Wine finds its legs

The room was a classroom in the sense that it had a “teacher” and “students”. Knowledge was being imparted. Lessons were being absorbed. There were books, pencils, a screen, and a lady at the front throwing questions at people seated behind a long table.

But there were things which one doesn’t find in a classroom. The students did not have uniforms and school bags. Instead, they had stemware in front of them, with red and white liquids. The lady was not holding a pointer, but a bottle.

The glasses contained wine. The bottle contained wine. This was a WSET Level 1 class. In an air-conditioned room. It could have been in Delhi, Dubai, Colombo, HCM City. The “students” were young (not children), grown up, greying, bald. They were a mix of ladies and men. Some looked like working people. Some looked like they were working on people. All had the earnestness of knowledge seekers.

They were there to learn about a visitor in their neighbourhood.

Wine.

Most had encountered wine earlier. At places where humans gather in a herd. Where the occasion is more important than the consumption. And something in the glass there had made them sit up, take a second pour, and sparked a desire to know more about this beverage. Ergo, the classroom.

People in older wine cultures accept wine without realising they are inheriting something that has taken years to bottle. Wine there is as much a part of the conversation as the weather in London. The wine lesson can be around a dinner table. At a party. At a café with friends. Or simply with a book of verse.

This cultural or social furniture is harder to find in Dubai or Mumbai or Bangkok. Here, the wine drinker has to assemble it, from a toolkit that has been put together for just this task.

A producer gives it a story. An importer puts it on a shelf. A restaurant might introduce it. A wine certification course might explain it. A sommelier might explain it again, in case you missed the first explanation. And there are other routes: a friend pours a bottle, a gifted bottle, a post, or duty-free.

And sometimes, a diagram explaining how a grape becomes a beverage costing three figures is crucial for the drinker to save face.

Wine, not surprisingly, has a lot of baggage.

The dusty, cobwebby kind. Centuries of it: vines, places, traditions, rules, rituals and accumulated knowledge, all travelling with the bottle. The question is what happens when all this baggage arrives in a room that was not designed for it.

That room has its own environment, and it did not spring fully formed from a damp forest floor. It was created by people who went to the wines, learnt from the vines and traditions of generations past, and came back determined to show us what they had unearthed. The MWs, the sommeliers, the importers, the chefs. All saying, in their different ways: ‘Follow us. We have walked the path.’

The wine course, the restaurant, the sommelier, are not markers of knowledge as much as they are a blueprint to build the furniture. They are all ways of helping wine find its place. They show, they tell. They describe, they point. They pass on what came before, and give the new drinker the direction to follow.

The point is not to turn every new drinker into an expert. Nobody needs another lecture on the difference between chai and chai.

We start on this journey, on a road that seems alien at first, but slowly reveals its destination. We can now put body to label, nod profoundly towards the second cheapest bottle on the restaurant menu, appreciate the AOC on a fine Burgundy, and tilt the glass to judge opacity.

And this is just the beginning. As we learn more, wine becomes less of a complex riddle to be deciphered. It becomes a companion. A part of our walk of life (apologies to Mr. Knopfler).

The old wine map is still useful. But now we can read it in a new place. A grape learnt from a book becomes something in the glass. A place on the map becomes an aroma. A technical paragraph about terroir becomes something you taste. The inheritance has not disappeared. It has become lived.

These moments, when what you have learnt suddenly appears on your palate, are when wine stops being a curious, if slightly dazed tourist.

And finally discovers legs to walk on.

Wine should be enjoyed. Drink responsibly.

Disclaimer: All links provided in this column are based on my own research and are not paid or sponsored.

© 2026 Shishir V. Baxi. All rights reserved. Reproduction or redistribution without permission is prohibited.