You can enjoy wine all you like. I'm indifferent to it.
What I hate are wine snobs. There's worse things that petite bourgeoisie do, of course, but one of the most universally binding commonalities that the ones I know seem to have is they pretend their noses have superpowers, that paying a few hundred bucks for a "certified wine taster" certificate at some Napa Valley tourist trap makes them authorities on what fermented grape juice is good and what fermented grape juice is bad, that they believe they can seriously tell what kind of wood their fermented grape juice was casked in, and much much more.
One of the local newspapers surrendered more and more of its page count to a designated wine section as years went by. When I bothered to read it, wondering how it was even possible to talk about wine that much and that often, my answer was it wasn't really talking about the wine as much as it was flattering wine snobs and kissing their asses page after page. I haven't subscribed to that newspaper in years but it was approaching a solid third of the total thickness of the damn paper.
Ever been in a social event where several wine snobs spend the entire evening basically jerking each other off about their superior sense of taste and smell and when they're not talking about the fermented grape juice they're openly mocking and belittling everyone that isn't part of their corner of the room? That was a mercy, at least: the hosting family quietly designated a wine snob table for the wine snobs to sneer at everybody else.
Years later, when PG&E screwed Californians across the state and through negligence started and worsened some of those fires, those same wine snobs used social media to post jokes about the poors dying in fires and very fucking seriously said as long as the vineyards are safe, that's all that matters.
:agony-4horsemen:
Also: this should extend to whiskey snobs. I've got a great palate for spirits so I genuinely do enjoy them and can tell the difference. However a couple months ago I got to try a ~$5000 bottle of XYZ bourbon and you know what it tasted like? Bourbon. Nothing special. Meanwhile the guy who let me try it was losing his shit about it
Same deal with coffee. The "elite" tiers of this sort of stuff always seems extremely contrived and scummy. I'm perfectly fine not having my coffee come from the poop of a jungle cat.
I love Zapatista coffee, it doesn’t taste like slave labor :cmnd-marcos-pog:
Basically yeah. It was some old, won't be produced again bottle of something or other but it honestly just tasted like a slightly nicer version of Jim fucking beam.
I always wonder what people taste beyond the 40%+ alcohol component that kind of overpowers most other aspects of taste.
Likewise, I trust people less if they insist on a preference for one brand of cola (or white soda, etc.) over another. Most of it is carbonation, what is there to taste through that? The whole idea is that it dulls your sense.
I mean there is a lot to taste there. The grain flavor is more or less prominent. The oak/wood flavor is variable with some being more or less strong depending on the toast or char of the barrel. Plus if it was finished in a wine/beer barrel or something that changes the flavor. Various caramel or coffee flavors depending on the malts used. The proof itself wildly changes how a whiskey can taste. Some finish sweet or dry. Some go deeper into the heads or tails cuts and those flavors can either be very off putting or very interesting. Etc etc
I mean it would be a lot more straightforward to taste all these things if the substance that told my taste buds they were being damaged wasn't as concentrated.
Low-key that could be genetic. Some people taste alcohol as very bitter and unpleasant but my slavic/central european ass doesn't really taste ethanol so it's largely just tasty for me. I'm massively more predisposed to alcoholism because of it but :shrug-outta-hecks:
"I'm kind of like a public intellectual", I say as I pour my fifth drink before noon.
One of the most bewildering things I've ever been told by a wine snob, one that was so obnoxious that he very seriously had security called on him at a fancy restaurant once because he threw a tantrum because he didn't like the wine selection (after having several glasses and getting drunk of course), was that he couldn't be an alcoholic because he "didn't drink the cheap shit." :so-true:
I've taken out several credit cards in my children's names to pay for wine. One day they can read my reviews which include one with four stars due to how much it tasted like blueberries when I was throwing up on the steering wheel.
One of the most insufferable wine snobs of all takes special pride in giving middling to hostile reviews of everything and plugging his very important critiquing blog and social media accounts.
