Billed by its author as a “super-geeky scientific take on wine designed to help people debunk myths and better understand how wine works,” The Cynic’s Guide to Wine has already sparked controversy in the wine world. Sunny Hodge, the owner of South London wine bars Diogenes The Dog and Aspen & Meursault, takes issue with the notion that location is everything when it comes to wine. Unlike most wine buyers, he takes an objective view when sourcing wines, based solely on the liquid in the bottle and its price point.
He believes that terroir—a concept central to most people’s understanding of wine—is largely BS. “When you start to understand how it all gels together scientifically, you realise that a lot of what you have been told about wine is inaccurate. First among these is the idea that a wine transmits a sense of place. Wines taste a certain way not because of the terroir in which they are made, but because of our expectations of how they should taste,” he told Restaurant ahead of the publication of his debut book.
He has spent the past decade or so (his debut wine bar, Diogenes The Dog—named after one of the founders of Cynicism—opened in 2018) poring over academic texts on subjects including soil science, the anatomy of the grape itself, and how human intervention in both the vineyard and the winery changes the liquid in the glass. All this knowledge has been distilled into the pages of The Cynic’s Guide to Wine, which is divided into chapters including Debunking ‘Terroir’, Microbes, and Flavour Perception.
While the book is at times extremely technical, Hodge’s writing is clear and concise (it also helps that the book is essentially a series of mini-essays on key subjects). Some might not agree with everything Hodge has to say, The Cynic’s Guide to Wine is an essential counterpoint to the perceived wisdom of wine that will be of interest to anyone that works with wine for a living.
The Cynic’s Guide to Wine
Sunny Hodge
Publisher and price: Académie Du Vin Library, £25