Whether wine is something you consider nightly or just on special occasions, sommeliers and retail wine sellers should be the first line of defense for anyone making decisions about wine.
George Day-Toles, right, beverage and education manager at Verve Wine on Lincoln Avenue, bags bottles of wine for Liam Marchant, a DePaul University music student, on May 18, 2024, in Chicago. Among fully grown and otherwise confident adults, few things of similar triviality trigger as much vulnerability and self-doubt as a sommelier approaching your table at dinner.
Wine is so laden with social pitfalls, explains Torrence O’Haire, the corporate beverage director at Gage Hospitality Group, which includes restaurants like The Gage and Acanto near Millenium Park. “There’s this pervasive fear that if you order the wrong bottle or drink the wrong thing, you’ll look like a fool in front of everyone,” he said.
The problem goes both ways. “Wine professionals are so engrossed in the language of wine, we tend to use terms or refer to regions or grapes that most people have never heard of,” said George Day-Toles a sommelier and the beverage and education manager for Verve Wine, the Lincoln Park wine shop. “At home, my husband sometimes reminds me, ‘alright, now explain this wine to me like I’m a four-year-old,’” he says.
Consumers also inadvertently muddle the lines by misusing many foundational wine terms. Whether a wine is dry or sweet is a perennial misunderstanding among wine drinkers. By definition, a dry wine is a wine with no perceivable sweetness because little to no residual sugar remains after fermentation. Conversely, a sweet wine tastes sweet because it does contain residual sugar.
“When a consumer asks for a sweet wine, I always have to ask, ‘when you say sweet, do you actually mean sugary, like a wine that has residual sugar, or are you looking something that’s just fruity and juicy?’” Day-Toles said.
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