Wine + Life: How To Find A Wine You Like

(Forbes) - Find the glue that works for you.

In my experience, that’s the most effective way to find a wine you like. By “glue,” I mean the thing that grabs your interest. If it grabs your interest, it’ll be sticky. If it’s sticky, it’s relevant and it matters to you. If it matters, then you’re motivated which, in wine as in business, leads to more enjoyment and success.

That’s the less tangible part of finding a wine you like. The more practical component is the actual drinking. There’s no real way around it. To find a wine you like, you need to taste, and taste some more.

This does not mean you need to set up a bowling alley of wines on one end of your living room, and it doesn’t mean drinking to excess. Tasting wine means sampling it, and it means drinking it with food and with friends. It’s in the service of developing context.

Fortunately there are often plenty of opportunities for you to sample a bunch of wines at a time.

You can find a wine shop you like and ask when they have public tastings. Usually it’s once a week. Find a restaurant you like and ask if they ever do wine dinners. Better yet, make friends with the wine person or the bartender. Ask them what they’ve just gotten in that they’re most excited about.

You can find out which restaurants near you offer flights of wine to taste; a “flight” is three or four smaller-sized pours usually organized around a theme, such as Chardonnay or Italian blends. Though they’ve been grouped together for a purpose, the wines are often different enough from each other for you to say I never want to try that one again, or Hmmm… I’d like to know more about this one.