Stickbuilt

Fluency with wine is built piece by piece

Two young men named Nathaniel and Johnathan are building us a garden shed. They got started last week in bitter cold. Their first task was to clear the concrete slab foundation, which was poured last fall and has lain encased in snow and ice. They got it swiftly shoveled but the ice proved recalcitrant. One of them drove off in his pickup and soon returned with two gas-fired heaters. They improvised a tent over the slab with a black tarp and two sawhorses, then angled the heaters toward the center and fired them up. I was certain this would end in a call to 9-1-1, but the men carried out their task with the breezy nonchalance of youth. They were right. Within a few hours the slab was clear and drying in the wan March sun.

The next day dawned at zero degrees Fahrenheit and temperatures never rose above five, so the pair worked with the heaters pointed at their workstations, warming themselves and all of Lyme, New Hampshire. And who could blame them. Today, not even a week later, it was sixty-eight degrees and sunny and they both wore t-shirts. By now they’ve framed the four main walls, leaving the roof open to a blue and yellow sky. I checked in with Nathaniel, the more senior member, as they were picking up for the day. “Looks great,” I said. “What’s next?”

“Tomorrow we might get started on the back part.” He meant the additional open section where I’ll store my wheelbarrow and bulky garden paraphernalia. There is rain in the forecast, and I pointed to the roof, or rather the opening where the roof will be. “What about the—” and here I hesitated a millisecond as my brain cast about for the right word. Was it truss, joist, stringer, transom or—“beams?” I asked.

“Yep, rafters after that,” Nathaniel said, without missing a beat. “I already have all the rafter stock on site.” He gestured to the longest stack of lumber near the carport.

“Rafters,” I said, “right.” And so I learned the definitive name of the long piece of wood that supports a roof: rafter. It is not a new word to me, and is in fact so common I must have heard and read it hundreds of times. But knowing the meaning of a word in context is different from conjuring it contemporaneously in conversation with an expert. And not just any expert, the one who will install said rafters.

He was gracious not to make a big deal out of the correction, and probably doesn’t expect the homeowner to know all of his trade’s terms of art. I didn’t feel embarrassed, and anyway there’s no quicker way to learn something new than to hazard a guess and get swiftly—kindly, politely—corrected.

It’s not so different with wine. Like construction, wine is a complicated domain that bristles with specialized terminology. It begins with the essentials of grape and territory: red Burgundy means Pinot noir and white Burgundy means Chardonnay, but also maybe Gamay (in the 14th century) and Aligoté (in a trendy wine bar). Layer on pronunciation; long ago I asked a somm for a wine from Veneto, pronouncing it “ven-EH-toe” instead of “VEN-eh-toe.” I still burn with shame.

Then add terms like varietal and variety, unfiltered and unoaked, native, typical, balanced, Old World, New World, medium-plus. Finally, top it all with the neologisms that gush from fertile descriptivist minds: natty, glou-glou, minerality, crunchy, zero-zero, raw.

Wine’s vocabulary can serve as a scaffolding that supports understanding and insight. Fluency is freeing, stimulating deeper conversation among peers. Professionals like to talk about wine, and in fact need to talk about wine in order to make progress.

But language can also seem exclusionary, and fluency can feel like a badge. The words are shibboleths that grant access to the temple. Those who are only partially fluent have it hardest because they know what they don’t yet know. I feel this way whenever I travel in Italy and France, where my limited command of these languages risks nerve-wracking self embarrassment. The partially wine-fluent know they cannot yet summon the mot juste for every context, and their anxiety is especially electric in highly charged social contexts: a date, a business dinner, a potent family gathering.

So for those who seek to earn wine fluency: Go easy on yourself. It takes a while to become au fait with any domain, but especially one as ancient and professionalized as wine. Take comfort knowing that this strange discourse of wine is evocative and evolving. It loves new ideas and neologisms, and everyone will want to hear yours.

For those who have already earned this fluency: Go easy on others. Remember that time before wine felt effortless for you. Be generous and gentle. Be like my builder Nathaniel. Smile warmly and say, “Yep, rafters.” Then go right back to work.

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Build it up ©2026 Meg Maker