How to Develop Taste in Wine, Art, and Everything Else
Taste is not innate — it is trained, and the training follows a remarkably consistent pattern regardless of the domain. Whether you are learning to distinguish a Barolo from a Barbaresco, a Rothko from a Newman, or a bespoke suit from a made-to-measure one, the process involves the same three stages: exposure, comparison, and articulation. The first requires humility, the second requires attention, and the third requires vocabulary.
In wine, the fastest path to competence is structured tasting rather than casual drinking. The Court of Master Sommeliers' deductive tasting method teaches drinkers to evaluate wine systematically — appearance, nose, palate, conclusion — rather than relying on the impressionistic language that makes most wine criticism useless. A case of six different Burgundy producers, tasted side by side, teaches more in an evening than a year of drinking whatever the restaurant recommends.
In art, taste develops through sustained looking. The critic Robert Hughes spent hours before individual paintings, returning to them across decades, and his writing reflects the accumulated precision of that attention. Visit the same gallery monthly for a year and you will discover that your preferences have shifted — not because you have read the right criticism but because your eye has calibrated itself through repetition.
The common mistake is confusing taste with expense. A fifty-dollar Cru Beaujolais often outperforms a two-hundred-dollar Napa Cabernet in complexity and interest. A forty-pound English canvas shoe from Novesta offers more design intelligence than most luxury sneakers. Taste, properly understood, is the ability to identify quality independent of price — a skill that actually saves money rather than spending it.
Resources for developing taste across domains are more accessible than ever. Wine Folly (https://winefolly.com) provides visual guides that demystify terroir and grape varieties. The Sartorialist archives decades of street style that illustrate proportion and texture. The Criterion Channel curates cinema with the same intentionality a sommelier brings to a wine list.
Developing taste is ultimately an exercise in paying attention — to materials, proportions, contexts, and your own responses. Start by identifying one domain where you currently accept the default and commit to learning why some examples are better than others. The vocabulary will follow the perception, not the other way around.
