Why you should learn French if you want to be considered a French wine expert

This assumption is valid also for Italian wines, but it is clear that the global benchmark for wine competence and knowledge still remains France.

Understanding wine it´s not just a matter of landing in a wine region like an alien, going to the producers and forget the rest.

Actually one of the reasons why a region or a State has developed a strong food and beverage industry is its own cultural environment.

This is why some States are still non-mature oeno-gastronomic worlds and few others like France in the first place and right after Italy are mature, still developing and, most of all benchmarks.

Anyway, if you going to Burgundy, to Bordeaux, to the Rhône Valley, to the Loire Valley, you name it, just for the wines, you are a bit out of line.

And if you pretend to be a wine expert of a specific area, but you don´t master the language, you will not master the culture, hence you will not understand its wines, which are, simply stated and sorry to shock you, a part of a whole and not the whole.

In the last year, I have seen a growth of experts without competences. Getting a diploma can help you, but doesn´t make an expert of you. You should get a diploma as a completion of a "cursus studiorum", not as the only "studium" that matters.

There is life outside the wine business and in the wine regions. There are writers poets, sculptors, inventors, scientists and also common people living their own lives immersed in their own culture.

If you pretend to go to a region, using as a benchmark the place you are coming from, you make a huge mistake.

It´s like those people going to the region X and expect to have wines applying to their own taste of origin.

It doesn´t work this way.

You must be more humble.

When you go to certain regions, you must go with the hat in your hands, not on your head and you must try, at least try, to know the local culture, not trying to impose yours.

This is why you should try to learn French. Or Italian.

This if you want to call yourself "expert" of French or of Italian wines.

Until that day you cannot be it.