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: