You Don’t Need a Better Palate, You Need a Better Compass

Your tongue isn’t broken; your map is.

The guy across from me kept apologizing.

We were standing in a wine shop that smelled like cardboard and lemon cleaner, the kind with handwritten shelf talkers and a bell on the door that rings too loud. He had a bottle in his hand he clearly didn’t want. He rolled it, stared at the label, put it back, picked it up again.

“I just don’t get wine,” he said, like a confession. “I can never taste what they say.”

Nobody had asked him to perform. Still, he was sweating.

The clerk—young, eager, dangerously fluent—hovered nearby, ready to rescue him with adjectives. Stone fruit. Linear. Nervy. Words that sound helpful until you realize they don’t point anywhere.

I asked the guy what he actually drank at home.

“Beer,” he said. “Cold. After work. Something crisp.”

That was it. That was the whole file. But the room had trained him to believe that wasn’t enough. That he was missing some internal upgrade. A better tongue. More software.

He wasn’t lost. He was just reading the wrong map.

Wine culture loves to pretend your palate is the problem. If you don’t like what’s in the glass, you’re inexperienced. If you’re confused, you need more training. More tastings. More vocabulary. It’s a neat trick. It keeps the burden on you.

Here’s what I’ve learned, slowly and against my own interests: most people can taste just fine. What they can’t do is orient themselves in a system designed to disorient them.

We teach beginners to start with regions, grapes, scores, hierarchies. North is Burgundy. South is Napa. East is old vines. West is oak. None of that helps when you’re standing in a store on a Tuesday, tired, just wanting something that won’t ruin dinner.

A palate answers questions. A compass decides which questions matter.

Back in the shop, the clerk launched into a pitch anyway. The guy nodded, eyes glazing, accepting his fate. I interrupted.

“Do you want it sharp or round?” I asked him.

He blinked. “Sharp,” he said, immediately. Relief in his voice. Like he’d been allowed to speak his first language.

We grabbed something clean, high-acid, no costume. He didn’t need to understand why it worked. He just needed to know where he was headed.

I’ve watched this play out everywhere: tastings, restaurants, cellars. People blaming their tongues for what is really a navigation failure. They follow authority instead of direction. They chase approval instead of alignment.

Wine snobs are often worse at this than beginners. They’ve memorized the map so thoroughly they forget to look at the terrain. They drink what they’re supposed to like and call the discomfort “complexity.”

A compass feels quieter. Less impressive. It doesn’t tell stories. It just keeps you from walking in circles.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: once you have one, you become harder to sell to. You stop asking, “Is this good?” and start asking, “Is this for me?” That question kills a lot of marketing dead on the floor.

If you want a usable compass, steal mine. Don’t dress it up.

Ask yourself three things before you buy or order anything:
Do I want this refreshing or comforting?
Do I want this loud or calm?
Do I want this to disappear or stay with me?

That’s it. No regions. No years. No scores. Just direction.

And here’s the move, the sentence that works in shops and restaurants and makes the room reset itself around you:
“I want something fresh and high-acid. Nothing oaky.”

Watch what happens. Watch how fast the noise falls away. Watch how suddenly people stop testing you and start helping you.

The guy from the shop emailed me a week later. One line.
“First bottle I finished without thinking about it.”

That’s not ignorance. That’s orientation.

Confidential note: The industry survives on the idea that taste is rare and expertise is expensive. Direction is cheaper, quieter, and harder to monetize. If you’re tired of being told your tongue is broken, subscribe.