Tag Archives: wine snobs

Who Benefits from Wine Populism?

27 Thursday Jun 2019

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sutter homeAn ideology is a set of beliefs used to lend legitimacy to a particular set of interests.

Wine populism is an ideology that consists of five claims:

1. The wine world is populated by snobs whose mission in life is to make you feel bad about your wine preferences or lack of wine knowledge.

2. There is no such thing as genuine wine expertise and little difference between fine wines and commodity wines.

3. Thus, the only relevant advice to give people about wine is that they should drink what they like.

4. People who have wine expertise have little understanding of the preferences of ordinary wine drinkers.

5. Thus, people with wine expertise are destroying the wine industry by making wine intimidating to people who lack such expertise.

Please don’t point out to the wine populist that 2 contradicts 4 and 5. They will get upset and accuse you of being a wine snob.

Needless to say, I think 1-5 are false. #3 is especially pernicious, head-in-the-sand ignorant. Rather than providing my own rebuttal, I will send you to Jamie Goode who recently posted a blow by blow refutation of wine populism. His final paragraph is a good summary:

Thus we are all being urged to ride this wave of wine populism, where the very essence of what makes wine interesting and attractive has to be eliminated (or at least well hidden) and the people who help people on their journey into wine (the experts – sommeliers, buyers and writers) are cast as the baddies and ruled to be illegitimate. It’s crazy.

When confronted with an ideology, especially one that seems crazy, it’s best to begin an analysis by asking whose interests it serves. Who would benefit from convincing people that wine expertise is baloney?

As usual in these matters, just follow the money. 70% of wine sales by volume in the U.S. are for wines under $10. Only about 5% of the population will ever by a wine over $20. There are a lot of people selling cheap wine who have an interest in persuading you that you’re getting good value. And there are a lot of people who want to feel that they’re getting good value and don’t need to spend more.

That’s a lot of incentive to buy into wine populism.

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Is Wine a Superior Cultural Product?

11 Monday Mar 2019

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wine vs beerLast week I published a highly critical response to Oliver Style’s post on Wine Searcher entitled “The Noble Art of Wine Pretension”. He was generous to continue the conversation in the comment section of my post. His comment provides important insight into the thought behind his post and flags several issues that are worth thinking about. The first has to do with the question of wine’s cultural status.

My point was that – as you rightly point out above – if one accepts the “wine as cultural product” position, this means all wine. The French are mirroring the approach the Spanish took to this issue. But that, necessarily, means one has to lump Grands Chais de France with Ganevat or Gruaud Larose. To state that all wine is deserving of this high cultural status is contentious, but I’d say this position is snobbish because, by inference, all other alcoholic beverages are undeserving of this protection. Why should wine be special? What about the farmhouse brewers, cidermakers, cider distillers (and thus beer, cider, spirits)? There is a whiff of elitism here if we want to protect wine as a cultural product, but not admit that one cannot do that without denigrating every other alcoholic artisanal endeavour. And it is a position accepted and advocated by a lot of people.

This raises a question I don’t think we devote sufficient attention to and I agree with Oliver that an answer to it is often just assumed. Most wine lovers think there is something special about wine. That is why we’re wine lovers. But is this just personal preference or are there some justifiable reasons why wine has this status? I’m working on a book on just this question but I won’t burden you (or me) with the twists and turns of that argument in a short blog post. But I do want to look at the question using the conceptual framework that Oliver is using.

I haven’t lived in France or Spain so I have no deep understanding of their culture. But if they do think that all wine is a superior cultural product compared to other alcoholic beverages, I suspect it’s because wine has been so deeply woven into their history and has long been a source of international prestige. It’s part of their identity as French. But that of course would not give those of us who are not French a reason to give wine that exalted status.

I think one factor that makes wine an important cultural product is that it expresses something distinctive about the particular culture in which it is made. It’s the distinctive combination of geography and unique historical choices on the part of the people of Burgundy (or Barolo or the Mosel) that produce those wines. They cannot be made any place else. The same can be said of the peat bogs of Scotland for Scotch or the agave fields of Oaxaca for Mezcal. The same may be true of apples for cider although I’m not sure that apples are particularly sensitive to terroir. Maybe they are I simply don’t know enough about cider. The same cannot be said about beer although some hops growers are doggedly trying to make the case.

All artisan beverages are a product of culture in a general sense. They are made by people who live within cultures. The question is whether they express something distinctive about the culture they come from. I live in San Diego which is ground zero for the hoppy style of IPA that has become the hot item in the craft beer world. Is there something distinctive about San Diego that makes it prime territory for hoppy IPA’s? I doubt it. Most likely the early successful brewers of this style just happened to be in San Diego and attracted lots of local mimics who created a critical mass of brewers making that style of beer. And in fact good IPA’s are made throughout the U.S.

