an idiot’s guide to wine — 1 fairly sure investigation

an idiot’s guide to wine, in my hands at 11:23 on a monday, while Dave was on the phone explaining a different financial instrument, was meant to clarify things. the man in 4B chose that moment to test his amplifier. cold pizza, opened in protest, did not pair badly.

i am writing this from the desk i sit at on weekdays, with the corner of one eye on the door. carla is upstairs in a training session about something procedural, which gives me approximately forty minutes before the corridor refills.

the kitchen, where the pairing happened, is a kitchen the way a parking lot is a venue. it has a counter, a microwave (the seventh, for those keeping internal scoreboards), and brenda, the dead plant, presiding from the windowsill in her permanent ceramic shrug.

1. an idiot’s guide to wine, the genre

the genre is older than the wine. somebody, somewhere, looked at a man holding a glass and decided he needed a manual. the manual sold. the man kept holding the glass wrong. the manual sold again, in a new edition.

i am, for the purposes of this idiot reclamation, the man in question. i did not buy the manual. i borrowed the posture. i borrowed it badly. an idiot’s guide to wine, as a literary subgenre, is essentially a coaching session for the chin: how high to lift it, how slowly to drop it, how confidently to say “oaky” when nobody at the kitchen counter has the vocabulary to disagree.

the genre has cousins. an idiot’s guide to using an iphone teaches you to lock the screen with ceremony. the idiot’s guide to volkswagen repair teaches you which warning light means “pull over now” and which one means “pull over eventually”. the idiot’s guide to psychic awareness teaches you to nod at coincidences. all of these books exist. i looked. they exist.

the wine one is the one i ended up with because stefan, the man who corrects you at parties about regions, recommended it indirectly by sighing at me once in 2019.

2. the comparison table — wines and the men who choose them wrong

i made a table. the table is the entire point. you can leave after the table. i’d leave too. but i wrote the rest, so i’m staying.

i stand by the table. it is a fairer audit than the manual provided. the manual had a wheel of flavors with words like “jammy” and “flinty”, which are words used by men who have never been hit by a flint and have never opened a jar of jam without a struggle.

i’d cite a source for the wheel, but the manual was published by people who also publish horoscopes, so we are operating on vibes. the wheel itself, looked at sideways, is closer to a dartboard than a science. for color, i looked up sideways on the movie database that knows things, because that film did more for pinot noir than any manual ever printed.

3. dave on the phone, opinions

dave was on the phone explaining a different financial instrument. it had layers. it had penalties. it had an early-withdrawal clause that sounded like a wedding speech. when he heard the clink of the bottle through the line, he paused.

“are you drinking, on a weekday, before noon.”

“i am pairing,” i said. “this is research.”

“with what.”

“cold pizza.”

dave laughed for nine straight minutes. i timed it. nine minutes is the dave laugh unit, and i have grown to recognize it the way coastal people recognize a tide. the laugh is not at me. the laugh is at the situation, which is also me, but technically a separate party for accounting purposes.

he hung up to take another call about his actual job, which is real and which he does well, and i was left with a mostly full glass and the residual conviction that cold pizza is breakfast, also pairs, also occasionally lunch, also an entire wine pairing program if you are willing to be honest about your kitchen.

4. the muted group chat where wine talk lives

there is a group chat. i muted it in 2022. the group chat is six people who used to be five people who used to be four people who used to know each other from a thing none of us remember. it is, for reasons of social drift, the only place left where wine is discussed earnestly in my immediate orbit.

i unmuted it for forty seconds, in the spirit of an idiot’s guide to wine being a matter of public record. the most recent messages were: a photo of a label, a single sentence reading “thoughts??”, a photo of a different label, a single sentence reading “this one is better”, and an emoji of a grape that has been used 41 times since january.

i muted it again. the muted group chat is a kind of cellar — wine ages, opinions ferment, nobody opens the door. it is the healthiest relationship i have with a piece of software.

5. cold pizza is breakfast, also pairs

here is what they don’t tell you. cold pizza is breakfast. it is also dinner if you got home late. it pairs with red and white and rosé, because cold pizza is the most forgiving substrate in the kitchen. you could pair it with tap water and it would still be a meal.

the manual does not include a chapter on cold pizza. this is the gap. an idiot’s guide to wine that omits the most common pairing in the kitchen of an actual idiot is a guide written for a different idiot, possibly a fictional one, possibly stefan.

the slice was room temperature. the wine was room temperature. the room was room temperature. everything agreed.

6. brenda the dead plant judges in silence

brenda has been on the windowsill since a year i no longer cite. she is dead in the sense that she does not photosynthesize. she is alive in the sense that she still holds an opinion. brenda’s opinion of an idiot’s guide to wine is unspoken, because she is a plant, but the lean of her dried stem toward the bottle is, i think, statistically significant.

brenda has watched the kitchen accumulate seven microwaves. she did not flinch when a man with a borrowed posture pretended to know what oaked meant. plants are silent landlords, which is a separate position i hold and have defended in writing.

for the literary version of this scene, see the elif batuman entry, where a different idiot reads a different manual in a different kitchen and arrives at a similar dead plant.

7. verdict — the wine is fine, also above me

the wine was fine. the wine is fine. the wine, in any reasonable accounting, is above me. i do not mean above me in price. i mean above me in the way that a ceiling is above a man on a couch — i can describe it, i could reach it with effort, but i’m not going to.

an idiot’s guide to wine, as a manual, is a useful object the way a coaster is a useful object. it sits there. it absorbs the spill. it does not change the wine.

i finished the bottle eventually. i washed the glass once. i washed it badly. brenda watched. dave laughed, in retrospect, for the second time that week. the manual went on the counter, near the unopened mail pile, where things go when they are not yet trash.

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