The Wine Guy
People who are really good at something have a way of making the way they acquired those skills sound effortless. "Oh, I guess I just sort of fooled around with chords until eventually I knew what I was doing," my guitar-playing pals offer nonchalantly. "Gosh, I've always liked to draw," says one artist I know. This frustrates me because it would follow then that, were I to strum a guitar or have some vague inclination toward "drawing," I could quickly and easily achieve their level of success.
Andy Besch, author of the new book The Wine Guy and owner of West Side Wine is just such a person. With encouraging tips like "trust your tastes" and "relax, it's just a beverage," Besch makes it seem like even the most devoted Carlo Rossi fan can learn to appreciate good wine.
Before he was the Wine Guy, Besch was a big shot in marketing, and his lucrative career allowed him to learn about wine by tasting it. But luckily for un-lucrative me, Besch says in the wine world, the correlation between price and quality is a myth.
"I've never really believed you have to spend a lot of money to get a great bottle of wine," he tells me. Nor do you have to adopt wine world pretensions. Besch rolls his eyes when hearing wine described with words like "oafish," "gooseberry" or "scrubby underbrush." (Do you know what a gooseberry or underbrush tastes like?).
Part of what makes Besch good at explaining wine to novices is that he is not a sommelier. "I buy wine like everyone else," Besch says. "I look for bargains, value and quality. I built my store around how I like to shop for wine." And it's working. West Side Wine (481 Columbus Ave. at 83rd St.) feels like the cool record shop of wine stores. It's set up for browsing, and alongside many of the bottles are short, hand-written descriptions of the product.
One of the best things about the Wine Guy is that he understands intuitively that wine stresses people out.
"For some people, buying a bottle of wine is somewhere along the lines of a root canal," he says. Customers at West Side Wine panic when they can't remember the name of a particular wine. Other wine guys might try to assuage their customers' anxiety by trying to track down the bottle. Besch will do that, but he also wants customers to acknowledge what they like in a wine, so they avoid the tragic fate of clinging to one bottle for their whole lives. If you can't bear to drink anything but Chardonnay (the wine tasters in Sideways might have snickered at you, but the Wine Guy won't), then why not branch out and try a Gewürtztraminer?
After I thought I had absorbed all the lessons Besch's book could teach me, I attended a tasting Besch held at the Strand bookstore. Before the tasting, he invited the crowd to ask him questions. It's possible that I was the only one who embarrassed myself that night.
"What do you think about drinking wine and other kinds of alcohol in the same evening?" I asked. The Wine Guy thought a minute, then said something like "yuck."
"That," my friend whispered to me, "is the kind of question an alcoholic asks."
I am a failed wine student, I thought. The Wine Guy thinks I'm a drunk. But by the time I tuned back in, Besch was already answering another question. "Relax," I told myself. "It's just a beverage."