Bob Martin
wine lover
Portland / Thailand
"I like to think of having a dialogue with the bottle of wine."
Every serious wine person has their wine moment, that Eureka experience when the grapes align and the wine heavens part. They remember it all as vividly as if it were still swirling in the glass.
It was 1996. Bob and his wife, Krissy, were in a little restaurant in Beaune, drinking a rich, earthy, local rouge. The owner spoke no English. The whole restaurant was trying to translate. But the wine spoke with perfect clarity, and over the course of the evening Bob came to feel that he and it were having a dialogue. "The wine changes, our relationship changes, as I work my way through the bottle. (And of course I get a little tipsy.)"
He can tell you all about it, down to the endless, eloquent finish. But ask him what it was, and he just laughs. "I don't remember! We missed our chance to take home a case, and to this day I don't know what it was, though I've tried to research it."
Not one to let another wine epiphany get away, these days Bob keeps a thorough wine journal. He records and researches his tastings, conducted on his own and with groups, including the Italian wine club Gli Amici del Vino in Chiang Mai. And he studies. After researching the WSET program he took it for a test drive with the WSA Recreational Classes. Even at that level the experience impressed him greatly, and now he's working on his Advanced Certification.
"More important even than the WSET credentials are Adam and Mimi. They're what keep me coming back."
"I'm a studious person, and their facility for facts and figures resonates with me. But it's also their style. They make it fun and you learn so much." Bob especially appreciates developing the understanding necessary to be objective about wines, and to be able to communicate meaningfully about them with other people, even across differences of taste.
"To be able to say, Yeah, this is really good, though I don't like it."
In wine and spirits, as in any field that rewards depth of inquiry, connoisseurship is far less about the facts you control than it is about the uncharted territories ahead. Having immersed himself in the WSA program, Bob describes his ongoing dialogue with wine in downright cosmic terms:
"I now know what I don't know. It has enlarged the universe for me."
To really understand wine entails learning about everything from climate to agriculture, from geography to languages, from chemistry to history, and everything in between. A traveler and a history buff, Bob loves the fact that his wine journal is really a kind of travel diary, a journal of everything.
Then again, maybe that's just the wine talking…
Photo 2008 by Emily Prosch (WSA Intermediate Graduate '07), at Southpark Wine Bar in Portland.