In another post questioning at what price point does the purchase of a wine for consumption become absurd, I made the comment that “wine is just a beverage”. Several people appropriately pointed out that this notion fails to account for the tremendous value of the shared experience of enjoying wine…that wine can be a part of something larger that brings people together and creates a priceless experience…you get the idea.
For me, the idea that wine is just a beverage is a concept that helps keep me in some control of my spending on expensive wines. I realize that wine is more than just a beverage in so many ways, but that concept still weighs on the original question as to when does the price become absurd. Spending $3000 for a bottle of Petrus seems absurd to me. That cheap Chianti being shared at the table of that Italian family…is that just a beverage? They drink it every day and they are not swirling their glasses and musing on the bouquet. Whatever your answer, would it differ if instead of being cheap Chianti it was a bottle of Sassicaia or perhaps Masseto? Would they have to be knowledgeable and experienced enough to appreciate the difference? When does wine stop being just a beverage and become something more?
I’ve never gotten the same enjoyment out of sharing a bottle of Cola or a beer. In fact, when I drank beer I would be pretty annoyed if I had to share it with someone else. I don’t think I’ve ever shared a bottle of Cola. I think part of it has to do with there being enough in a bottle of wine for everyone to have a glass in a party of 4 that makes it feel more sociable. Beer and hard liquor are more independent drinks.
Doesn’t really matter the cost. It’s the act of sharing it, enjoying it, and finishing it together that makes it special.
It doesnt matter if it is wine, a japanese wagyu, camping, watching a movie, having afternoon high tea, playing sports with friends, going on a vacation, etc. The joy comes from the people you are with. Wine or anything else does not bring that to the table unless the gathering was specifically meant to focus on that. Bottom line is wine is just a beverage. It is more only to those that care that much about it. There are more people in this world that really doesnt care about the wine foremost when they make plans to have dinner with friends and family. Wine to me is an enhancer for time spent with friends and family.
I agree for the most part except that beer and hard liqour are independent drinks. You can easily share a 6 pack or pour out of the same whiskey bottle. I dont know many people that would have a whiskey bottle per person.
Hi Glenn,
I think your statement, “wine is just a beverage” is true, a very healthy attitude, and worth remembering.
I don’t think there is anything particularly rational about spending a hundred dollars or more per bottle. That said, we aren’t Vulcans, and we don’t have to be rational all the time. I have no problem with folks collecting wine, because it is a very interesting hobby. And folks spend a lot on their hobbies.
I do like the idea that wine brings us together. But we could get together over a $19 bottle of Bedrock OVZ. I think this comes back to the hobby aspect. It’s fun learning all the wine facts we on this board take for granted. It’s fun remembering where and when we bought or drank a bottle. Many of our best vacations have been at least partially oriented around wine.
I’m sure that vinyl collectors feel exactly the same way. Other hobbyists too.
I still like “The wine brings us together” point. Perhaps bringing like-minded folks together is the greatest upside of this hobby.
Sure, when talking with “normals” (non-wine people) we like to demonstrate self awareness, perspective and wine’s true context relative to world suffering, our family or health by saying wine is “just a beverage.” BUT- There’s no need to pretend here, we’re among friends, fellow enthusiasts. Wine is one of my passionate hobbies, it’s not just a beverage to me.
Yes
I’m sure you will get plenty of disagreement – hopefully all delivered gracefully.
While the idea that “wine is just a beverage” is true for the vast majority of the drinking public (in large part due to what they are drinking) at some point I hope any wine drinker can experience the epiphany most on this board have during our wine lives that tell us wine is so much more than “just a beverage.”
Though I’m not ITB I’ve hosted formal tastings for groups of people largely new to wine. Wine can be intimidating and many newbies think they are supposed to both experience the great depth and wax poetically about a wine the way more experienced drinkers do. To help them appreciate where they are in this journey and what they should reasonably take-away from the tasting I talk about my own reactions to wine at various stages of drinking and learning about wine.
At the early stages for myself and many people they like wine, it tastes good, maybe makes them feel sophisticated, and gets them drunk. Success. It’s where the vast majority of the public are and will remain. It encompasses all of the social fellowship advantages you mention which has more to do with the company and circumstances than the actual beverage that is being consumed. They can range from the complete beginner ordering a glass “house white wine” at a beer-smelling, sports bar to the upper-bound exemplified by Jack (the TV actor best friend) from the movie Sideways. He can taste and appreciate great wines but it doesn’t do much for him beyond enhancing the party and his mood. The gum chewing seen (“tastes good to me!”) scene is perfection.
