Neil Mackay: Why wine has become woven into our culture

It was 20 years ago, and Hoy’s wife Mary had just given birth to their first baby Emily. The couple were living in South Africa, working in the wine business, and after their daughter’s christening, Justin and Mary journeyed into the bush and drank the sparkling Beck amid one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth with their newborn baby beside them.

‘It was probably not the best sparkling wine in the world, but for that occasion it was absolutely perfect,’ says Hoy. That’s what wine does, it underscores the events in life which matter. Mary laughs and says he’s making them sound like terrible parents, drinking in the wild with their baby.

Hoy hates the expression ‘wine expert’ but like it or not that’s what he is, one of Scotland’s best connoisseurs. Spend an hour in his company and you’ll learn more about wine than you could from a decade of experimenting as an amateur wine buff on your own.

As National Wine Week comes to an end today, Hoy is singing the praises of wine and the role it plays in human culture and society. Wine has been with us for at least 8000 years - the earliest archaeological record of wine-making is dated to about 6000BC in Armenia. Wine writer Aaron Pott says there is a theory, though, that wine is much older - that wine began when some ancient human ‘chanced upon some wild vines in late fall, their bunches well past ripe, rotten and slightly fuzzy with a blush of mould’. They would have tasted the sticky juice and become euphoric - and so wine quickly became part of religion as it seemed to connect us to the gods. The ancient Greeks and Romans deified wine in the rites of Dionysius and Bacchus - and it remains embedded in our culture today.

‘Wine is so important in society as we use it as the major part of any celebration,’ Hoy says. ‘Humans are incredibly gregarious, we love celebrating and will find any reason to be together whether it’s a birth, christening, marriage, finishing school - we find reasons to have a celebration, and the major part of that celebration is when we’re toasting whoever it is that’s getting married or winning a race.

‘Take that same idea across to a dinner party. It doesn’t matter how many people are coming, when they cross your doorstep you’ll give them a beer or a gin and tonic, but that’s not why you invited them - the reason you invited them is that part of the evening when you’re all sitting around the table focused on each other and having a good time and the food comes out and you’ll notice all the other drinks go out the window and are replaced by wine - wine becomes the centre of the table. We change to wine as that is the celebratory part of the evening. That’s the importance of wine, it’s all about the occasion. It’s how we celebrate.’

Hoy has spent his life in the wine trade. Born in England, he married a Scot and the pair went to South Africa to run a vineyard. He later moved back to Scotland, where he now runs the Glasgow Wine School.

The secret to wine’s beloved role in human life is its connection to food and social interaction. Sure, says Hoy, you can drink it to ‘get pissed’ but there’s much more to wine than that - unlike other drinks which exist primarily to get you drunk.

Food is at the heart of every culture on earth, and wine elevates food. Wine is completely natural, like the best food - it’s just grape juice, yeast and sunshine. In wine, it’s the acidity and the tannins - the chemicals extracted from the grape skin that dry the mouth - which, when matched with a simple plate of food, can create something sublime. Other alcoholic drinks don’t have the same type of acidity that’s found in white wine or the tannins in red wine.

‘Acidity is a really good palate cleanser if you are eating fatty food,’ says Hoy. ‘One of the most magical food and wine parings is champagne and fish and chips.’ The fatty, oily fish and chips coat the inside of the mouth, and that deadens taste buds leaving the brain bored with what’s being eaten. A sip of acidic champagne washes the mouth clean and the palate is ready to experience the taste of fish and chips all over again.

With tannins it’s all about the interaction with salt - think of a hearty stew or a bowl of spaghetti bolognese, a lot of the flavour comes from the salt in the food. ‘Salt suppresses the perception of tannins,’ Hoy says, ‘and once it does that it gives the impression of the wine being more fruity. One of the things we know works really well is a nice big steak with an Argentinian Malbec [a red] - it’s become one of the great things in life. Malbec has a very high tannin level and when we cook steaks there’s salt in the cooking process, so put them together and suddenly the wine becomes this juicy drink.’