That said, it is nevertheless the case that artisanal products, wine, beer, spirits or ciders, can express the distinctive point of view of the people making them (if they have a distinctive point of view). That is why they can be interesting. So despite my love of wine I’m very reluctant to claim artisanal wines are  somehow inherently superior to other artisanal products. (Industrial wine seldom counts in this discussion)

The issue really comes down to distinctiveness. What is distinctive (as long as it is of sufficient quality) is worthy of special treatment and I don’t think it snobbish to say so. (The question of what counts as snobbish will have to wait for another day).

Anti-Expertise, Anti-Pleasure BS from an Unexpected Source

06 Wednesday Mar 2019

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snobbish drinkerI usually thoroughly enjoy Oliver Styles’ writing on wine—it’s witty, well informed, and coherent. But for the life of me I can’t follow his argument in his latest article for Wine Searcher, even after reading it several times.

As far as I can tell, this is his argument:

(1)  Wine is a cultural product, meaning it’s “woven into the historical, agricultural and social fabric of the regions it is produced and consumed in. It is not, we might argue, simply a means to get wasted, more a cerebral and pleasurable accompaniment to our oldest ritual: eating.”

(2) Wine is a source of refined pleasure in part because it is “indistinct and imprecise”.

Therefore, wine appreciation is inherently snobbish and pretentious.

But if we accept this – and, let’s face it, while we get Agnes Buzyn’s point, we agree that wine can give pleasure beyond getting a bit tipsy – then we should probably accept that wine is inextricably woven into the one thing many of our commentators try their best to distance wine from: snobbery.

Huh? Anything that is a cultural product and provides non-inebriated, “cerebral” pleasure is snobbish? The problem I’m having is that there is a lot of logical space between the premises and the conclusion and I can’t find anything in the article that fills in that space. Barbecue and Parmigiano-Reggiano are “woven into the social fabric of the regions in which they are produced and consumed” and like all matters of taste are “indistinct and imprecise”. Does that make them snobbish? If so, the word “snobbish” is evacuated of all meaning.

It is important to point out that (1) is false. The vast majority of wines sold throughout the world is not woven into the “historical, agricultural and social fabric of the regions it is produced and consumed in”. Most wine is an industrial product made from grapes sourced from who knows where and sold much like orange juice except with fancier labels filled with gibberish. There are of course many artisanal wines, some of them quite affordable, that are genuine cultural products but you won’t find them in most supermarkets. Styles is aware of this objection but asks that we accept his premise and play along. So, against my better judgment, I’ll ignore this objection and play along.

Given that he’s stated up front an argument that seems to make little sense on its face, it is to be hoped there are some additional premises supplied in the text that will pull the argument together. Alas, I’m having trouble finding them.

He hypothesizes that the snobbishness of which we are all guilty is sub-conscious and reflected in the fact there is still debate about the virtues of screw caps over cork. There likely is a prejudice regarding screw caps—people mistakenly think they indicate a cheap or poorly made wine. Putting aside a genuine debate about how wines under screw cap will age, most people who assume screw caps are inferior are casual consumers, not wine lovers and wine professionals who are the groups typically accused of being snobbish. Despite the casual consumer’s mistaken premise about screw caps, I fail to see how wanting to buy a well made wine is snobbish or pretentious.

Then he gives us the example of a brand story from a new industrial wine from California,  JNSQ (Je Ne Sais Quoi) that tries to pass itself off as exclusive and somehow connected to France. But the fact that commercial wine marketing trades on the romantic image of artisanal wine is hardly evidence that artisanal wines are built on snob appeal. It’s the commercial wine that is built on pretense, not the wines that are genuine cultural products.

Is he claiming that anything rooted in distinctive local traditions  is snobbish or pretentious because it’s distinctive? That seems to be the assumption but he offers no defense of such a controversial and plainly ridiculous claim.

So much for connecting (1) more clearly to his conclusion.

Thus, we are left with (2) the old canard that because  wine lovers get intellectual pleasure from wine’s subtleties and use an esoteric vocabulary to describe something that is indeed “indistinct” and “imprecise”, they must be performing secret handshakes and smirking eye-rolls behind the backs of the the hoi polloi.

Underlying this whole piece is the implicit assumption that any activity that requires expertise to enjoy is motivated, not by the pursuit of pleasure, but by a secret desire to show one’s superiority over others. So all those baseball fans reciting arcane stats like Babip, FIP, and WAR really don’t like baseball. They just want to show their superiority to the guy cracking peanuts and slugging beer.

Apparently the pursuit of pleasure is not sufficient motivation to get us off the couch—only the desire to provoke envy will do. Thomas Hobbes, the 17th Century political philosopher who argued only a Leviathan, an absolute dictator, could succeed in controlling vices such as envy, would be proud.

This is one of the most cynical articles I’ve read in a long while, I suppose not unexpected in the age of Trump.