Wine Is Basically a Gym Bro With Better Vocabulary

Wine people like to pretend the language of wine is mysterious. It isn’t. Half the time we’re just describing a bottle as though it has a personal trainer. A wine can be lean, muscular, full-bodied, light, heavy, tight, flabby, powerful or structured, and at some point you have to ask whether you’re tasting Cabernet Sauvignon or standing outside the squat rack waiting for someone to finish their set. Once you’ve noticed it, you can’t unnotice it: wine and fitness speak almost exactly the same language.

You know the type. Big Napa Cabernet, Amarone, Australian Shiraz, mass everywhere. Alcohol, fruit, oak, tannin, more fruit, possibly some chocolate, possibly an entire vanilla warehouse. These wines are not trying to fit into a medium T-shirt; they are bulking, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, a good big wine can be absolutely magnificent. But occasionally you taste something where the winemaker has clearly gone on a dirty bulk, everything bigger simply because bigger was the brief: more oak, more ripeness, more alcohol, more extraction, until you finish the glass feeling as though someone has shouted “ONE MORE REP” directly into your face.

Then you have the opposite end of the rack. Chablis walks into the room at 8% body fat: lean, sharp, no unnecessary padding, nothing there just because it photographs well on Instagram. It’s acidity, mineral character, restraint and the faint sense that it disapproves of your lifestyle. Muscadet is cutting. Albariño is probably cutting. Some Sauvignon Blancs are so aggressively cut they look faintly dehydrated. These are wines that have stripped away the excess and left only the definition, and you could grate cheese on some of them.

If wine had macros, tannin would be protein. It provides the structure, it gives the wine something to build around, and it’s especially noticeable when there’s far too much of it and you suddenly realise you’ve been chewing the same mouthful of Barolo for seven minutes. Young Cabernet is high protein. Nebbiolo is a meal-prep container holding six chicken breasts. And cheap red with no tannin whatsoever is a protein bar containing 3g of protein with the word PROTEIN printed across the wrapper in 80-point font.

Acidity keeps everything moving. It brings freshness, it stops richness becoming exhausting, it gives wine energy, which is to say acidity is cardio. A rich Chardonnay with enough acidity can still feel alive; a rich Chardonnay without it feels like climbing three flights of stairs immediately after Christmas lunch. It’s also why some genuinely expensive wines taste surprisingly fresh despite carrying real weight, they haven’t skipped cardio.

Oak makes things feel bigger. Rounder, broader, more impressive, sometimes better, sometimes considerably more expensive. Used properly, you barely question why everything suddenly looks a bit more muscular. Used too heavily, the entire personality of the wine disappears underneath it. I’m not saying oak is creatine. I’m just saying that if a wine abruptly develops enormous shoulders and starts tasting of vanilla, I have questions.

Before anyone gets upset: body fat isn’t inherently bad, and neither is residual sugar. In the right place you absolutely want some. Champagne can have it, Riesling can have it, Sauternes has plenty and is one of the great wines of the world. The problem is only when there’s more than you expected and nobody warned you, that supposedly dry supermarket red which tastes suspiciously soft, jammy and sweet is simply a bulk season that got out of hand.

Nobody enjoys the first five minutes. Your face hurts, you begin questioning your choices, you wonder why other people claim to love this. That is young Barolo: tannin everywhere, acidity everywhere, absolutely no interest in making your evening easy. Leg day in a bottle. And just like leg day, everyone who loves it insists the suffering is the entire point. The rest of Italy has gentler options, mind you, plenty of the great Italian reds won’t make you sign a waiver first.

Every serious training programme eventually tells you to back off, recover, stop trying to break records, have an easier week. Champagne is that week. No spreadsheets, no decanting for four hours, no staring at the label trying to remember whether 2016 was any good in some tiny corner of a region you can’t pronounce. Just open it, drink it, and feel instantly more successful than you were thirty seconds earlier. Recovery is important. And if the budget’s mid-programme, a good Prosecco does a perfectly respectable active-recovery session.

Think about it. You tell them what you normally do. They tell you why you’re doing it wrong. They suggest something slightly more uncomfortable. You resist. They insist. Three months later you’re spending twice as much money and telling everyone it has changed your life. That is either a sommelier or a personal trainer. Possibly both.

The word “natty” has meant natural in gym culture forever, drug-free, nothing added. And now natural wine has arrived. So technically the person at your table drinking cloudy skin-contact wine while earnestly discussing sulphur levels is natty. This may be the first time in recorded history that a natural-wine drinker has had anything whatsoever in common with a competitive bodybuilder. Enjoy the moment. It may never happen again.

The funny thing is that none of this is new. Wine has always borrowed from the human body: full-bodied, light-bodied, muscular, lean, fat, flabby, firm, fleshy, supple, powerful, elegant. Wine writers have spent decades presenting this as a sophisticated vocabulary when, in truth, we’ve been describing fermented grape juice as though it’s about to walk out on stage at Mr Olympia.

And perhaps that’s exactly why wine language intimidates people when it really shouldn’t. Most of these descriptions aren’t technical, they’re sensations. Does the wine feel heavy or light? Sharp or soft? Big or restrained? Fresh or tired? Lean or rich? You already understand every one of those ideas. You just haven’t been saying them while wearing a Burgundy fleece.

If wine genuinely followed gym culture, the training week would look something like this.

Then Monday morning arrives, you check your bank account, and you realise the only thing getting progressively lighter is your wallet. Which, incidentally, is also one of wine’s oldest traditions.

WRITTEN BY VIM, EDITOR OF 12×75. No wines were made to skip leg day in the writing of this article.