Reasons to care
This summer in Cortina, one of Italy's most respected producers told a full room that wine had spent decades talking to people who already loved it, in a language unchanged for thirty years. The room applauded. Since then the debate has moved to responsibility, money and channels: who built the old language, who paid for it, and which platforms should carry a new one.
Those are fair questions. I'd like to ask a simpler one. What are we inviting people to?
Much of wine communication, my own included over the years, answers questions nobody has asked yet. Grape varieties, soils, ageing regimes, scores. It is information offered before interest exists. For someone who already cares, it is welcome. For everyone else, it feels like homework handed out at the door of a party.
People usually find their way into wine through a moment. A bottle shared on a terrace in late September. A glass that tasted of the place where it was poured. A host who said nothing more than "try this". Knowledge comes later, when curiosity asks for it, and it stays because it attaches to something already felt.
If that is true, then the renewal of wine's language has less to do with formats and more to do with substance. Wine offers things very little else can:
Pleasure that is personal, and worth learning to recognise in yourself
Place, held in a glass, from a hillside you may never visit
Hospitality, the oldest reason to open a bottle
Culture: the people, food and habits that grew up around it
None of this is new. It is simply what we tend to skip on our way to the technical sheet.
In my years of teaching, the real shift always happened at the same point: when students stopped searching for the right answer and started noticing what they actually enjoyed. From there, everything else became easier to learn, because it now mattered to them. The purpose of wine education, as I see it, is to help people discover what they find beautiful.
That is why Grande Passione begins with How to Taste for Pleasure. Four evenings, four styles of wine, and one question carried through each: what do you like, and why? We start with the person in front of the glass, and let the rest follow.
Wine has no shortage of information. What it needs more of is invitation. Reasons to care first; reasons to learn will come.
