You don’t have to be a snob to enjoy wine

It’s a familiar scene: You’re standing in the wine section of the grocery store, eyes darting from bottle to bottle and you start to sweat as you think ‘I don’t belong here.’

It’s the feeling that wine belongs to the sophisticated – that everyone but you knows what they’re doing when it comes to wine.

You’re certainly not going to impress your Valentine if you can’t pair the perfect wine with dinner.

So what’s a layman to do?

From the simplicity of how to open a bottle of wine, to deciphering a magnum from an imperial and those wine bottle sizes, Madeline Puckette wants you to know you don’t have to be a snob to enjoy wine.

You can just be you. “Wine is actually an adventure,” says Puckette.

Puckette discovered she loved wine in a chance meeting with a Nevada bartender who noticed she could drink “smart” and gave her a job.

Two months after that meeting, she became a certified sommelier – that’s French for someone who knows a lot about wine.

True to her nature, Puckette, armed with new skills took, it upon herself to make everyone love wine as much she did.

First, she had to make it simple.

That’s how her website WineFolly.com came to be.

“When you’re getting into wine, it is a little bit of a folly the more you drink, you can get into trouble that way. But it’s more about exploration and finding a new you through a new discovery.”

As a graphic designer by trade, Puckette first made discovering wine fun and easy through her infographics.

“And instead of having to read through gobbledygook, people can just see the answer,” she says.

Her first infographic showed how to pair wines with food. “It was so popular that I decided to make another infographic, and that one was really popular too.”

Say you’re having a creamy chicken dish for Valentine’s Day dinner tonight, just follow the line on Puckette’s infographic and you’ll discover a Pinot gris would pair perfectly.

It’s that simple approach to sommelier knowledge that’s made PUckette so popular among casual wine drinkers.

She knows how we feel. “You have people around you who are intimated by wine so they maybe make fun of you for trying to swirl your glass and they’re going, ‘Oh you’re such a wine-o.’ But then you also have the people on the expert side who are looking at you going, ‘You’re swirling your glass wrong,'” says Puckette.

I wanted to know if she had any advice for men and women embarking on a first date.

“My favorite thing to do is to swirl wine and I actually have a video online of how to swirl but there really isn’t too much (to it.) If you can learn the basic technique of the swirl,” she says, “you’ll always look like pro.”

Just don’t swirl your champagne.

And one other piece of advice, love birds. “If you want to look like an expert without really knowing what you’re doing, make sure you drink your wine slow and take your time to smell it.”