The first step is always the hardest

Right. You like wine, you drink a lot of it, you read about it, frequent tastings and become snotty enough to claim that your opinion somehow starts to matter in the world of wine. What better way to express yourself, to share your vast knowledge for the greater good of humanity than through a blog? You start describing every encounter you had with a winegrower, casting your judgment on every bottle of supermarket champagne and presenting the most outrageous wine-food combination as the new culinary orgasm simply because you were the one to come up with it. After all, you are the connoisseur, at the very least in your own mind.

But sooner rather than later, you realize that you’re out of ideas, out of new topics, out of anything interesting to tell. Your posts become less and less frequent, you still enjoy the world of wine but you become more adept in finding excuses not to write than in discovering new wines. All the while you’re trying your utmost best to disregard the fact that maybe, just maybe, you’re not as knowledgeable on wine as you thought you were.

Over the past months I myself have reached that stage. I spent more time thinking about the why and the how of wine instead of just writing about it, with the end result being a blog that has not been updated since the beginning of the year, resulting in a dismally low number of readers left (hint: closer to 0 than any other number).

Fortunately the time for self-pity is over! New leaf turned over, an even greater passion for wine, a new determination to make some kind of contribution to the huge online world of wine and a humbling experience will be the key ingredients of this blog for the next couple of months.

So for those of you who have read this far already, congratulations! I’ve been a wine drinker for the past 12 years, wine lover for the past 7, and wannabe-sommelier student for the past 2. My grandfather had an enormous cellar that was the sanctuary, the inheritance or the vinegar storage depending on who you asked, so wine does run a bit in the family. My real passion was kickstarted as a student when I worked in a restaurant during the weekends. I still know the wine list by heart, so you can imagine the kind of impact this had on me.

Passion tilted towards obsession when I got my first fulltime job and found myself with an actual budget to spend on wine. Before long, I was hit by a form of wine fatigue. Disheartened by the different wine styles, regions, vintages, opinions and constrained by financial means, it became nigh impossible to see the forest through the trees. An ongoing sommelier course provides some form of guidance as do more and more tasting experiences, but writing about it, forcing myself to put my thoughts down on paper proved to be the best way to get some clarity.

Therefore the purpose of this blog is twofold. On the one hand I want to share my love for wine with other kindred spirits, friends and family or people who every once in a while prefer drinking something that does not come out of a supermarket. On the other hand it’s my own compass, a way to document my journey through the world of wine, to keep track of where I came from and to find out where I might end up. I sincerely hope that you will find something in my ramblings and musings, be it a new discovery, a reaffirmation of what your own views are or an opinion to disagree with, as long as both you the reader and I the writer get something out of it, I’d call it a win-win situation!