He spends big money to go to places and three star them because he's that important.
There's a reason "Pretas" are one of the main concepts in my book trilogy. I've personally known fundamentally empty people that constantly crave to fill that emptiness in ways that hurt people all around them and never, ever, get satisfaction no matter how much they destroy.
insufferable rich people understand that it's still day drinking if it's expensive wine challenge (impossible)
:wojak-nooo: nooo you have to drink this extremely expensive wine and describe the chocolate or nut or whatever notes it has while drinking
:gigachad: ha ha 10 buck box wine go brr
I tried to argue with one of them, that I am unfortunately associated with by way of in-laws.
There's no reaching them. None.
It's an elaborate guessing game where the first wine snob to come up with the wood of the cask and what year it was and what the weather was like gets to gatekeep everyone else's senses, unless he already picked a winner and he'll adjust his wine snob standards to let his favorite past the gate before condescending to everyone else.
The fact that we know people can have different reactions to tastes (like cilantro, the fact that mental state and what you’ve eaten or drank recently can effect your senses, and other stuff) kinda makes me wonder if it’s a weird conclusion that each person could possibly recognize an “objective” taste profile of something with their subjective senses and experiences
Like at best youre randomly similar to an equally subjective experience that just happened to be lionized and enshrined in some standard perception.
Plus, either way, they’ve done tons of studies on wine experts and fooled them with cheap wine like a bajillion times.
It’s really about picking something arbitrary that you can be good at that other people can’t be and patting yourself on the back for clearing your imaginary goal
I brought up your lattermost point about wine experts being basically quacks and I got a "you're wrong, you're stupid" that was backed up by being outnumbered in the room and laughed at.
I don't miss those gatherings.
Ah yes mistaking consensus for truth, the hallmark of liberals lol
Not to be a debate bro but, What a convincing argument Lmao
I wish I got angry enough at the time to do something about it. I sort of just stood there and took it.
It would have been better to do something I didn't regret and just stop getting invited in the coolest possible way.
That would have been a hoot, but considering how tantrum-prone one of the worst wine snobs was (being removed from a fancy restaurant after threatening serving staff), a fight might have broken out anyway.
That particular one had "gymcel" vibes and was almost certainly a wifebeater. I mean, maybe I could have taken him, but the cops would definitely be on his side because of his zip code.
The fact that we know people can have different reactions to tastes (like cilantro, the fact that mental state and what you’ve eaten or drank recently can effect your senses, and other stuff) kinda makes me wonder if it’s a weird conclusion that each person could possibly recognize an “objective” taste profile of something with their subjective senses and experiences
Like at best your randomly similar to an equally subjective experience that just happened to be lionized and enshrined in some standard perception.
Aesthetics (as in, the philosophical discipline) has some really cool takes on the subject, and it is still a matter of debate. Not to mention the idea of criticism or expertise having any actual weight when it comes to for example art or music. I am an absolute nerd about food and philosophy, so i have gone down that rabbithole.
Taste is pretty cool because it is both largely socially constructed and not completely physiological. It actually involves a whole bunch of other things, and ecological theory of perception opens the door to ways of understanding taste and appreciation that kinda blow your mind when you read and kinda take them in. It pretty much does away with the whole idea of objectivity, but it doesn't just shrug and say "well shit, everything is subjective now". I keep teasing that i'll make effortposts about my dissertation research, which is related to this stuff. Once i'm done with it i'll try to do that.
That’s interesting. I haven’t done near that much reading on it, I just know peoples perceptions of things are highly subjective so based it on that. I always kind of distrust institutions about these kinds of things bc they have a way of dogmatizing shit and eschewing evidence that contradicts it.
It’s hard to imagine really ever knowing for sure a random consensus from ‘elites’ or whoever is gatekeeping is correct when we can’t know for certain how others actually are experiencing things. I imagine this is one of those things that people have been arguing about for eons and will continue to argue about as things change.
