This guide is intended to serve as a trailhead for anyone that doesn't know the first thing about wine. I aim to provide everything you need to know to appreciate wine.

Appreciation Vs. Enjoyment

First, I'd like to draw a distinction between appreciating and enjoying a glass of wine. Wine appreciation has to do with assessing a wine objectively, whereas wine enjoyment is about assessing a wine subjectively.

A wine might have a strong note of white pepper. If this was a flavor that was expressed by the winemaker intentionally and balances well with the other flavors in the wine, this is objectively a good expression of that note. On the other hand, you might not like white pepper or its use in combination with the other flavors, even though it fits very well (just as some people don't like blueberry pie, even if it's the best blueberry pie to be had). In this example, the expression of the note of white pepper in the wine ought to be appreciated, though it probably won't be enjoyed.

So why bother appreciating wine, then? Why not just enjoy it? I submit that, by learning to appreciate wine, your enjoyment of it, and all good food and beverage, will increase immensely. In my own experience, at the same time, my focus on flavor lead me away from food and drink I was previously happy to gulp down without paying much attention. The effect has been a decrease in my intake of junk food and beverages containing high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) along with a modest amount of weight loss. In essence, by learning to appreciate wine, I discovered that I had been eating and drinking a lot of things on autopilot that I didn't actually enjoy, and most of these things turned out to be mass-marketed and unhealthful. For instance, these days whenever I drink something containing HFCS, I find the initial sweetness overpowering and cloying, along with a bitter kind of "burn" at the back and sides of my throat. I'm no super-taster either; when I point this out to friends and ask them to focus on the flavor of HFCS-sweetened beverages, they often report the same experience.

Varietals

The most defining characteristic of any wine is the grape from which it is made. Most grape jelly might be made from one kind of grape, but the same is not true of wine. There are dozens of different kinds of grape from which wine is made; the type of grape used to make a wine is called the wine's varietal. This is where we'll begin.

The first step to knowing about wine is understanding varietals. So, I recommend anyone starting wine go out and get themselves some inexpensive, good representations of several different varietals of wine and taste them. It helps to begin with popular varietals that also have very different flavor profiles from each other, as this serves as an excellent baseline for learning about wine.

I recommend starting out with the following varietals. Visit your local wine merchant and ask him to recommend a $10 bottle that is a good representation of each of the following:

sauvignon blanc
reisling
chardonnay
pinot noir
merlot
cabernet sauvignon
zinfandel

Also, pick up some inexpensive traditional, clear wine glasses. Since it's going to be necessary to open more than one of these bottles at once, you might want to pick up 6 or 8 glasses, as you'll be needing some friends to help you finish all this wine.

Drinking in Order

When first starting, it will be necessary for you to drink different wines very close together. As you pay more attention to flavors and flavor profiles, you'll get better at remembering them, but at the outset your memory for flavor will be fleeting at best.

This, however, presents a problem. The closer together you drink two wines, the more the each wine will interfere with the flavors of the next, as wine contains many flavor compounds that tend to hang around in taste receptors and elsewhere in the mouth for a while. So, it also helps to always keep nearby a glass of tasteless, slightly cool water. Even more important, wines must be drunk in the appropriate order so as to minimize the interference of each wine on the next. Keeping this in mind, it's necessary to accept the fact that you'll almost never be drinking wine in a hermetically sealed bubble, nor would you want to do so. One of the biggest pleasures in drinking wine, in fact, is letting it interact with other flavors in food and aromas in the air, provided they complement each other in profile and strength. It pays to simply accept that you'll never stop developing your ability to find new and increasingly subtle flavors and there are too many variables to make this a completely controlled experiment. Practice will never make perfect in this regard (but it's fun to try for it anyway).