But if the wine drinker cares to, and there is nothing wrong if they don’t care to, pay closer attention to what they are drinking and understand some of the nuances that go into one wine versus the other based on factors like grape selection, terroir, vintage, climate, barrel choice, etc. wine has the possibility of being something far more beyond just a beverage. Hopefully anyone who wants to understand why people wax poetically (and spend irrational amounts of money) on wine hit this next stage and have that epiphany I mentioned above. For me a great wine transports me to locations and times past recalling the circumstances, locations, and people all from the smells and tastes. It is memories and tastings that can be savored and recalled with every sip. Few other beverages can achieve this experience.
Last night I drank a 2001 Chateau Musar and I was immediately transported from my home in Charlotte, NC back a decade to a restaurant (The Lion) in Greenwich Village, NYC when I introduced the wine to a beautiful woman on date. Everything about the wine last night was delicious – the smoky notes on the wine balanced against memories of the dark and wooded bar entrance to the restaurant – as were the memories of a fantastic date during a wonderful time in NYC. A great many wines achieve that for me. Aged Mondavi takes me back to their tasting room, a beautiful South African red blend takes me back to the beautiful grounds at Delaire Graff, etc.
Not everyone is as fortunate to experience wine that way but I try to introduce many interesting wines to people in hopes even a little of what I enjoy may creep into their experiences. For most wine will remain just a beverage but with some intellectual investment, patience, and time wine can be so much more.
Cheers to your journey.
I believe that wine is far, far beyond just a beverage. It’s tied in a very special way with the civilization of mankind. I also believe there are levels within that beverage. Drinking a Grand Cru Burgundy demands your attention in a way that a $9 bottle of Chianti doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong — I enjoy both experiences but I don’t have the focus and cognitive energy to drink and truly appreciate Grand Cru Burgundy every day.
“wine as a beverage” is a very narrow way of looking at wine just like looking at a car as “transportation” or a phone as “means of communication” or, at the extreme, a person as “means of production”. In a first-order utility framework you have no space for more abstract concepts like craftsmanship, culture, art, beauty, fun, joy, community, etc. These concepts apply based on the perspective of the interaction, the breadth of thought and emotion of the consumer/patron and, in part, the intent of the creator.
For those, and there are probably many, for whom wine is simply a beverage, it reduces to a tasty way to get a bit of a buzz. If you ascribe no further value then, really, you are just trying to find the best taste at a price that seems reasonable relative to substitutes. That might be $10 that might be $50 or it might be higher. Seems like for most people in the US its about $20-$30. We can apply this approach to anything (cars, clothes, vacation, housing, electronics, food, etc.)
If you care about wine (or anything really) beyond that the sky is the limit. People will go to the ends of the earth in search of the concepts mentioned above. You can call it irrational or you can call it love (or, if you want to be cynical, a broken attempt to fill our own emptiness – I choose to be more positive than that).
Some might know this story:
Picasso is sketching in a park. A woman recognizes him and begs for a portrait. A few minutes later he hands her a sketch. She is excited and loves the drawing. She asks how much she owes him. “5000 francs” says Picasso. The woman, very upset by the sum, asks “how can it be 5000 francs?! It took you 5 minutes!” Picasso replies “No, madam, it took me my whole life”
I think the differentiator is finishing something you’ve started with a group of people (and, inevitably, popping another bottle). I don’t think a lot of people are going to split and kill a bottle of whiskey, but good call on the 6 pack. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s a different sensation to having a bottle of wine with a small group of people that I didn’t get drinking beers with my friends when I was in my 20s. I supposed correlation =/= causation, so maybe it’s just the booze, getting older, and having less of a social life than I did in my 20s that makes it seem more special.
Testarossa is just a car.
The Grand Canal Venice 1835 is just a picture.
Any discussion of the value of non-essential goods should start with “who’s asking?”.
Wine is a beverage but a much better beverage than others in the right context. Just like some foods are better than others. I always look at wine as an ingredient to a meal and when you do that it really boils down to is the meal better with x wine or with another beverage. If I’m making tacos and loading them up with spicy salsa, I’m not inclined to reach for wine. Water or a refreshing cocktail enhance that experience vs. a wine that IMO would most likely clash. Now if I’m roasting a leg of lamb, a beautiful bottle of Jamet would significantly enhance that meal vs. water or another beverage IMO. Fresh oysters scream for you to open a bottle of Muscadet or Chablis but the bubbly hot and spicy Korean tofu soup I had the another night did not scream for wine. It said I didn’t need a beverage because I was drinking the broth. I know not everyone looks at wine and food the way I do but that is how I look at it as a “beverage”. Does wine have to be expensive to be enjoyed with a meal? No, but life is about experiences and certain wines offer a different level of special experience. Just as a special sushi meal where the chef takes extra care of sourcing and preparing ingredients would offer a different level of experience than your avg. sushi restaurant.
Testarossa is just a car.
The Grand Canal Venice 1835 is just a picture.
Any discussion of the value of non-essential goods should start with “who’s asking?”.
