There's an instinct, especially among people who don't want to come off as snobs, to say it doesn't matter, just drink what you like, don't overthink it. And there's something healthy in that. But pushed too far it's the same logic that would have you walk through a cathedral without ever looking up.
The philosopher Roger Scruton wrote a fair amount about wine, and one of his simplest ideas was that the pleasure of it, depends partly on the knowledge of it. The more you understand what you're tasting, the more there actually is to taste. That isn't snobbery. That's just how attention works, with anything worth attending to.
Think about a song you loved as a kid, versus a piece of music you came to understand later, where you can hear the separate parts moving against each other. You didn't need the knowledge to enjoy the first one. But the knowledge gave you a different kind of enjoyment that the first one never had.
Wine's a bit like that. Someone made this. They chose where to grow the grapes, when to pick them, how long to age it, what to store it in. A bottle is the end of a year of weather, decisions, and judgment, the way a painting is the end of a thousand small choices with a brush. You can drink it knowing none of that, and that's perfectly fine. Or you can learn just enough to start seeing some of the choices, and suddenly it isn't a generic red anymore, it's a particular thing made by particular people in a particular place.
That's what the rest of this course is for. Not so you can perform. So you can see what's actually in front of you.