Hoy’s tip for matching food and wine is simple - ‘the more flavour you have in your food, the more flavour you should have in your wine’. He gives the example of a dinner of smoked fish with a cream sauce. ‘The sauce is where your fattiness will come through, so you will need a bit of acidity in your wine. If you tried to match a Sauvignon Blanc the flavours of the dish would overpower the wine as it doesn’t have a huge amount of flavour necessarily - but if you changed that Sauvignon Blanc into a nice wooded Chardonnay the wine will stand up to the food and still have the acidity.’

With something like a green salad, though, a wooded Chardonnay would kill the delicate summery taste, but a Sauvignon Blanc is probably perfect. The worst food and wine matching, says Hoy, is red wine with dessert. The clash of sugar and tannin is frankly disgusting - so what you need is a desert wine, something like a Sauterne. ‘The wine you are drinking must always be sweeter than the food you are eating,’ says Hoy.

Hoy wants to remove all the snobbery from wine. Getting the right drink to go with the right food shouldn’t be the domain of the middle classes - it’s about taste, not money, and we all have taste. Of course, many wines aren’t cheap, but over the years low cost wines have filled supermarkets and a half decent red or white can be picked up for the same price as a six pack of beer if you know what you are looking for, and what food will go with it.

Jay McInerney, the acclaimed American novelist and wine writer, says having less money will make you a more astute wine drinker as you are ‘forced to make choices and sacrifices that can only sharpen’ discrimination and appreciation. ‘Starting at the top, one will miss out on the climb,’ he says.

McInerney makes discovering wine sound like a mysterious journey, and indeed there is something deeply mysterious about wine. The film Sideways is adored by wine drinkers as it’s a tragi-comic love story wrapped in a homage to the vineyard. In the film, one of characters, Maya, has a speech in which she talks about wine as if it’s almost human. ‘I like to think about the life of wine,’ she says, ‘how it’s a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing; how the sun was shining; if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I'd opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it's constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is, until it peaks… and then it begins its steady, inevitable decline.’

For Hoy, wine is about simplicity. A winemaker in ancient Rome could make as good a wine as the wealthiest and best equipped vineyard owner today. ‘I’ve seen people make the most astounding wines in plastic tanks,’ Hoy says. ‘I’ve worked in some vineyards in France where the equipment was as old as the hills and I thought there was no way you can produce decent wine here, but you taste the wines and they’re remarkable. The very best wines in the world are the ones where the wine-maker is working with what nature has given them - not adding or taking anything away.’

Those great wines are down to what the French call ‘terroir’ - the land, the environment in which the grape is grown. The secret is getting the right grape for the right soil and climate. Once that sweet spot - that Goldilocks zone - has been found then nature will take her course.

Of course, not everyone is in love with wine. The writer Rory Sutherland finds it’s the snobbery that kills. ‘For the drinker to demonstrate status and connoisseurship,’ he says, wine must become ‘absurdly hard to navigate, so providing opportunities for contrived, hair-splitting distinctions that let the buyer advertise his own discernment.’

Others, quite rightly, worry about health effects, like Dr Susan Biali, a wine drinker who’s now more or less on the wagon. ‘I love wine,’ she says, but she admits to an addictive personality and recalls the aggressive breast cancer her mother had in her 40s. When Biali heard the renowned Harvard-trained gynaecologist Sara Gottfried say ‘what you think wine is giving you, it’s actually taking away’, she decided to quit. ‘The truth of this resonated so completely with me that it pushed me over the edge. No more wine, or alcohol, period, except on the rarest occasions like a special dinner.’

