My entire life’s experience with wine has been professional (discounting my university habit of buying two bottles of Spanish red for a fiver at Jackson’s corner store in Leeds in the late 1990s). I joined Majestic Wine as a trainee manager at the age of 22 with absolutely no knowledge of wine, and virtually no interest in it either. 

That would rapidly change. Six years later, I was a WSET Diploma graduate managing the busy Notting Hill store. The following year I worked a vintage in McLaren Vale, which kick-started my writing career, and in 2015 I became a Master of Wine.

But wine has always been my profession first, not my hobby. Obviously, I love drinking it, enjoy learning about it, and I count myself hugely fortunate to work in an industry centred around hospitality and pleasure. I’m not so flippant as to dismiss wine as ‘only a drink’, but I have never been in wine’s thrall.

For others, wine is an interest – often an obsession – before it becomes their career. Many people are lured from their existing profession to the wine industry, despite the sacrifices that may entail. They are part of what makes our industry so diverse and interesting; for them, wine is first and foremost a personal passion.

Like all generalisations, I am massively over-simplifying these distinctions, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that all wine pros are either one or the other. Let’s call the first ‘pragmatists’ and the second group ‘enthusiasts’: the yin and yang of the wine trade.

Last month, I shared a bottle of Margaux 2011 and Yquem 2008 with two friends (both current or former MW students) and my wife. I served the wines non-blind and without ceremony. We didn’t discuss them, take tasting notes or share them on social media – we just drank them over the course of an evening with some home-cooked food, listening to music and playing silly games.

Once or twice during the night, we briefly agreed that both bottles were delicious. The wine was an accompaniment to the evening and a conduit for enjoyment, not the centrepiece of the night itself. Did we analyse the wines to their fullest extent? Absolutely not. Would we have had an equally enjoyable evening drinking ‘lesser’ wines? Very probably.

However, if we had treated the wines with the sort of sacrosanct respect that many enthusiasts think obligatory, it would have been a far less enjoyable evening; because in that version, the wine – or rather, the reputation of the wine – becomes the predominant factor. It suddenly demands descriptors, comparisons and reverence, often accompanied by lengthy pontificating on what is ultimately entirely subjective anyway.

I would argue that wine’s primary purpose is to be drunk for pleasure, not as an intellectual exercise. However, as top-end wines have become luxury goods, the scarcity and expense that they command greatly complicates how they are appreciated. The two wines we drank are ostensibly worth hundreds of pounds per bottle – prices that are determined by fashion and market forces, not by intrinsic quality. Price alone should not confer sacred status on a wine. Nor should production volume.

As a pragmatist, I view such wines with healthy disrespect (although I would argue that we drank them exactly as is intended: as an enjoyable accompaniment to a great evening), whereas enthusiasts want to make wine the main focus.

It’s not for me to tell people the correct way to enjoy wine. However, treating wine with excessive reverence creates the sort of reinforcement loop that drives prices ever higher, making wine less accessible and more coveted. It potentially spoils wine’s fundamental value, turning it from a transient sensory pleasure into an academic contest.

To repeat: my characterisations are grossly generalised. Perhaps, like yin and yang, one can’t exist without the other.  Of course wine is more than ‘just a drink’ - but that doesn’t make it omnipotent. A healthy level of disrespect keeps wine where it belongs; not above us, but alongside us.