The Five Stages of Wine Geekdom

A meditation on the the end point of a life devoted to wine

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief famously attempts to describe how humans progress through the process of grieving. She identified those stages as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and she generally applied them to the process of dying.

The identification of stages through which a person progresses in coming to terms with dying is a very handy and effective way of stepping back and attempting an objective assessment of a fundamental aspect of life.

I’ve come to believe there is also a set of stages through which a devoté of wine can assess their journey toward Peak Wine Geekdom? The stages are as follows:

DISCOVERY (of wine)
TYPES (investigating and discovering different types of wine)
PLACE (moving on to uncover the meaning of place and terroir)
PEOPLE (identifying and associating the people that make and grow wine as critical)
REVELATION (Settling into the search for revelatory wine experiences)

When you meet that person who has journeyed through the five stages of wine geekdom, you can be nearly positive they have traveled the path outlined above. And when you are that person, you can easily assess how this path from Discovery to the search for Revelation has occurred in your own wine journey.

For all of you who, like me, fondly embrace the moniker of “Wine Geek”, there is usually a moment or event you can identify as your point of discovery when you realized that wine had the power to captivate you. You realized that in addition to drinking more wine, this captivation required you to learn more about wine. The moment or event may have been the introduction to a particularly persuasive wine lover. Perhaps you found yourself at a wine estate and became taken with the magic of fermentation. Maybe a former lover became “former” for a good reason but left you with a happy memory of the introduction to great wine. It could be anything o any moment, but that point of DISCOVERY is a crucial beginning every wine geek can identify.

Almost all of us proceeded from DISCOVERY to the process of investigating TYPES of wine. Varietal, Burgundy, Port-Style, etc. This is where we began to come to terms with the vastness of wine and where we confirmed for ourselves that wine is much more than just a hedonistic pursuit but also intellectual in nature. Simply realizing that there were such an array of wine grapes beyond Merlot and Chardonnay confirmed for us that there was something profound about the profundity of wine types. We jumped in and started exploring and learning.

But once the budding wine geek moves on from DISCOVERY to understanding the wide variety of wine TYPES, it quickly becomes clear that there is an exponential increase in the TYPES of wine first though existed when you realize that PLACE or terroir is the concept that makes the variety of wine nearly infinite. This is the point where a budding wine geek decides to cut and run or commit to a lifetime of exploration. When the wine geek realizes that Cabernet Sauvignon can be a different wine when produced from grapes grown in Napa or Sonoma or Bordeaux or Uruguay or Argentina or Australia or South Africa or anywhere else, then something deeply altering happens to the wine geek’s brain. A recategorizing of the wine world is required. It’s a project that requires either commitment or retreat. The Wine Geek commits and quite often obsession takes over.