When Master of Wine Nick Jackson published his slim, theoretical volume, Beyond Flavour, in 2020, he did so with the expectation that it would be read by “maybe a hundred MW students.” Instead it became an instant classic, a must-read for the wine cognoscenti, and perhaps the most influential wine book of the last decade among wine experts. Its premise was simple and provocative: wines are distinct from one another not for the way they taste, but for the way they feel and behave in your mouth. 

The broader media quickly caught on, and Beyond Flavour garnered praise from major outlets including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times. 

It’s not surprising that such a novel theory of wine was developed by someone with a track record of deep thinking. Jackson earned his Ph.D. in theology at the University of Cambridge, studying early Christian texts through the lens of literary criticism. As a student, he found wine, joining both of the university’s wine clubs, which began a journey culminating in a Master of Wine distinction. After a turn at Sotheby’s in London and New York, Jackson moved to Florida to start Crescendo Wines, his fine wine importing company. 

We spoke with Jackson about the success of Beyond Flavour, why it took him 10 years to understand Italian wine, how wine heroically resists modernization, and why a bit of imperfection makes the very best wines even better.

On fleeing academia for wine

I graduated in 2011 with my Ph.D. in theology and was working at Cambridge Wine Merchants. I decided that, rather than go down the academic route, I’d try to do the wine thing.

Every day that goes past I feel more justified in my decision. Humanities have dug themselves a very deep hole from which they will not escape. The dead ends that this intense focus on theory over texts has produced; this inability or refusal to grapple with core texts—not just of Western culture but any culture, in favor of doing politics in an unsophisticated, ahistorical way—it’s just totally bankrupt. I could already feel that my kind of approach was being edged out in favor of the theory people 

Wine is the very opposite. Wine is life giving. It’s joyful. The only reason people buy wine is to make them happy. We’re selling the greatest product in the world.

On how wine returns us to our humanity

Wine has always generated outsized levels of influence for a drink. But ultimately there’s this thing about returning ourselves to our own humanity, especially in this very decadent 21st century situation where everything is automated, efficient, frictionless. A disaster in the modern world is when your delivery man arrives five minutes late.

This is not humanity. This is not how humans have ever lived. It betrays our embodied nature. It betrays our fundamental characteristic of being relational beings and all the contingency this involves. You can’t control everything. Anyone with children, or in a relationship, knows that. 

Wine sits there in the modern world and stubbornly resists attempts to modernize it. Witness the almost complete failure of tech in wine—much to the frustration of people in California.

There are so many variables that go into its creation and where it comes from, how it's consumed. That makes it extremely difficult to commoditize. And the worst actors in the wine industry are those that do try to commoditize it. 

I was at a dinner in New York recently, and there was a guy making the case that wine is replaceable with any other form of substances. “Some nights I do drugs, some nights spirits, some nights wine.” I think that’s a complete misapprehension of what wine is. Dare I say, that’s a very American perspective that you can just switch these things out.

Wine fits the natural rhythms of our life. It helps us unwind at the end of the day. It improves food. Food improves it. The French have this down—it’s part of joie de vivre. This vision of it as some kind of stimulant is very limited.

Wine has a natural human receptivity to it. It just feels natural to us. 

Wine is a cultural asset. That wine clearly encodes history, culture, place, family, tradition, makes it a great cultural artifact. Perhaps scotch might attempt to reach for this in terms of aging and terroir, but many spirits have no ambition to do that. 

Wine is such a product of where it’s from. It’s very closely associated with the months it spends hanging in the vineyard. Spirits, of course, have different ingredients and the way you age them can be affected by where you are. But wine has that deep tie with nature and the land.

On the trouble with wine language and the decline of the critic

A lot of the issue with wine writing is that many wine writers started in wine and became writers. Having some other broader context can be useful. I was trained as a literary critic where you learn different ways of understanding the same subject matter. 

There is this huge confusion of language in wine writing, which is that people don't understand what metaphor is. All flavor language is metaphorical. And no one knows it. When we say a wine smells of strawberries, it smells like strawberries. Meaning it has a resemblance in some respect to the smell of strawberries. Not even the strawberries themselves. Just the smell. 

This is like pure Plato, isn’t it? 

Why does this matter? It generates confusion. How many times have you been in a wine tasting where someone says something like that and a consumer will say, “Do you mean they add strawberries to the wine?” When you receive a comment like that, it’s a statement that your language is failing.

Now, look, there are plenty of people for whom the language does work. You only have to go onto CellarTracker and see that so many people write in the same style as the critical magazines, where it seems to become a competition about how many fruits and vegetables you can name. 

I think this language tends to work for older generations, the people who grew up with Robert Parker. And it’s such a characteristic of the baby boomer generation to pick up on an idea and latch onto it for dear life. So for many people in that generation, the way Parker wrote and the wines he liked—that was it. 