Others simply hate wine because of the taste. Author Anne Fadiman is the daughter of the late, great wine critic, Clifton Fadiman, but she detests Bordeauxs, Burgundys, Pinot Noirs, and Pinot Grigos. There’s not a wine she likes - and that’s because she’s as near as it comes to a supertaster - someone with a higher than average number of tastebuds who can be overpowered by strong flavours. ‘As other women fake orgasms, I have faked hundreds of satisfied responses to hundreds of glasses,’ she says.

Luckily, for the Glasgow Wine School, supertasters are relatively few and far between - there’s certainly none at the school’s latest wine tasting evening. Mike Cottam is leading a dozen or so people - of all ages and backgrounds - through the basics of how to get the best from a glass of wine.

Each person is concentrating solely on the most sensory experience for a human outside of sex - taste. As they sip and slurp and swirl it seems as if the mouth is the very centre of their being - and perhaps it is, can you imagine how dead life would be without taste?

One of the tasters, Alec McLean, says wine is about simple pleasures. ‘It’s about taste,’ he says, ‘relaxation. It’s about being slow in a busy world. It’s also about story - where did the wine come from, who made it, and why. It’s not mass produced, it’s real. That’s a rarity these days.’

TASTING TIPS: HOW TO DRINK WINE LIKE A CONNOISSEUR

If you want a quick guide on how to taste wine, then Madeline Puckette and Justine Hammack at the company Wine Folly are your go-to connoisseurs.

They say follow the four simple steps of look, smell, taste and conclude, and you’ll be able to navigate the complex world of wine with ease.

LOOK

You can tell a lot just by how a wine looks.

Tilt the glass over a white backdrop to inspect the colour. The paler the colour at the edge the younger the wine. In a white, a deep gold will be oaked. The darker the red, the higher the tannin.

Swirl the wine to see how viscous it is - if the wine ‘legs’ (the way the wine pours down the inside of the glass after swirling) are slow then the alcohol is high. Swirling also oxygenates the wine letting flavour out.

SMELL

Hold the glass just under your nose and give it a quick sniff to ‘prime’ your nose. Swirl, and then get your nose right in the glass and take a deep sniff. Now think about what those smells remind you of - don’t be scared to move your nose around in the glass as rich fruit smells and more floral smells can gather in different places.

If your nose gets ‘overloaded’ sniff your forearm to neutralise all those wine smells. Don’t wear perfume.

In wine, the primary aromas are from the grapes. So a Sauvignon Blanc will smell like gooseberries or grass. Secondary aromas come from the winemaking process, and reactions with yeast and bacteria. So the buttery smell in Chardonnay comes from a type of bacteria. Tertiary aromas are from the ageing process - that’s what gives Champagne its nutty flavour.

TASTE

Coat your mouth with a large sip followed by smaller sips. Sloosh it around in your mouth and draw air in through your teeth. Try to pick out at least three fruit flavours and three other flavours. You don’t need to spit wine out.

Think about the basic tastes of wine. Sweetness is at the front of the mouth. Acidity makes your mouth water. Tannin dries the mouth - the Wine Folly folk say it’s like a ‘wet teabag’. Alcohol creates heat at the back of the mouth.

Wine ‘evolves’ on your palate. A Syrah, for example, tastes very strong for a short period of time. A Cabernet Sauvignon builds on the palette and then fades gradually. A Pinot Noir is subtle, never overpowering the mouth and has a long finish - meaning the taste lingers over time.

CONCLUDE

This is where you begin to build your expertise. Was the wine balanced? Did one flavour overpower another?

Think about the key traits of the wine and keep them in your memory to use when tasting other wines.

Try blind tasting with friends - and see how you all react to each wine.

Start with single-varietals - that’s one type of grape such as a Chardonnay or a Merlot - so you can work out how each grape tastes.

Try the same grape but from different regions - like France, Chile or New Zealand.

Be honest - decide what type of wine you like, not what type of wine you are told you should like.

Wine Folly use a four point rating system - from bleh, to meh, then yeah, and finally last meal, as in this is the wine you’d have with your last meal on earth.

Drink sensibly.