But I’ll defer to you on it bc I really only have a light understanding of tangential things to it lol
Kid who reviews Fruit by the Loop with Good/Bad/Yucky please start tasting wine.
You heard it hear folks another yucky. Wine objectively sucks shit
My absolute favorite thing to do with "good wine" is to drink it in red solo cups or something equivalent in front of snobs. They lose their shit about the cup being wrong, it's great
"The only proper cup for wine, is whatever cup is in my hand."
Did you guys see that study where a researcher gave sommeliers 2 glasses of cheap white wine, except one was dyed to look like red wine?
They didn't even fucking notice it was the same wine, and described them in vastly different ways.
Wine tasting is total bullshit.
I think that may be the same one I mentioned during the social event.
Because "you're wrong you're stupid" and being outnumbered by wine snobs, I was laughed out of the room. :desolate:
there's some John Cleese hosted wine tasting docu where they do blind tastings with novice and expert tasters, but they use a cup that hides the contents (so unable to see the liquid at all - literally blind tasting)
and even the experts couldn't distinguish red from white better than random guessing
sweet - I found it on the tube!
https://youtu.be/sHnz6KoYw_A?t=981
The fanciest and best wine I ever had was when I was in northern Italy, in an area that was more or less all vineyards making some pretty fancy wines. It came in a rinsed out coke bottle that I had brought. The people who worked making the wine didn't necessarily own the vineyards if you can believe it, and since crop yields vary a bit from year to year, until the fancy wine was actually bottled the owners didn't know exactly how much wine they technically had. So the people working at the vineyard - who I can guarantee knew A LOT more about wine than your wine snobs, some of them even held wine tastings for wine snob tourists for extra money - were perfectly happy to just fill up my empty coke bottle with wine that had yet to be bottled. This was the cheapest bottle of wine I've ever bought (5£), but if I had bought the exact same wine in one of the glass bottles it was supposed to go in, with the cork and the label, it would have been by far the most expensive (about 100-150£ I think).
The wine was nice. I can never really taste those things they promise on the bottle like "a hint of apricots and wet hay" anyway, so I wasn't bothered by my bottle just saying "coca cola", but I am pretty sure I could taste a fair hint of in a small way helping the people who had actually made the wine take back some surplus value from the owners of the winery.
I watched a documentary about wine collectors called Sour Grapes after someone recommended it to me. After 30 minutes, I was ready to retch at the self-righteousness of the people depicted. I was ready to give it up, until it revealed how one guy managed to cheat wine collectors out of millions of dollars with cheap wine and homemade labels. It was inspiring, until the end, where the guy is sentenced to ten years in prison.
I've lived it. I'd probably get too mad to sit through that.
Fuck wine snobs. They are the most obnoxious kind of petite bourgeoisie.
I was ready to give it up, until it revealed how one guy managed to cheat wine collectors out of millions of dollars with cheap wine and homemade labels. It was inspiring, until the end, where the guy is sentenced to ten years in prison.
o7
There's this Italian philosopher that pretty much wrote a whole book about shitting on the snobby way of tasting wine, and pretty much saying that all of that is meaningless in the face of the potential for the taste and the experience of wine drinking to connect people with each other, with the earth, and with a different way of thinking. I attended a wine tasting led by him, and it was pretty cool, albeit bizarre.
EDIT: Found an article where he explains his ideas, and mocks wine "experts" and snobs
I'd go for that, I think.
The wine snobs that I had to put up with before covid gave me a very convenient excuse to never see them in person again, well, they didn't want to connect to people or the Earth for that matter. They wanted to savor their special and petty extra partition of alienation and look down on the peasants (yes, they even used that word) that weren't sharing their enthusiasm for nose-fucking a wine glass.