I love this discussion and certainly understand all sides. I agree with the general premise for the vast majority of folks out there - that wine is something to have on the table, enjoy with a meal, and share it with family and friends. I like to say that wine is a ‘lubricant for conversation’ - to the average person, that conversation might just involve the highs and lows of the day; to a wine geek, it may revolve around the nuances of what’s in the glass . . .
Cheers.
I will take the ‘no’ side of the debate.
What differentiates wine from ‘just a beverage’ is that it stimulates multiple senses via aroma, flavor, texture and appearance. In terms of flavors, excellent wines can effectively span the sweet, sour, bitter, and umami spectrum well. And let’s not forget it has alcohol. So for those who are inclined/interested, wine at its best is very experiential.
Add in the history, geography, climate and vintage aspects, and there’s another layer of intellectual interest to accompany the liquid. Collecting is also somewhat of an instinctual behavior, which fine wine enables due to its aging arc.
On the other hand, it is not art, nor is it some kind of treatise on the relationship between man and nature. Nor is it the only consumable liquid that checks the boxes I mentioned above.
I’m aligned with you on this one. When a similar topic came up a while back, I wrote a version of the following, which remains my view:
Wine is not “just a beverage.” One way to look at it is that there are categories of things, or pursuits, the enjoyment of which is greatly enhanced by greater knowledge and experience. Certain topics are amenable to deep–perhaps endless–analysis, discussion, and study. There’s a reason people have been writing about Mozart for centuries and are not going to stop any time soon. There is a lot of depth of material to discuss; the more one listens to Mozart, the more one learns. There is enough material to captivate interest for more than a lifetime. There’s also a reason people don’t (and won’t) write scholarly articles about the work of Vanilla Ice, except to the extent he’s indicative of a cultural phenomenon. Mozart’s music rewards study. You may find it nice at first, but digging deeper yields greater treasures, and digging deeper still yields greater treasures still. This is how cultures develop their canons of work and why aesthetic choices aren’t totally random.
Great wine doesn’t rise to the level of great music or literature in terms of being amenable to scholarly study and analysis–but it’s not Vanilla Ice either. Really learning about wine will lead to a categorically richer experience–and it’s a mistake to think that greater wine knowledge is only snobbery and navel-gazing without any added value of deeper understanding and enjoyment.
Put very briefly, there is a reason people obsess more over wine than any other beverage, and have for a very long time. It has more depth to it and thus rewards obsession in ways that obsessing over grape juice, or vodka, does not.
A few random thoughts from me:
1 - Wine, as I heard so nicely put, is the only beverage to (intentionally/beneficially) change once bottlled. In itself, that separates it out from Coca Cola and whatever else. I’ve never had quite the depth of nuanced flavour I get with wine, but that being said I’ve never been a big whisky guy. Rums, whilst I love them, are nowhere near the complexity and breadth as wine. For me one of my first really mind blowing experiences with wine was drinking a Domaine de Chevalier blanc and experiencing the mango flavour in it. Clear as day. That really blew my mind. The other one was, quite early in my wine consumption, a bottle of 98 Yquem ove the course of a couple of hours with appetizers and cheese, etc, all specificalaly prepared for it. That’s probably one of my best all time wine experiences still.
2 - As discussed in the other thread (or at least hit on), the idea of expensive wine is ludicrously relative. If you’re on $100 a day, Petrus is going to be something you’ll never really want to buy. If you’re an ogliarch then a $5k bottle of Le Pin on a tuesday is no big deal. We need to appreciate that there is such a broad spectrum of people in wine, aand also the balance of people who will sacrifice on, e.g., quaality of home/travel/whatever for enjoying their wines.
I think another poster made a very nice point around the cars, many of us I’m sure will largue that a Ferrari isnt a sensible purchase against other options, but you’re onlly going to live one, and as an atheist, the closest to having meaning in this life is the experiences and senses we get to enjoy through it - for that, give me an expensive bottle of wine (or three), a nice meal, and great company to enjoy it with ANY day of the week.
And, yeah, I do consider wine to be art. People will travel the world to see a painting from someone who died hundrerds of years ago - does that not also apply to people who spend money on (ever-decreasing) bottles of wine made by a master who may have died? I’m sure 1945 Lafite is never going to be considered a ‘commodity’, and for me personally, being one of the limited number of people who would ever be able to taste such a wine (especially in its limited prime window) is a potentially other-wordly experience. (Not that I’ve ever had a 45 Lafite, just as an example)
Back in 2012 Costco’s wine buyer caused a lot of backlash when she referred to wine as “just a beverage”. I recall seeing that documentary and thinking she’s right but that’s not very good marketing… unless you’re aiming low.
Even cold, calculating bureaucracy views wine as more than just a beverage. Look at the tax and tariff rates.