But it seems to me that’s missing the point. The different flavors in a wine are not the end in themselves, they’re a means to a more complete experience. They’re vehicles for telling a story. Only the complete experience can give you the whole. What’s the complete experience? Not just flavors, but tannin, acid, sapidity, structure, length, all those kinds of things. Personality and character are elements of wine which we just don’t think about enough. And they’re so much more important than fruit flavors.

Clearly there’s a lot of contempt for this style of writing, and this kind of tasting notes. But in a way it’s almost irrelevant because the profession of wine criticism is dying by suicide. The notion of the independent wine critic is rapidly becoming extinct—it’s one of the most unforeseeable fallouts from the Parker era. We may have expected that other people would try to take Parker’s mantle, but the integrity and independence of Parker’s voice, funnily enough, are probably his greatest legacy, one that’s been betrayed by the next generation of writers. The idea of an authoritative voice is lost.

It’s all pay to play now. People are not idiots; people know that. So the quality of the notes is irrelevant. It’s just, “Does my guy like my wine this year?” That’s what it comes down to.

On how he developed his theory of tasting 

I’d tested some of my ideas on my tasting group in New York for the MW, and people seemed to respond to them, so I thought maybe there’s a few MW students who might appreciate this. I was very surprised by how broadly Beyond Flavour caught on.

I thought I might sell 100 copies to MW students. Underlying the book is a series of contentions about wine itself, the way that we perceive it, and how we can use language to perceive it. This is very difficult to do. Especially a sensory experience as obscure as taste. It’s easier to do with something we’re seeing. Taste is more difficult.

The vocabulary available to us to describe wine was extremely limited. Other books were missing the point. All these flavor wheels and stuff—they all work on the basis that flavor is the most important thing in wine. But it’s not at all obvious to me that that’s the best way of apprehending a wine.

I don’t think that’s how winemakers think. I think it’s like estimating a person by the clothes they wear. You’ve got to do more work to get to the heart of it.

On what the hell tasting for “shape” means

The book’s about structure. Each of the major varieties has a distinctive structure. If you can learn each variety's distinct structure, you can learn to understand the way the wine works in your mouth.

What do I mean by structure? Acid in white, tannin in red. 

Let’s do the reds first. My argument isn’t just that tannin is a drying sensation on your gums. It's that there’s a texture to the tannins that varies by variety. Some could be sandy, or grainy, or velvety. The other aspect is that for each variety, you can experience a different physical location in your mouth where you feel those tannins most strongly. So when you combine the texture and location of those tannins, you can say, “It’s likely to be this variety.” 

Acid structure’s a bit more complicated. It involves holding the wine in your mouth for about five seconds and feeling what the acidity is doing. Obviously white wines have freshness, that’s the acid doing its work, but you feel that electric or zesty quality of the acid in different places in your mouth. But also, in particular, acid behaves in different ways during the time the wine spends on your palate. You might feel the acidity most strongly when you first put it in your mouth, or at the end, or experience peaks and troughs or other “shapes.” I visualize acid structure for each white variety as having a different shape. It’s an abstract concept and it’s much more difficult than tannins, which have a physical location of the sensation. 

A just criticism of this idea is that some of the descriptions can be more easily understood than others because some varieties don't have a strong personality in terms of their structure. 

But think about the major international varieties we always learn—they really do have strong personalities in terms of the structures. I love Italian white wines, for example, but many people can find them interchangeable in terms of style. These wines haven’t achieved the success of Chardonnay. One of the reasons is that they don’t have that very defined structure that Chardonnay does. It’s not accidental that the best varieties have the best, most pronounced, clearest structure. It’s fundamental to their identity as a great variety.

These varieties have good structure, but of course other aspects: complexity, beauty. Again, not the kind of categories this world requires us to think about very often. But appreciating wine is the study of beauty. It’s aesthetics. Often, in a pretty ugly world, wine is a daily experience that gives us a moment of grace.

On the puzzle of Italian wines

My wine journey was very typical of an English person. I started with Bordeaux—the first two years at Sotheby’s, that’s all I did. Then I caught the Burgundy bug; then I got into Champagne. This is a natural trajectory—you’re getting lighter, finer, more delicate. 

After all of that I finally began to wrestle with Italian wine. It took me a decade as a wine professional to begin to understand Italian wine. So I’ve done a lot of thinking about why so many people find Italian wine difficult. 

Italian wine is complicated. It doesn’t fit into the typical categories. (I owe this idea to Stevie Kim from the Italian Wine Podcast and Sarah Heller MW.) The way we teach wine is through the lens of French wine—as if French wine is the gold standard. Now, it may be, but let’s think about why: they're emphasizing things like flavors, the texture of the fruit, ageability, specificity in terms of terroir expression. I’ve got no problems with any of those things. A velvety Burgundy, Sonoma Pinot, Napa Cabernet, or Bordeaux—these wines perfectly fit the model that’s been made by education. 

