I Pretended to Know Wine for Three Years
I swirled, sniffed, and lied my way through every dinner party.
For three years, my entire personality at dinner parties was built on a word I could not define: tannins.
It started the way most frauds start, with a small social emergency. I had just moved to the city with two suitcases and a job title that sounded better than it paid. Everyone I met seemed to have arrived years earlier and absorbed a shared curriculum I had missed: which neighborhoods were "actually" good, which films were "actually" bad, and wine. Endless, confident, adjectival wine.
At my first grown-up dinner party, in an apartment with exposed brick and a host named Dev who owned a decanter, someone handed me a glass of red and asked what I thought.
Here is what I thought: it tasted like wine. Purple. Warm on the way down. Vaguely like the cough syrup of my childhood, but for adults with rent.
Here is what I said: "Interesting tannins."
I had heard the word eleven minutes earlier from a man in a linen shirt. I deployed it the way a soldier throws back a grenade, purely to survive. And the table nodded. A woman said "right?" with real gratitude. Dev topped up my glass as if rewarding a correct answer.
That nod was the most dangerous thing that ever happened to me.
Because the truth is, pretending worked, and it kept working, and the city rewards a confident liar the way the sea rewards a fish.
I learned the choreography fast. Swirl the glass, but lazily, as if you have swirled ten thousand glasses and the thrill is gone. Tilt it against anything white and frown slightly, as though the color has just told you a secret about the winemaker's marriage. Sniff twice, short then long. Then say something that cannot be falsified.
"There's a lot going on here."
"It needs a minute."
"This is drinking well right now," which I once said about a wine that had been open for four days.
Nobody ever challenged me... That was the discovery that both thrilled and quietly ruined me: nobody at those tables knew either.
We were a dinner party of mirrors, each of us reflecting a sophistication that originated nowhere. Somebody would say "stone fruit" and we would all taste stone fruit on command, obedient as choirboys.
I once watched an entire table agree that a wine tasted of "wet slate," and I am confident that not one of us, if handed an actual wet slate, could have picked it out of a lineup of damp rocks.
The act deepened. I bought a wine folding knife I never used. I said "old world" with a small sigh. At a colleague's engagement party I sent a bottle back, gently, regretfully, using the phrase "a touch of cork taint," and when the waiter took it away I felt my heart hammering like a shoplifter clearing the door.
The bottle was probably fine... The waiter probably knew. We were all in the same theater, and the show was sold out every night.
What I did not say at any of those dinners was the true thing: that I was profoundly lonely, that the city had not yet given me a single person I could be mediocre in front of, and that the wine act was scaffolding around an empty building. Years later I finally wrote about that specific loneliness, the kind you feel in a crowded apartment with a glass in your hand, and writing it honestly took more out of me than three years of lying ever did.
The collapse, when it came, was gentle.
That was the surprise.
It was a Tuesday tasting, one of those wine-shop events I attended to maintain my cover, the way spies keep paying dues at the tennis club. The woman pouring was in her sixties, hands stained faintly purple at the cuticles, and she worked the row of glasses with the unhurried competence of someone who has nothing to prove. When she reached me, I swirled lazily. I frowned at the color. I said, "Interesting tannins."
She looked at me for a long second... Then she said, kindly, the way you tell a child the magician is just a man:
"It's a white wine, love. There's almost nothing there to be tannic."
The man next to me coughed into his elbow. Somewhere behind me, a glass clinked like a small bell announcing the end of an era. Three years of choreography stood in the middle of that shop with nowhere to put its hands.
And here is the part I did not expect. What I felt was not shame.
It was relief, arriving all at once, the way sleep arrives after a long flight.
I started laughing. I told her the truth... the whole ridiculous ledger of it: the grenade word, the fake cork taint, the folding knife still in its packaging in my kitchen drawer.
She listened, refilled my glass without asking, and said the sentence I have been quoting at dinner parties ever since, this time with attribution.
Nobody tastes the wine while they're performing the tasting. You've been drinking for three years and haven't tasted a thing.
Then she taught me, in about four minutes, more than the previous three years combined. Not vocabulary. A question. "Do you want another sip, or are you done?" That's it, she said. That is the entire secret. Your mouth already knows. Everything else is theater for people who are afraid of the question.
I think about how long I performed instead of tasting, and not just with wine. I performed opinions about films I had slept through. I performed a thicker skin than I had. For a while I even performed as a writer, producing careful, borrowed lines engineered to be nodded at, until I read an essay on why safe poems lose and recognized my whole dinner-party self in it: swirling, sniffing, saying things that could not be falsified, and never once risking a true sentence.
The true sentences, it turns out, are the cheap honest ones. "I don't know." "I can't taste the slate." "I am lonely in this city and I would like a friend more than a decanter." I started saying versions of these out loud, and the strangest thing happened... the dinner parties got better. Dev confessed he had bought the decanter to impress an ex. The linen-shirt man admitted "tannins" was the only wine word he knew too, and we stared at each other like two spies discovering they had been reporting to the same government all along.
That confession season felt like a beginning disguised as an ending, which most good beginnings are.
These days I drink whatever I like, which is usually the second cheapest bottle, chosen for the label if I'm honest, and I can tell you exactly what it tastes like.
It tastes purple. Warm on the way down. A little like childhood cough syrup, but for adults with rent.
It's drinking well right now.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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