That's sad, that his attitude discouraged questions. It's a lot better to encourage the "silly" questions and use it as a vehicle to teach one or more better ways of doing things. Some folks are simply bad teachers -- it doesn't matter how much they know if they can't convey it.The winemaker had very few filters when it came to home winemaking questions about practices he disagreed with so I learned early on not to ask questions.
Learning wine making is SOOOO much easier today with a forum like this one. I learned from recipes in the newspaper, a few old books I purchased, and from guys that had learned from their fathers and grandfathers. All this taught me a lot of good techniques ... and some stuff I had to later unlearn. With a forum like this one, we don't have to take things on faith, we can discuss and research.