Richard Oh

I’ve had my share of wine tasting days. In one private wine-tasting occasion, a young fellow, scion of one of Jakarta’s upper-crust families, brought six bottles of wine, all wrapped in brown paper. They were stood on the table, three on each side. A bottle was uncorked to go with each course of dinner. The game that night was to guess which group of bottles belonged to New World and which to Old World. You don’t need to be a wine connoisseur to understand that New World means Chile, Africa all the way to Australia. Old World is of course pan Europe.

It wasn’t so much about how close to the mark we were that night at the guessing game, but how this young bloke and his spouse and friends went about thrusting their beaks into wine glasses, sniffing and gargling and spitting out the wines that amused me tremendously. As for the former, no genius would go wide of mark to say that we were all off mark, despite the agonizing efforts. As for the latter, it was really a hilarious sight, watching these guys going after something that a true Sommelier would tell you, no one would ever get the vintage year, country and the intricate blend of spices and ingredients down pat.

This same Sommelier, a Mr. Lee who owns a successful wine lounge, once told me this. Don’t be fooled by the price tags. (A bottle of Gaja grown and bottled in the Italian valley would easily fetch US 400.) The best wine, he winked at me, is one that you really enjoy. Now I must admit this statement lifted a lot of weight off this novice wine taster’s chest. I’d thought, as with any knowledge, there must be a set of underlying fundamental principles that one must acquire in order to be considered a person with a good taste for wines.

This simple truism about wines, I suppose, can be expanded to include anything to do with our taste. Our taste for a certain color, texture, style of clothing, food and drink is as natural as the day we were born. I, therefore, scratch my head in complete bafflement when I hear words like ‘acquired taste’.  Sure, after a few years of wine-tasting, you do get a few simple facts straight about the age of a wine by looking at the color of tannins and the fermentation fingers forming a Mercator inside of a glass, but that doesn’t mean you have an ‘acquired taste’. To have an acquired taste suggests that you had no prior taste whatsoever, which is rather difficult for me to comprehend. Some snooty wine connoisseur would pipe up, “But how would you know how good a wine would taste if you don’t know what good wines are.” My bone of contention is still this: no one could persuade me to enjoy a bottle of Gaja at whatever price it is tagged. It tastes like formalin with hell knows what else in the mix. And I stay away from Riesling and Shiraz, for as much reason as I keep going back to Cabernet Sauvignant and Merlot. I like wearing dark-colored short-sleeve shirts with matching pants or shorts. If we were to carry on with this ‘acquired taste’ bunkum, we’d all be lemmings led to the abyss of uniformity in our taste for clothes, drinks and foods. Just because these connoisseurs and fashionable folks tell us we should!

All this would make a whole lot more sense if you were to look into this matter of taste more thoroughly.  Our taste is instinctual. It’s most directly related to our senses. And our senses are what constitute our personality. Over time, naturally we’ll expand our taste to include other variants, but I would argue that these variants in one way or another pertain to the basic components of our taste. Thus, a coffee drinker is more likely to develop a taste for wine and vice versa.

The basics, however, remain enigmatically unchanged. I could, for instance, bend my mind to the most intractable thoughts or books, even if that would spell doom to my neural cells, but I just can’t make myself eat broccolis, tomatoes or anything to do with aubergines. (The quixotic fact is that my mom loved these veggies but failed to make me eat them.) As for colors, I loathe red, orange, and green. I drink tea, never just a glass of plain water. Aqua or Evian or any variants of mineral water for some reason just don’t appeal to me at all.

I’ve spent half a life trying to puzzle out these rather quaint proclivities but I must tell you I’m still figuring them out till now.  Our taste is in the end as individualistic as we are as a person. If we were to cut our own clothes, make our own wines and cook our own dishes, we should be wearing, drinking and eating very differently. Unfortunately, we’ve got our priorities in life. As such, we’ve unwittingly relegated our taste to the expert hands of others. We’re in a sense carrying the badges of other people’s tastes while still believing that our taste is irrevocably one of a kind!

A version of this essay was published in Now! Jakarta, April 2010