You are learning rhetoric and persuasion: you will read the scene it happens in, learn 10 words and phrases, take apart the pattern behind them (rhetorical structures: concession, counter-argument, rhetorical questions), hear them in a conversation, rehearse them, and finish by saying one thing out loud to be graded.
The Four Horsemen, Williamsburg, natural wine bar and restaurant
My friend Sara is a natural wine evangelist. I'm skeptical. So when she dragged me to The Four Horsemen in Williamsburg — a restaurant co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem — we made it a proper debate.
'Granted, natural wine looks different,' Sara began. 'Some bottles are cloudy. Some smell funky. But isn't that what makes it interesting? Conventional wine is predictable. Natural wine tells a story.' She poured me a glass of orange wine from Georgia — the country, not the state.
I took a sip. It was strange — tannic, earthy, nothing like what I expected. 'While I agree it's unique,' I said, 'the real question is whether unique automatically means better.' Sara smiled. 'Fair point. That said, isn't the beauty of wine supposed to be its variety?'
We went back and forth for two hours. She made the case for terroir, minimal intervention, and sustainability. I pushed back on consistency and accessibility. By the end, neither of us had won. But the wine had. I hadn't been converted, but I had been won over — at least for the evening. Sometimes the best arguments don't end with a winner. They end with another glass.