We are living in a moment in history which seems particularly poised for taking stock of our industry and our practice of teaching. Fires burn wide swaths of forest each summer, the ice caps are melting, and with them, global diplomacy. It sometimes feels hard to tell if wine really matters in the grand scheme of it all. How we attempt to deal with our place in the world and our sense of mortality, however small, is through teaching and communicating, through making sure we can share with you the things worth saving and teach you how to weed out the things better left behind. As educators and wine professionals, we have all spent more than a third of our adult lives learning everything we can about the grapevine and its many paths through this wide world. Jenna is fond of noting that through these travels we have found that wine touches everything - environmentalism, politics, economy, history, trade, geography, biology, cooking, engineering, art, fashion, health, and perhaps most of all, culture and human connection. While we may not save the world through a bottle of wine, it could very well be on the table while someone finally does.

The way in which the world of wine interacts with these other realms is often problematic to notions of progressive politics, and we wrestle with this every day. The modern wine business is built on a Euro-centric colonial and patriarchal model which has been co-opted into a romance, and we do our best to recognize it and name it if we can’t always change it. We don’t use the terms ‘new world’ and ‘old world’ in our classes, for example, because they reinforce the colonial narrative that Europe is somehow more important and better than other wine-making nations. In knowing this, we acknowledge it is true that vines were brought to many places by European colonizers, and we seek to celebrate stories of indigenous peoples, native grape varieties, and traditions that subvert the imperial-industrial complex. We believe in people attempting to tell stories of places and the ways they are different, and to give you (the hypothetical student) the confidence and the tools to explore and find these wines and their histories.

We have also promised (sometimes at great personal pains, because we all love a good rant) to not “yuck the yum” of others. This statement boils down to avoiding the painful sentiment of being told that what you like is gross, or, perhaps even worse, unserious. This is not to say we will praise every wine (trust us, we don’t.) However, we do attempt to see the good in things that may not be our style. We live in a moment where light bodied, gossamer-thin, high acid, cool climate wines are everything that is cool, and we do tend to seek out these styles ourselves and sing their praises frequently. However, that doesn’t mean that we don’t see beauty and importance in warm climate, full-bodied, deeply fruited wines. Sometimes we think these wines ought to be celebrated even moreso, as climate change will have us all drinking all the big and rich wines by 2045 and we may as well get out ahead of it. At the same time, we’d all like to drink less overall, or lower alcohol levels when we do drink, so we seek out the 11-percenters where we can. And thus, wine lives in the balance and the tension between opposing ideas and ideals.

Wine is full of contradictions, exceptions, and thus we hope to teach not only the truth of what we know about grapes and their places but also the ability to think critically. Cute labels can fool us all, and so can a heavy bottle or a leather-bound wine list. Sometimes the wine inside doesn’t live up to the hype, and we hope to help you figure out when that is true and when it isn’t. However, we’d also like to give you the tools to decide when the story and context and people who made it are so worth it that they make the whole thing taste better, or make the whole moment matter. It doesn’t always matter if a wine is ‘technically perfect’ if it makes you feel something.

The traditional dynamic of the classroom is also a structure that is inherently hierarchical – teacher at the top, students below. Maude looks forward to a time where we don’t need this type of structure, but for now it is how we can best get things done (and give you the best value for your money, at the end of the day, because we know classes cost money and you didn’t pay to hear your neighbour’s opinion on a wine he had last Thursday.) We know we sometimes have to follow this framework but hope to disrupt it in small ways when we can; we take feedback and recognize that sometimes other people in the room know a lot more about a given subject (or can offer a native Hungarian pronunciation of harslevelu, that I, for one, cannot) than we do. In this way, we hope to offer a dialectical method of teaching that is about discussion, debate, and moving toward common goals and understanding as much as it is about ‘disseminating information.’

Wine is much more than an assembled collection of facts, and so too should be classes about wine. To paraphrase the philosopher Gayatiri Spivak, “What is known is always in excess of knowledge.” In twenty-first century terms, sometimes you catch a vibe and know it to be true without the receipts in front of you, or sometimes even in spite of the facts in front of you. This gives way to the concept of the dialectic - which essentially means learning through debate or discussion, with the whole room moving together to a common goal of critical thinking on a subject. Many of our alternative classes (i.e., our non-WSET classes) are formatted with two teachers to allow for our students to see that two sommeliers can hold differing opinions about wine and both be valid, or, at the very least, for students to feel empowered to voice a dissenting opinion if they have one. Sometimes it's simply more fun and less intimidating to hear two people bantering back and forth, and we recognize that some wine classes have drained the fun right out of the glass. We’ve sat through them ourselves, and won’t subject you to the same.

Finally, and perhaps most challengingly, we arrive at the notion of what things cost. We operate (begrudgingly) in a system of capitalism which requires us to charge money for classes, because it costs us money to buy wines, glassware, textbooks, accounting software, and toilet paper. All these things cost more than we want them to, and so as much as we talk about being accessible education, we recognize that classes are luxury purchases for many people. We are not yet in a place where we can pay ourselves living wages to work full-time in this business (though that’s our problem, not yours), but still actively seek ways to make payment plans and scholarships work for our students. We hope soon to be able to offer scholarships of our own.

Knowing all of this, we respect and admire much of what is traditional to wine cultures and histories, but recognize that within those traditions are systems that subvert what is good for what is profitable. Therefore, what we desire for you to take away from This is Wine School is both resistance and celebration. We believe in change and spreading joy through the great unifying force that is wine. We think the ground in which it grows is worth understanding, because that makes it more meaningful to drink, and we hope you take this understanding and can apply it to so many other aspects of your life. We hope TIWS is a third space for people who love wine, and potentially even for those of you who really don’t. We’re willing to try.

Photos by Jeremy Wong

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