My year of wine: Freed from the terrors of terroir

At a blind tasting of four champagnes I got all of them wrong.

How do you distinguish a Ruinart from two Moët & Chandon (one a vintage bottle, the other not) and a Veuve Clicquot? They all looked the same, and were equally bubbly and delicious.

The tasting exercise was the precursor to a screening of the 2012 documentary SOMM last week. The film follows four young American men while they prepare for the Court of Master Sommeliers' master sommelier exam. It's a madly intense process and very few people pass it. In the organisation's 40 years, fewer than 200 candidates have passed the exam. For months, years even, candidates obsessively learn wine facts and taste wines, sniffing at them, describing them, drinking and spitting.

They learn to distinguish terroirs, identify grapes and vintages, and generally sound off on wine-related history, science and botany.

A few days after seeing this bit of obsessive madness, I met Robert Joseph, an English wine writer and expert, but not a Court of Master Sommeliers graduate.

Did you sit through the whole film, he asked.

"It's so boring. It's like watching people train for a marathon," he laughed.

His view is that wine has become "deliberately difficult, unnecessarily difficult".

"Wine people set up barriers to prevent other people getting in."

So can he do the sniff-and-taste test, and tell a good story about a wine: where it comes from, what it tastes like, how old it is?

"On a good day, " he shrugged. For him enjoying wine is the key, and that doesn't require becoming a monomaniacal bore.

Besides, he said, when you think you know something about it, "a wine will come and make a fool of you".

So, do we need to know anything about wine to enjoy it?

"No! Nobody needs to educate consumers about handbags, shoes, or perfume. We enjoy and buy perfume and handbags without learning about them. You don't need to know wine to drink it," Joseph said.