No, it can’t be fast-tracked. And spending a lot of money will make it harder, not easier. A.J. Liebling wrote about this.
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There are 600+ 1er cru and grand cru vineyards in Burgundy (don’t know how many are monopoles) and almost a hundred crus classés in Bordeaux. If your friend has had a majority of these across multiple vintages in the last year, he might or might not be an “expert” (and your rebuttal to him was absolutely right), but he’s definitely a medical miracle. 
that’s 700 bottles, two glasses a day in a year is hardly a death sentence.
Tasting 1% of the 1% of worlds wine production hardly makes one an expert.
Some Burgund Hounds think that, but we all know better…
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Love that whole book - classic !
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He sounds fun at parties
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I’d question why one would want to fast track an expertise. Like Cunard lines, getting there is half the fun.
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Continue to feel having a “forever amateur” mindset will allow me to learn more. Becoming an expert seems to put you in a defensive position…
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No it takes years and years and cannot be frast tracked.
After more than 35 years I have a lot of experience and knowledge but I am only an “expert” in the eyes of some of my friends who know next to nothing about wine. But put me up against a geniune expert and I will be revealed as an emperor with no clothes. My expertise is mostly limited to the wine styles I know and drink. There is vast ocean of high quality wines, regions,varieties and styles I know nothing (or close to nothing) about. Chasing famous Chateau and Domaines does not make you an expert IMO.
The Will Rodgers quote about “Good judgement comes from experience and that comes from bad judgement” reasonates with me in this context. I have learned the hard way about the dangers of buying and cellaring highly scored wines that I actually do not like. This was a big learning that scores and reputation mean nothing if the wine is not to your taste. This comes with time and experience.
Each to his own but for me there are very few true experts out there.
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Nice work! I just got out my Between Meals today at lunch for a re-read…
So many great quotes even in the first few pages. Especially the line about French diets going downhill once the French doctors discovered the existence of the human liver…
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Yes, of course. Those who take courses, get diplomas, pursue university studies, accelerate their expertise in wine, just like people in any other field. It depends on how seriously and intensively people gain and pursue that knowledge. That does not necessarily make them experts in all fields of wine (getting an oenology degree from Dijon doesn’t confer expertise in rare Serbian grapes), but as Aleksey Tolstoy wrote, one cannot contain the uncontainable.
There’s definitely a sense in wine that knowledge of it must be earned over time and that it can’t be accelerated, but I’ve always found this inherently a somewhat odd view; there are writers and critics who are very well respected that are considerably younger than many posters on this forum. Certainly their wine expertise was “fast tracked”, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t any less earned or any less obvious.
I’m not convinced the OP’s friend is indeed an “expert”, but if he had the time and money to do Burgundy tastings every day for a year*, he’d certainly be ahead of anyone else who’d only been drinking for a year.
*Not that I’m suggesting he’s likely to run such a gauntlet.
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You care because you’re this guy
A friend of mine who is very wealthy just got into wine a year ago. He claims he is now an expert since he has drank majority of the fine wines and vintages from Bordeaux and Burgundy.
When I first got interested in wine, I bought a few highly rated, higher end bottles from every major wine region, thinking I would at least have a good conceptualization of wine. Many, if not most, were beyond my ability to understand or appreciate. I don’t know how much expertise I acquired, but I was very successful creating a large number of biases I still wrestle with addressing twenty years later.
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This is why wine is one of the greatest things on earth. We’ll never fully master it as it’s constantly changing and evolving with every vintage, while we race to keep up with it all. A constant chase with no end in sight.
It’s what makes us go berserk.
The more I know, the less I know.
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I love this book so much. It’s got it all…food, wine, romance…
Yes, to me a true wine expert would need to know a lot about how wine is made (ideally be a winemaker themselves) and understand how the effects they tasted in the glass were actually created
Is it something that can be fast-tracked
I’m certainly working on it
Hiccup
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You need to drink, taste, read, travel to regions of interest, talk to people and listen. It can’t be fast tracked.
I am not sure that the question is framed correctly, but there’s no doubt that some people have the aptitude to learn more quickly than others, have greater resources, greater passion, are more single minded and obsessive, so the road to expertise varies in length, or maybe the speed that it is traversed.
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