I once did a blind taste test with some friends between Bud Lite, Coors Light, and Miller Lite. Bud and Coors were pretty much the same, maybe Bud was a little sweeter and Coors a little hoppier (is that a word?). Miller was easy to pick out because it tasted like hot garbage.
shout out to the one person I saw proudly proclaim "most expert wine tasters can't actually tell the difference between red and white wine."
Napa Valley is such a horrific, touristy, cheesy place. All hand crafted to meet the PMC’s expectation of what “fancy” and “authentic” is. Hideously overpriced and you’re made to feel like shit if you buy small amounts. It’s mainly just a flex as to how much you spend.
The funny thing is Napa won’t be viable much longer with climate change and wildfires. The Pacific Northwest has this culture to look forward to.
It's such a bleak and superficial consumer culture that even living relatively nearby still gives tourist vibes because the entire point of the place is to hype itself for narcissists across the world to fly in and congratulate each other for their good taste.
I won't miss it when it's gone. Last year's fires were just the beginning. :elmofire:
If you want good wine experience that’s reasonably priced go to Oregon or Paso Robles
I want to love California, but the neolibs there are closest lolbertarians to the max. Everything they do is calculated to flex on the working class.
California's property values surge so high an outhouse is now worth a million bucks? "Clearly this is a high class state for high-class people! The help can go live in the red states! I don't speak broke!"
"Sure, I care about the environment! GASP Take a bus!? I say, what kind of PAUPER do you take me for!?! Now who will now that I am a PROUD Bugatti driver!?!?"
I know quite a bit about wine to the point that I got hired to run wine tastings and handle the wine section of decently nice place. I've literally lost count of how many vineyards I've been too. So I love getting into it with wine snobs, most of them are just parroting shit they read without any real idea of what they're talking about. The idea that expensive always wine is better is ludacris. There is normally a really big difference between an $8 and $20 bottle, but anything over $35 is just so you can brag about how expensive it is. I have limited experience with stuff over $100 a bottle but nothing I've tried has made me think they're remotely worth the price. Most of what I drink is in the $16-$24 range and there is no real reason to ever spend more.
Next time you talk to a wine snob just throw out something like "the sandy terroir and cold winter really brings out the bright currant undertones" and watch them nod sagely at what ever bullshit you throw out.
It's Calvinball for petite bourgeoisie idiots, where one of them decides what the wine's hints and accents are and everyone else has to guess what the correct answer is.
Please, can we make Calvinball a more widespread term among the left? It describes a lot of hog mind games perfectly.
it's my understanding that many wine makers sell the same exact wine at various price points with different labels, but the liquid inside the bottles is exactly the same
so much of the profitability of businesses is based on information asymmetry being used to dupe their customers, and wine business is no different
But you see, single vineyard cuvees pair better with prescription drugs
I’m sure @Ithorian could confirm this
I find muscle relaxants make a great pairing with just about any vintage.
That's the alcohol industry in general. There was a point a few years ago where an absurd % (I don't remember specifics but it was very high) of whiskey made was by 1 company in Indiana, MGP. It's all branding and marketing
Yeah if you buy rye whiskey in America and it doesn't say "distilled in [another city]," it was probably made by MGP. Some brands will age it in different barrels but it's all the same stuff.
Which is frustrating because I can't stand their rye but I love rye whiskey. Malted rye whiskey straight up tastes like candy to me, I love it
That's true for some of the bigger vineyards but small local places don't normally do that. Not saying that you can't get over charged as hell at them just they tend to have fixed price points.
that sounds a lot like problem drinking if I found out someone I know went into thousands of dollars of debt to buy booze and stopped leaving the house I would be deeply concerned
This sounds more like a pyramid scheme with a little wine mixed in.
There is merit in being stupid and knowing less about some things, like wine.
I don't think the wine snobs know all that much about wine except trivia tidbits, vineyard locations, and lots and lots of Calvinball-like self conjured rules for their little social status hierarchy game.
it's actually more stupid to spend thousands of dollars getting a certification in alcoholism
