Yes. Snobs are incurious and “only drink the best”. They refuse to try any wine they feel is below them, look down people who drink non-prestigeous wine. Their knowledge tends to be very narrow and not entirely accurate. Arrogant and self-assured. Pretty much the opposite of geeky.
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Can’t echo this less. Some restaurants have rules about wines you can bring precisely to avoid people picking some wine of the shelf and paying corkage rather than paying restaurant markups. When I go out to restaurants with friends, who like good wine but are not wine geeks, they are happy for me to bring wine so that we can drink nice wine without paying absurd prices for it. I bring wine to restaurants regularly and have never remotely done it to impress anyone. It is being cheap. If markups weren’t what they are, I might order off the list more.
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I would say if you bring your own glasses to a restaurant, that clearly starts veering into snob territory.
FWIW, I have done that a couple of times before but it’s rare.
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“I can’t swear you are wrong because I can’t get in their craniums, but I think that is incorrect. I would imagine they would feel as I do when I see someone keeping score at a baseball game. He’s deeper into it than I am or will ever be. He’s not imposing his interests on me; why should I care or be offended?”
This.
Snob is a pejorative term for a person who offends due to an attitude of superiority.
Some people are set up to be easily offended with few cues, why worry about that? In other words, if simply bringing a bottle of wine to a restaurant offends someone, IMO, that’s on them.
If you have trouble relating to people (if you’re giving more cues through your attitude and/or behavior), then the problem may indeed be with you.
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When I worked
When I worked at restaurants the staff sure didn’t think so. I’d say more leaning towards that attitude when people brought in their own glasses and especially pre-decanted wine, and other customers didn’t seem to care when people BYO either. Maybe it was the locations and general clientele, or different times (late 90s, early 2k’s). I think we got more of a kick out of people who brought in sub $30 bottles when corkage was close to equal or more.
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Now if civilians saw what we spend on wine, they might be more likely to wonder (not necessarily correctly, but if we’re talking about what they’d actually think) if we may be snobs.
“He spends $100 on a bottle of wine when you can get some perfectly good Barefoot Pinot Grigio for $5? Maybe he’s one of those wine snobs, thinks he’s better than us regular folks.”
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Wine snobs are like an onion, there are many layers.
At the outside layers some of the basic (pretty benign) stuff is perceived and/or stereotyped as snobbery by non wine people… then at the core are the hard core wine snobs that even most other wine snobs are offput by their attitudes and behaviors.
I think most here agree that passion and preference is not inherently snobbish, but that isn’t the global perception by many folks outside the hobby- some of whom are downright snobbish in their own predisposed opinions about those who are into wine.
edit: I seem to have used snob in a similar usage as smurf
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Aw hell, it is all relative. I have wine friends who are wine snobs think I am low-life wine trash. On the other hand, I have friends who drink pretty much nothing but booze and/or beer who think I am a snob simply because I order wine.
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If you have the self awareness to ask yourself that question, probably not.
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The company I regularly dine with understands. I’ve also been asked by others if I thought the restaurant’s wine wasn’t good enough for me. I happen to live in an area where I almost never see someone else bring a bottle with them to dinner so doing so is very irregular.
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A small note on turning down the opportunity to drink wine that doesn’t excite us.
I used to regularly spend time away from home during the week. Whether on expenses or not, there was always the opportunity to have a glass of wine or beer in the evening with or after the meal. I’d often pass, generally having some sparkling water instead, when the selection was poor (volume branded wine, or even worse, the disaster that is ‘brewed under licence’ beer).
Snobbish? Perhaps, though I did come to the conclusion that I’d rather have a few days off from drinking, knowing I had some lovely wine from the cellar to look forward to at the weekend, an/or a bottle of Belgian/German/etc. beer from a reasonably local major importer. In short I didn’t want to drink alcohol for the sake of drinking alcohol, but rather when I did, I wanted to enjoy it.
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I once called a restaurant and asked if I can bring my own wine. The person answering the phone laughed and told me (while snickering) I don’t need to, since they have wine there.
I wonder how she would have responded if I asked her “what is your corkage policy”?
Does that last part make me a a snob ? Or show her ignorance . Maybe both.
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Have you ever seen the episode of Fawlty Towers in which a customer tells Basil the wine is corked and Basil insists that it is not since he has removed the cork? Is the customer a snob or is Basil a fool?
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I think this is the line between snobbery and being a douchebag. If you are invited to a dinner and bring your own stems, you are a douche, unless it’s a very specific and tiny subset of dinners where this may be somehow acceptable.
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Short answer is yes!
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How about this (and I go back and forth on this myself). Sometimes when I get together with non-wine geek friends where we plan to bring wines for dinner, I want to bring all the wines for the dinner and not have them bring any. This happens a lot at my country club where we can bring wine without paying corkage because we are members of the wine club (as are most of the friends we dine with there).
I offer to our friends to let me bring the bottles because I have more wine in my cellar than I will drink in two lifetimes (and this is true) but a large part of it is I would rather drink my wine than their wine. Certainly, part of this is to share my wines with friends, but another part is that I like my wines better.
I would like to say that I don’t bring the wines to impress my friends but is that true? Certainly, I am not trying to impress my friends with labels (I am a Burgundy guy remember - none of them know one label from another) but I am trying to bring wines they will enjoy (and I even tailor the wines I bring with what I think the friends will like).
Is bringing wines that someone will enjoy more than their own wines trying to impress them? Snobbery or generosity???
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Sorta, yes
If your mindset when bringing the wines, is carefully choosing them to align to their tastes, then it’s very much leaning towards generosity. If however it’s with a mindset of educating them, or trying to ‘improve’ their palate preferences, then it risks being snobbery.
Of course it’s never as black and white as generosity OR snobbishness, and a great example is ‘I think they might like this if they tried it’, which feels generous, but has a risk of some subconscious ‘leading the witness’.
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Scheming to prevent them from bringing “meh” wines is full snob.
Wanting to be generous and share your wines is not.
I have, on a small number of occasions, brought my own stems to a dinner I’ve been invited to, Mikko.
I am a douche.
Seriously, I could’ve been more precise.
I would never do that if the new neighbors next door invited my wife and me over for a welcome dinner.
But if my surfing buddy invited us over to try his new coq au vin recipe, I could see myself bringing a few special bottles of Burgundy from my cellar and 4 stems for the group to try.
Done properly, it can be instructional and fun for the civilians. They can see and taste the difference between Zalto and jelly jar glasses.
It’s all about context and reading the crowd.
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