It was fascinating to watch my wife and her friends study for (and pass!) their Certified Sommelier exam.

It also highlighted to me just how wrong I was about how wine experts go about identifying wine.

We see the wine snobs in movies take one sniff of wine and rattle off the vintage, producer, and varietal.

To an outsider, they appear to be some magical wine savant.

They aren’t.

They figure out what a glass of wine is by figuring out what it is not.

It’s a framework, similar to the game of 20 questions, where they take identifiable characteristics and check them against knowledge, leveraging experience and deduction to increase their chances of a successful outcome.

Visual clues help to eliminate certain regions.

Aromas eliminate others, tightening the geographic focus.

Tasting notes eliminate particular grapes while signaling the presence of others.

The list of options for what the wine is becomes more limited.

The hunter can now search for specific characteristics that narrow the search.

The sweetness. The acidity.

Each note, each observation being used to narrow down the options, increasing the odds of success by eliminating others.

They didn’t know it was a Merlot blend from the Bordeaux region at the first sip.

They figured all the things it likely wasn’t to figure out what it was.

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If we are struggling to figure out what something is, sometimes the best route is to figure out what it is not.

Prior experiences and lessons serve as waypoints, each one increasing the odds that when we make that final declaration, we will be right.