I was perched on my pedestal, across the street, watching a large wine chain insert their freshest iteration across the road from our year-old independent wine shop. I lost nights of sleep after I found out they were moving in. I’d ebbed and flowed between panic and firey determination for months.

On their coldest of opens, I was transfixed by a young man in the window, deep in conversation. A deep focus, unbreakable eye contact, his body gently leaning into the conversation. But I was drawn to his right hand. Between his fingers, he balanced a piece of stemware. Even from my vantage point I could tell it was one of those wafer-thin ones, dainty and fanciful. He started with a quick roll of the wine and held it up to the light to assess its colour. Then the roll turned into a swirl. Like a Swiss scientist arriving at CERN on Monday morning, they flick the Hadron Collider on, start it firing, get it up to speed (I assume it needs a little warm up and I refused to do further research because my analogy will fall apart). The wine glass picked up speed, the liquid starts perfectly swirling in the glass. Ten seconds of heavy clockwise rotation, a pause, a nose inserted into its opening, a little head nod - then change to a counter clockwise swirl. The confidence is building, the juice is clinging to the side of the glass seemingly mocking science and those Swiss scientists. All the while holding this seemingly interesting conversation. It was perfectly synchronised and choreographed.

For the sake of clarity and cuntery, we’ll now refer to this young man as the Performative Swirler (PS).

LOTS of people like wine. Lots of people drink wine very regularly. A diminishing amount of people love wine and are also interested in learning about wine – because the barrier for entry is seemingly too high-minded. People are understandably intimidated. And the blame is squarely at the feet of the Performative Swirler and the pseudo-expertise that he was attempting to project. Our dear PS was suggesting to his audience that he knows wine, consciously or subconsciously, by performing the dance. He knows the intricacies and jargon of wine and if you have the prerequisite knowledge (or the confidence), you may engage - you may join the performance.

If not, you’re not allowed in. You’re stuck buying the varieties you know how to pronounce. You’re condemned to consumer anonymity at your local ASX100, supermarket-owned bottleshop (it’s a huge reason why they exist so prominently in Australia!). You get cold sweats when you’re obliged to bring a bottle to a dinner party. You mumble something unintelligible about your wine choice and everyone laughs and a hockey-masked Performative Swirler chases you in your dreams.

Lets quickly breakdown why you would swirl a glass of wine:

• Are you a judge at a wine show tasked with professionally assessing a wine based on a rigid set of criteria? Then yes, swirl away, get that nose in there, Greg is already on his third wine.

• Do you smell petrol? Fumes? Struck match? Go on, give it a quick swirl, you might be able to swirl off the volatile compounds.

• Do you just love the smell of the wine? Sure, give it a lazy twist in the glass and savour a sniff, but let’s not get weird about it.

• Have you ever been poured that awkward taste test at a restaurant after you’ve ordered a bottle? Well yes, you’re smelling for corkage (it’ll smell like wet dog), not basking in your wine choice, you’ve already bought the bottle, silly.

That’s it.

It’s this type of performance, the high-toned ‘intellect’ of our PS that makes it so intimidating for people that like wine, to start loving and learning about it.

The wine industry naturally produces professionals, making a living off and authenticating their objective opinions on wine. Much of the history of commercialised wine was built around brand, validated by it’s heritage or ancestral affiliation. We bought Bordeaux and Burgundy and Chianti. We buy Yarra Valley Pinot Noir and Anjou Chenin and Beaujolais. And to maintain that value, people need to make industry folks believe and perpetuate its reputation for being valuable. This is the genesis of our Performative Swirler - where, in conjunction with selling the wine’s value, he’s also selling his own value to authenticate his opinion.

Taste is inherently subjective.

Always.

Nothing can taste objectively good or bad - it’s always linked to our experience and environment and culture and mood and weather and if-we-had-a-fight-with-our-partner-this-morning (infinity etc).

If I taste an orange wine and taste candied ginger - and you taste the same wine and you taste ass - we are both equally correct.

If you like the taste of Jagermeister and its 56 herbs and spices, that’s awesome - LOVE that for you. If I taste Jagermeister, it tastes like shame and pretending to like beer at my first boy/girl party. Both are equally valid assessments of taste.

Regrettably, Australian wine consumers have been uniquely subjugated, our tastes suppressed and moulded to fit Big Industry. It’s Parkeristion of Australian wine in the 80s. It’s Tall Poppy Syndrome. It’s our evil Supermarket duolopy. It’s a growing precariat class and a shrinking middle class. It’s the mere-exposure affect. It’s wankery and classism as a selling technique.

The result: it’s disappointing love child, the Performative Swirler.

Wine is remarkably romantic and loveable. It’s an agricultural product made by human hands, that involves thoughtful farming and environmental practices, passion, creativity, culture, heritage and hard work - which is expressed with an astonishing degree of variability and variety - and will give you a nice, warm buzz. It’s equally sad that people use it as a cultural measure stick, insufferably over-intellectualised to a point that denies people social access to a product that arguably is the essence of humanity and community, an unrivalled social lubricant.

If you’re holding a wine glass and feel your wrist loosen, stawp. There this a way to enjoy wine and be curious AND not be a twat.

Our simple homemade recipe for enjoying wine:

1. Learn the winemaker's name. The human, the face. Learn to love the wine and the winemaker’s story. Go meet them at a local tasting or at their cellar door. It’s more romantique!

2. When asked to describe a wine, start with ‘it’s yummy, I love it’. If you have the technical wine knowledge to know why you like the wine, wow that's cool, but keep it on the inside, save the jargon for your trade tasting. Give people space to agree with you or express their own opinion.

3. Stop buying wine from supermarket-owned chains. They are irredeemably evil corporations that bully grape growers, small wine producers and independent wine retailers. They’re the reason ‘natural wine’ is in quotation markers. Industrialised, frankensteined wine is the blip in wine history - they’ve just peddled it as the norm, for enormous profits.

4. Buy a wine you can’t pronounce. Drink it, google it. Learn how to say Gewürztraminer and Assyrtiko.

5. Invest in some anti-swirl technology. Pour your wine into a coffee mug, into a stem-less something with no shape. It’s for your own good.

Dom Garreffa operates Crooked Drinks, a silly little wine store on Smith Street in Collingwood on the unceded lands of the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung poeple of the Kulin nation.