pay more attention to what's in the glass when I can't
see the color.
Though both
provide a sense of making long-term progress, the analogy between the shoes and
the wine isn't perfect. The shoes purportedley get a runner closer to the more
natural experience of running, while the black glass is imposing a sensory
limitation on the wine drinker that can quicken one's learning curve.
I don't
advocate drinking this way all the time—as I said, color is an important
component of wine, and bringing a black glass to a restaurant or dinner party
would be unbearably fussy. As a personal experiment, however, it seems
worthwhile.
What
do you think? Aside from opening a lot of bottles, are there specific steps
that promote "wine fitness"? Have you worked at getting better at tasting wine,
and how?
This is a great exercise, if for no other reason that it teaches us how misleading color can be. Years of tasting and drinking PInot Noir have convinced me to pretty much ignore color (except to note it in the tasting description if it unusually light or dark). I've lost count of how many rich-textured, succulent wines I've had that were light-colored, and insipid wines that were dark.
As chefs know, we eat with our eyes first. They play with color and shapes to make food look interesting so we'll want to like it even before we taste it. It's the same with wine. Cold soaks can extract more color in advance of fermentation. Alas so can mega-purple, or the practice of hermitagé (adding Syrah to Pinot to darken it)?