Why talk about wine ?

I much prefer drinking wine to writing about it. I was prompted to write about it by an experience I often have when I offer a good wine to a novice. They will say something like, “Don’t waste that on me. I don’t know anything about wine,” implying that they will not be able to enjoy the wine. This raises the obvious question of whether and, if so, to what extent, knowing about wine is necessary for enjoying and appreciating it. I take it as obvious that there are all sorts of practical benefits to knowing a lot about wine, even if you are not a winemaker, wine seller, sommelier, wine writer, or wine critic. Knowledge and experience help you decide which wines to try, which wines to buy, and which wines to serve with which foods, as well as to recognize tainted, oxidized, or otherwise flawed wines. But none of this knowledge, I claim, is essential to actually enjoying wine. Much of this knowledge provides pleasure of its own, thanks to the fact that there is so much to learn about wine and that so much about it is interesting, but this pleasure is mainly intellectual, not sensory. That, in a nutshell, was how I answered the question, “What good is knowledge in enjoying wine?”, in an article called “Knowledge, Wine, and Taste.” Now I want to ask a different but closely related question: what good is being able to talk about wine for enjoying it? Here, I do not mean the practical value of wine talk. For example, being able to describe with precision what sort of wine you would like might enable a restaurant sommelier to suggest a wine that fits the bill – assuming he takes your description in the way you intended. Conversely, being able to decipher the tasting notes of wine critics