I have heard this sentence more times than I can count. The wine list arrives, someone opens it, turns a page or two, and closes it again. "I am not an expert," they say, a little apologetically, and pass it on.
I have heard it in Verona and in Hong Kong, at weddings and at business dinners, from people who run companies and from people who cook beautifully at home. It always touches me. Nobody says they don't like wine. They seem to feel they haven't earned the right to choose it.
I've been wondering where that feeling comes from, and I'm not sure I like all of the answers.
I remember an evening in Hong Kong. I had spent three days hosting fifteen masterclasses on Italian wine, and afterwards my wife and I joined a table of mostly Italian guests who didn't know me. The restaurant manager handed me the wine list. Before I had opened it, my neighbour, an Italian visiting the city, kindly took it from my hands. I couldn't possibly know how to choose, he said. I wasn't Italian.
I smiled at my wife, and let him choose. The manager stood there in silence, trying very hard to keep a straight face.
It still makes me laugh. I didn't mind at all, and I think he was only trying to look after us. But I have often thought about what lay beneath his kindness: the quiet belief that to choose a wine, you must first know.
I'd like to say I have always been on the right side of that belief. I haven't.
About twenty years ago, my parents and my sister joined us in Tuscany for Christmas. I opened a bottle that turned out to be very, very good. I was sipping it slowly, a little at a time, wanting the pleasure to last as long as possible. My sister was drinking it in big mouthfuls, and at that pace half the bottle would be hers before the rest of us finished our first glass. I was upset. I said something about slowing down. She didn't take it well, and I don't blame her.
Only recently have I seen that evening another way. I think that bottle may have been the first time wine truly spoke to her. Everything in it was in its place, and she felt it, perhaps without knowing what she was feeling. Her eagerness was the joy of finally finding it. And I, with all I knew, told her she was doing it wrong.
I feel a little ashamed of that now. I was so busy protecting my pleasure that I missed hers.
For seven or eight years I had a monthly radio programme, and I kept saying the same thing to listeners. Be adventurous. Try, and try again, until you find something you love, and then dare to put it into your own words, however simple. I meant it. I still do. That evening in Tuscany, I didn't live it.
These days I try to listen before I explain. Most people know more about what they like than they think. They have simply never been asked.
So if you are someone who passes the list along, I'd love you to keep it for a moment next time. You don't need the right words. "Something fresh" or "nothing too heavy" is plenty, and anyone worth asking will be glad to hear it.
And if you know a great deal about wine, as I do, perhaps we can both watch a little more closely for the moment someone else discovers it. It may not look the way we expect.
I wish I had seen it in my sister's glass.
