Taken by Surprise

Matt Kramer
Posted: December 18, 2003

"There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition." -- Henry James, Partial Portraits (1888)

It's a kind of Zen wine question: How do you know when you know? More clearly put, how do you know when you've reached the level of wine knowledge where you're no longer a novice? When you actually know wine?

I wondered about this frequently when I first started to piece together the wine puzzle. I originally thought that it was a matter of vintage experience.

How I envied those wine tasters who could hold forth on vintages from 20 or 30 years earlier, ringing the changes of one vintage compared with another, like baseball buffs comparing various shortstops or whole rosters of Yankee teams.

I was mistaken. It wasn't a matter of vintages after all. That's just a way of keeping score, of tracing your ever-widening range of knowledge. Yes, we all need some experience before approaching wine with genuine confidence, but now I know that you don't need that much.

No graybeard (or bald head) can know any more or better than anyone else who has passed a certain tipping point of experience. Want proof? Look at how so-called experts can disagree so strongly about a particular wine or even the worth of a whole vintage.

So how do you know when you actually know? Henry James offers a clue: It's when you can experience -- and value -- an "emotion of surprise."

The source of a wine's surprise ultimately lies in its originality. You'd think that judging a wine's originality would require a wealth of experience. But vast experience is needed only for establishing whether a wine is unique; for that, you need an awareness of all the other players on the field. A wine does not have to be unique to be original. It only needs to be true to itself. And, as it turns out, sensing whether a wine is original takes surprisingly little exposure.

Just ask anyone about their first La Tâche or any other great wine. Almost always, such "epiphanies" occur early in your wine life. Never at the beginning, mind you, but some ways along the path. I rather doubt that Samuel Pepys was all that wine-savvy when, back in the 17th century, he famously proclaimed that Château Haut-Brion "hath a good and most perticular [sic] taste that I never met with."

It's at such moments -- all wine lovers have them -- that you can honestly say you "know." It's not that you know all about wine. Quite the opposite. It's that you know enough to have expectations. What moves you is an emotion of surprise, almost a shout of exhilaration: This is what I've been looking for!

For myself, that wine was Domaine d'Angerville Volnay Clos des Ducs. I first tasted it maybe a year after I began pursuing wine. I had begun with Beaujolais and then tried a good number of basic red Burgundies. I already knew by then that I was susceptible to Pinot Noir.

But when I tasted Volnay Clos des Ducs I experienced a profound emotion of surprise. I had no idea that you could expect such a thing from wine. I still feel this same emotion of surprise whenever I drink Clos des Ducs -- which is a sure sign of a wine's inherent greatness, that it continues to astound.

But what about a Jamesian taste for "emotions of recognition"? You might think that an ability to recognize, rather than be surprised, distinguishes when you have arrived at wine knowledge.

But it's not necessarily so. True, there's a "connoisseur's" pleasure in tracing a wine's pedigree. But this accomplishment is largely intellectual, an impressive parlor trick of taste memory and acuity. Nothing is more impressive, yet less substantive, than the ability to "call" a wine blind. Much as I'd like to, I rarely can.

James chose the word "emotion" rightly. The thrill of terroir lies in feeling it. If the thrill is gone, terroir was never really there.

A taste for emotions of recognition, in comparison, is really a preference for soothing banality, like children who want to hear the same bedtime story over and over again. It's what gives us so many (profitable) lookalike wines.

When you prize a taste for emotions of surprise, that's when your "Time for you to leave, Grasshopper" moment has come. That's when you can know that you do, indeed, really know. Everything else is, well, just a bedtime story.

Matt Kramer has contributed regularly to Wine Spectator since 1985.