I don’t know that there is another human sub-culture as bound to habit and convention as the wine community. The wine styles available today—red, white, sparkling, rosé, skin contact whites, and fortified—have been around for centuries.
At a tasting, the glassware is standardized, the pour size tacitly agreed upon, and the order of service rehearsed: whites before reds, dry before sweet. A shared vocabulary circulates the room—dry, clean, varietal, oak—so people with a bit of experience can share judgments without consulting a dictionary. None of this is inherent in the nature of wine. It’s the result of conventions that people consciously or inadvertently have decided on.
We cannot do without conventions. They make wine intelligible enough that makers, sellers, and drinkers can coordinate their actions and expectations with minimal friction.
Howard Becker’s lesson about art worlds is relevant here: collective practices depend on shared routines that reduce uncertainty and enable cooperation. In wine, those routines do more than save time. They draw a boundary around what counts as success. A producer can innovate, but only within a field of recognizable norms about faults, dryness, ripeness, oak use, and the rest. If you ignore these, you do not merely surprise people; you risk drifting into a category that no one knows how to evaluate. Decisions about style are always a wager on the audience’s learned habits of attention.
Wine regions inherit and refine these habits. The authority of Barolo or Madiran rest partly on tannic structure;not so for Beaujolais and Emilia-Romagna which come with quite different expectations. Climate and grape variety matter, of course, yet local practice and discourse shape what the vineyard offers. That is one reason “terroir” refers to more than geology. It names a historical picture of belonging that growers, critics, and drinkers maintain together—sometimes zealously, sometimes experimentally, but always through talk and training that intersect with the physical features of terroir. A Pinot Noir from Burgundy doesn’t just taste of the soil and weather. It tastes of the decisions made by countless people through the centuries.
The tools we use when we taste are conventions as well. Ann Noble’s aroma wheel gave drinkers a shared idiom. Sensory science linked compounds to families of aroma. The professionalization achieved through wine education improved clarity, training, and comparative tasting. There is a risk, however, when an aid to attention becomes a filter that lets through only what it can already label. If our methods teach us to look only for what is easily named, we will miss the structures that create finesse or elegance and that make each wine distinctive.
Conventions also encode meanings. We meet wine as a companion to meals, a token of hospitality, a symbol of achievement, or an indicator of geographical location. Those meanings stabilize style choices because they stabilize expectations about the occasion in which we taste. A silky Napa Cabernet at a celebratory dinner performs one role; a brisk Muscadet with oysters performs another. Producers read these expectations and adjust their decisions in the vineyard and cellar accordingly. The result is a feedback loop between vineyard/winery practices and what wine lovers value that constitute conventional wisdom at a point in time.
But despite these conventions and the traditions that support them, wine is not static, which I think is remarkable. Conventions bend under pressure from markets, new regions, changing climates, and palate fatigue. Tastes circulate through cycles: sweet to dry, ripeness to restraint, extracted to lifted. At each turn, communities argue, revise thresholds, and carry forward enough continuity for the conversation to remain intelligible. Innovations that last tend to be intelligible as an answer to questions the community already understands how to ask. The popularity of rosé was an answer to what to drink when the whether turns hot. The recent re-emergence of orange wine was an answer to what to drink with bold dishes that work well with high acidity. Conventions are the product of these ongoing conversations.
What follows from this for drinkers? Learn the conventions that structure what you notice. Wine is a vague object, too reticent and subtle for us to grasp without these conventions to help us notice what it has to offer. That is why experience and education (formal or informal) are essential for wine appreciation. But use these conventions as lenses not blinders. When a norm or convention illuminates what a wine is about, rely on it. But always look for cases that violate norms because that is where excitement lies.
Conventions make wine intelligible but curiosity keeps it alive.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 