For when you know nothing about wine: with these 5 comments you can pass for a sommelier

Starting next week, all the festive chaos begins: until the new year, you will probably be fully booked every evening with work drinks, friend dinners, and Christmas parties. And especially for the occasion, a reservation has been made at that one fancy restaurant in the village or that expensive hipster place on the other side of town. Normally, you find the house wine at the brown café around the corner perfectly fine, but now your stepfather or that wine expert-friend puts some nice bottles on the table. And before you know it, you are asked for your opinion: ‘What do you like to drink?’ ‘How do you find these wine flavors?’ Of course, you won’t let it show and quickly come up with some grape or flavor in the hope that it sounds somewhat intelligent. Or you memorize the list below so you can bluff your way through all those dinners with your so-called wine knowledge. Small note: don’t overdo it, because before you know it, next year you’ll be asked to choose the wines for the whole table!

• Never find anything really tasty: a true wine snob is never completely satisfied with the wine choice. Don’t overdo it, but react slightly blasé, as if you have really thought about it. What you can always say is: ‘Fine in its kind’, suggesting that you have already tasted a shitload of wines in your life.
• Always describe a wine with strange terms: push your nose deep into the glass, sniff the wine well (not literally: I have seriously once stuck my nose too deep in and literally sniffed some wine, there went my credibility…) and supposedly think about what you smell. ‘I smell a fresh forest walk with a hint of dew’ or ‘a leather saddle in an overcrowded riding school’ are sentences I have genuinely heard and thought: this person must really know what they are talking about. Let your imagination run wild and describe with a straight face what you taste.
• The art of swirling: a true wine expert always lets a wine ‘swirl’ in their glass first, to release the aromas of the wine. Slowly rotate the foot of your glass in circles, so that waves are created. Then smell the wine and take a small sip. These sentences are always good to throw out afterwards: about a red wine: ‘The tannins give just enough body to the wine’ (that little bitterness you often taste in red wine), about white: ‘This wine is well-balanced in its acidity.’.
• Avoid the word ‘dry’: almost ninety percent of a wine list is dry, so this doesn’t limit your choice. Learn some terms from a sommelier and you will immediately come across as a pro. If a wine is ‘complex’, it has many different flavors, ‘elegant’ you say about a light wine, ‘intense’ about a concentrated flavor, with ‘flamboyant’ you indicate a fruity wine and ‘opulent’ is rich and round in taste.