Wine proselytizers seem perennially torn about how best to evangelize the stuff. One school advocates the “you have to study it” approach. The other is more defiantly populist. Its rallying cry is “Pull the cork, pour, and glug.”

The wine formalists believe the complications of wine are such that mere drinking isn’t enough and that study is essential. The “pull, pour, and glug” adherents find this approach overly prescriptive and pretentious. They believe that if you leave wine drinkers to their own learning devices they’ll come to a profound appreciation in their own good fashion.

Indeed, no less a wine connoisseur than the late Alexis Lichine, a famed wine writer, once declared, “There is no substitute for pulling corks.”

My experience in teaching wine classes during several decades leads me to conclude that pulling random corks, no matter how well selected, is like visiting a museum where you gaze at everything and understand nothing. What’s missing is focus—and the insight that comes from it.

What I learned at school, admittedly in the teacher’s seat rather than the student’s, is that when left to their own devices, most wine drinkers — including many well beyond the novice level — assess wines from an “I like it/I don’t like it” platform.

Refreshing as the “pull, pour and glug” approach is, all of us need guidance, or even a gentle push along our wine way, teaching us to distinguish between the fundamentally important elements of wine and those that are insignificant or just transitory (such as tannins or the latest winemaking style).

Hard as it may be to accept, pleasure is not the measure of fine wine. Rather, the best measure judges complexity, finesse, cohesion of flavors, and an indefinable but unmistakable sense of originality.

True, these attributes usually result in pleasure. But it’s a pleasure more substantive than, say, the seduction of residual sugar.

When my students would begin their discourse with, “Well, I like this wine…,” I had to gently remind them that I didn’t care whether they liked it or not. “Tell me what you think of it,” I asked the students. “What you like is, for the moment, immaterial.” Tough wine love, you might say.

Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with a hedonistic approach. Hedonism doesn’t lead to insight, though, but only to reactive pleasure or distaste. It’s awareness that enables even absolute beginners to swim from the shallows of mere preference — “I like it” or “I don’t like it” — to the deeper waters of insight.

Most wine drinkers, especially beginners, are put off by tannins and, to a lesser degree, acidity. The astringency of tannin, like learning verb conjugations in a foreign language, can be formidable. There’s a strong inclination to reject wines with even a smidgen of tannin or a poke of acidity as unpleasant and therefore “not good.” What a mistake that is.

The most important thing I learned at school — the thing that has made teaching wine such a joy — is how quickly, even easily, interested wine lovers can learn about what’s really important in wine. I’m not referring to the grammar of the label (which is why many people take a wine class), but the knowing of wine itself.

I’ve seen many times how, in just one evening focusing on just six (progressively more complex) wines, absolute beginners could grasp why some wines are intrinsically betters than others. You can’t get that from merely pulling corks.

HERE’S THE DEAL

Torii Mor “Willamette Valley” Pinot Noir 2005 — The trend these days with American pinot noir is to offer ever fruitier, ever jammier wines created by picking ever later. It’s not uncommon to come across pinot noirs — mostly from California — that swagger in at 15% alcohol or even higher. Such wines are striking at first sip, but they soon pall. They lack an “edge,” something that goes beyond jam and juiciness to a more sustaining and refined experience.

The best American pinot noirs, such as this beauty from Oregon’s Willamette Valley, deliver a multithreshold experience. If this is tasted alone, some folks might find the edge of astringency in the Torii Mor 2005 to be off-putting. Yet if the wine is served with food, the slight astringency, from tannins, seemingly melts, and the layered fruit and delicious acidity spring to life.

This is a terrific, subtle, nuanced pinot noir, the sort a Burgundian would be proud to offer. It’s worth hunting down. $32 at Park Avenue Liquor, among other merchants.