But if you have a Sangiovese or a Barolo—frankly, they’re powerful, but they lack that generous mid-palate fruit texture. What do they have instead? This piercing acidity, this grainy tannin. So the wines become less about fruit, and more about texture and the structure of the tannins. But it’s not the texture of the fruit like you’re taught. It’s the texture of the tannins and the acidity. Italian wines are immensely textural, but they’re not textural in the “right” ways.

Italian wine requires you to pair them with food. Sit with them. Listen to them. Especially the finish. Italian wines are quintessentially back palate—not front palate—wines.  

Super Tuscans are trying to buck this and create something that’s understandable to international norms. I believe many people find Italian wine difficult, so Super Tuscans are an answer to the question “how the hell do I enjoy Italian wine?”

French wine education, service, somms—they place so much emphasis on creating these perfect moments. Moments of emotion, as the French say. 

It goes very deep into the French psyche to believe that perfection is possible and to go for it. But some French producers—like Mugnier in Chambolle-Musigny—to me they’re almost too perfect and pure. Jamie Goode has written well about this: you need some wabi sabi, a little tiny flaw in the pond to create the ripples so you can see the beauty. French wines aim for perfection. Italian wine never does.

On how we got to this point with natural wine

From 1997 to around 2011 there was this huge convergence of styles worldwide. To say it was Parker is way too reductionist. A lot of it had to do with winemaking technology. They had so many more tools to play with—they went mad! In the decade of the 2000s, which I think will come to be seen as one of the worst-ever decades of winemaking, you get this uniformity of style. The wines are usually made from a standard set of international varieties, they’re made in homogenized ways, and they haven’t aged well. (Of course, in the classic regions there are many producers that resisted those trends.)

After 2011 we moved into a much happier world of indigenous varieties; of all different funky styles, pét-nats, orange wines. Kind of the opposite of what we’d had. But a fair question is whether all these wines can find a home. The market always wins.

The proposition of what natural wine was in 2011 was quite strong, if not defined. But it’s become watered down precisely because it wasn’t defined. 

There are a lot of carpetbaggers proclaiming that their wine bars and restaurants were natural wine bars, and you walk in and it’s all conventional stuff, but maybe just from smaller producers.

True natural wine is still out there—but I think it’s a hobby. Natural wine has sort of been absorbed into the mainstream. The producers are all making “natural” styles, many restaurants have “natural” styles available. But in the end is natural wine a victim of its own success? 

“True” natural wine—the stuff that turned people on originally, the absolute nothing added, nothing taken away—the incredibly vibrant fruit, the likes of which you’ve never experienced before; it’s only available in the typical handful of urban liberal centers around the world. It doesn’t exist in my market in Florida. 

But maybe the great legacy of the natural wine movement is that a lot of mainstream producers have dramatically reduced the amount of sulfites they’ve used and changed their practices. That’s very important. 

On what he’s drinking—and not

I don’t drink Rioja. I should, and I would if the wines were better than they are. Rioja is a huge region with fantastic terroir but with winemaking stuck in the 19th century. The 21st century isn’t the time to be making wines in the cellar anymore, relying on oak and extended oxidative aging. 

Of course I’m exaggerating to prove a point. But this is a huge region capable of creating a wide diversity of wines, and everything just tastes the same—it’s oaky, the fruit is simple, it's all unsophisticated. And look, age does a lot of good work, but why should wines take 20 years to become interesting?  

There are a lot of pioneering producers who have reached these same conclusions. They say, “Forget about all the crianza reserva nonsense” and instead are making single-vineyard Tempranillo or Garnacha from great terroir, often at altitude, from these great chalky soils that give you such pure, scented styles. If you had them in a blind tasting, you’d never know they’re Rioja. [Note: for much more on this, see our piece about new-wave winemakers in Rioja.]

People are getting excited about Garnacha from a handful of producers making small volumes in Sierra de Gredos or wherever. But we’re talking about a grape that struggles to keep its acidity and has this naturally sweet fruit. On the other hand, you’ve got Tempranillo that’s got great acidity, fabulous terror, great soils. No one’s talking about that! But people are working on it, that’s the good thing.

I think we’re only just starting to see the beginning of this Rioja revolution. If such a huge, important historic wine region could be transformed for the good, that would be very exciting. It’s very much a “watch this space” thing.

I love Germany. But I’ve completely given up on Prädikats—not that they’re not world-class wines—they’re wonderful and delicious. But it never feels like the right moment to drink them. Whereas the trocken Rieslings are what producers in Germany want to be all about now. They want to make world-class dry white wines. I love when in Anne Krebiehl’s Germany book, she says, “Life is difficult, let us drink light wine.” Dry trocken riesling at 12 percent alcohol is so concentrated, yet so playful and light. It’s a joy to drink. 

I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to drink lighter, fresher wines. Germany’s got them in abundance. Also: Spätburgunder. To my mind, those are the best Pinots outside of Burgundy in Europe and no one knows it.

I love Piedmont and many of the Tuscan wines. Chianti is just great. I suppose people would expect me to say Brunello. There are some great Brunellos, but Chianti as a region is unbelievably good right now.