Oh, the mystique that some people ascribe to wine in their rush to canonize it out of all proportion to what it really is, or should be: a beverage.
Or the denunciation some people heap on inexpensive bottles. I have heard elitist oenophiles use terms to disparage wine they wouldn’t deign to try.
I reflect on some of the phrases I’ve heard from those who want to place wine on a pedestal, elevating it to near mythical status or trying as best they can to create an image that has no bearing whatsoever on the product.
“Champagne is one of man’s highest art forms,” he said just minutes before he removed the cork and poured for us a horrid example of the stuff. It was so bad most of us looked around for a potted palm into which to dump our glasses. (I was, I admit, worried about planticide.)
“Magnificent!” said the host of a nearly dead French red Burgundy that had no fruit left in its aroma and was thin and acrid.
Then there are those who prejudge wines based on price or region and imitate Debbie Downer.
“I don’t drink white wine,” she said, taking a tiny sip of an utterly sublime German riesling, which she then dumped into the spit bucket before trying some red plonk.
“South African pinotage?!” he grumbled. “No thanks.” He never tried it. I did and liked it a lot.
Unfortunately, in nearly five decades of writing about wine, I’ve met all manner of people who say things about wine that are way off base or who rave about greatness that simply doesn’t exist.
I never correct them. (Well, almost never. Once I had to speak up. It was in a Southern California restaurant. The waiter told me I was wrong when I said the wine I ordered was spoiled.)
Thirty years ago, I heard a blowhard say something about how great wines were almost always expensive. Weeks later, a wine merchant invited several of us (including the blowhard) to a blind tasting of 12 reasonably priced blended red wines whose average price was about $4 a bottle.
The tasters liked two of the wines better than the 10 others. The blowhard’s favorite was $4.25. One of the wines was a $25 Napa Valley Reserve cabernet—which the blowhard didn’t like at all.
When I began writing about wine in the mid-1970s, approximately 30 percent of all the wines that I evaluated had some form of flaw that made the wine basically not enjoyable at all, if not completely undrinkable.
So much has changed in the world of wine today that we can find extremely fine, if perhaps a bit simple, wines from literally dozens of places that are making excellent table wines at extremely low prices.
I was chatting last week with a friend who lives in Virginia. He suggested that he often hears people disparaging all the wines being made in Virginia today. “That’s so far off base, it’s ridiculous,” he said.
The last time I was in Virginia was about 15 years ago, and I completely agree. And things have improved since then. I have also tasted excellent wines from Missouri, Michigan, and several other locations that 20 years ago might have been considered risky.
Just because a wine is $5.99 is absolutely no reason to disparage it. By contrast, I have tasted wines that sold for $100 a bottle and were particularly uninteresting or even undrinkable.
