TheChampagneSommelier Reflects on Unsolicited Advice for the Novice Drinker [ read the full champagne story ]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
The young man was entirely serious. He leaned across the table at the club, eyes wide with the terrifying, fragile sincerity only an eighteen-year-old can muster, and asked:
”Do you have any life advice for me?”
Personally, at his age, I would rather have set fire to my own trousers than ask an elder for directions. I was far too busy cultivating a thin veneer of cynical detachment, wearing too much black, and pretending that a lukewarm glass of bulk-produced cava was the height of bohemian decadence. But this boy, refreshingly, lacked the debilitating self-consciousness that paralyzed my generation.
I paused. I weighed my words. As TheChampagneSommelier—or Björnstierne, if you must address me by the name on my passport—I felt a sudden, heavy pressure. The trajectory of this boy’s young life might hinge on what came out of my mouth next.
The Rejected Manifestos
My mind raced through the inventory of standard, middle-aged wisdom. I instantly dismissed the crude, locker-room philosophy of my best friend’s father, who used to look at our spectacularly barren love lives and cheer us up by muttering, ”Girls want to get laid too, you know.” While technically a liberating truth for a gaggle of spotty teenagers, hearing it from a man with graying temples risks sounding less like a mentor and more like a disgraced influencer hiding from an internet mob. One must avoid the Andrew Tate stamp at all costs.
Then there was my own father’s utilitarian mantra for facing overwhelming tasks: ”How do you eat an elephant? Bit for bit.” It’s functional, I suppose, if you’re planning a career in middle management or moving a pile of gravel, but it lacks any sort of vinous romance.
I thought about lecturing him on the digital rot eating his peers from the inside out. ”Put down the telephone, stop scrolling, and read a book.” God knows too many young brains are currently liquefying under the blue light of TikTok, but it felt intolerably smug. It sounded like a headmaster standing in a drafty assembly hall.
So, instead, I took a sip of something properly structured—a Grand Cru with enough nervous acidity to focus the mind—and gave him the only truth that has ever brought me true peace.
– ”Nobody cares.”
The Self-Centred Tundra
The student looked appropriately baffled. He had probably been expecting a quote from Marcus Aurelius or a tip on compound interest.
I explained to him that I have squandered far too many hours of my finite existence on this planet wondering what the faceless, indifferent crowd thought of me. For decades, I walked through the world under the grandiose delusion that I was the subject of intense external surveillance. I assumed the room fell silent when I entered because of my style—or lack thereof.
It was all an illusion. Had the public actually spent any time analyzing my character, they might have concluded I was arrogant, tight-fisted, or remarkably average-looking. But they didn’t. Because they were far too busy panicking about their own hair, their own bank accounts, and their own minor social humiliations. They were thinking about themselves.
We consistently and catastrophically overestimate how much others dwell on our shortcomings. I would have been spared a vast lake of anxiety if someone had pinned that note to my bedroom wall when I was his age.
The Sabre-Toothed Illusion
– ”But isn’t it better to just stop caring about what they think?” the boy asked, trying to find a shortcut.
It doesn’t work that way. We are biologically hardwired to obsess over the tribal consensus. For 99% of human history, being ostracized from the group didn’t mean getting muted on Instagram; it meant starving to death in a ditch or being structurally disassembled by a sabre-toothed tiger. You cannot simply intellectualize your way out of a million years of evolutionary terror.
And that is precisely why the realization that everyone is trapped in their own self-absorbed orbit is so utterly liberating. It is not that you must stop caring; it is the comforting knowledge that there is nothing to care about.
The Application to the Glass
How does this apply to your journey into the world of Champagne? It is the ultimate prerequisite.
When you sit at a table among the self-appointed gatekeepers of the wine world, do not panic about whether you can detect the exact percentage of Pinot Meunier or if you can instantly spot the difference between an un-grafted pre-phylloxera parcel and a commercial Grand Cru. Do not sweat over whether your description of the lilla mellantiden sounds sufficiently poetic to the ears of Richard Juhlin.
Drink the wine. Let it spark your own internal dialogue between the grape and your memory. Understand the structure, feel the energy, and enjoy the “övertänkt smak” (the thoughtful taste) for your own selfish pleasure.
Nobody is watching you. Nobody is judging your palate. They are too busy trying to remember if they left the iron on at home or if they look fat in their jacket.
Nobody cares, my boy. And in a world as loud and judgmental as this one, that is the most beautiful, sparkling luxury you will ever be granted. Enjoy the freedom. Now, let’s order another bottle.
