Tim James: Understanding wine starts with pleasure but what comes next?
Wine Mag | 16.03.2026 21:27
Once it’s been successfully nabbed, a good quotation should not be allowed to get away too quickly. I had three of them in my last column for World of Fine Wine, and decided to keep one of them at work a little longer for Winemag. That column was, in my usual rambling way, wondering about how much technical etc detail is useful to know if one wants to “understand” something like wine (or music, which I used as an analogy), and, relatedly, what it means to really “get” a feeling for the subject. My concluding quote came from the great British poet Philip Larkin, who was also a notable jazz critic. It’s worth sharing more widely. He said:
