We’ve all got that one spicy opinion that makes our tasting group groan, our cellar-mates roll their eyes, or our in-laws question our sanity. Maybe it’s a grape you’ll never drink again, a beloved region you think is overrated, or a food-pairing rule you flat-out refuse to follow.
This thread is your safe (but lively!) space to plant your flag, defend your stance, and have a little fun along the way. Whether your take is backed by iron-clad data, decades of blind tasting, or pure emotion—bring it on.
I’ll go first: Any decent all-purpose “universal” glass will do - expensive ($30+) stems deliver only bragging rights with imperceptible gains to tasting ability.
People that go to tastings and proclaim to the entire group that (insert wine here) needs food are a bunch of try hards. If a wine is enjoyable, it doesn’t need food. That’s not to say it wouldn’t be even MORE enjoyable with food, though.
X varietal is worth high pricing (I.e. Cab, Burg) whereas Y varietal is not (I.e. Rosè). Varietal will not determine the amount I pay, my enjoyment in the wine will.
Would not die on any of these hills nor really defend them, but my unpopular wine opinions include:
Whites are typically most pleasurable refrigerator cold.
Zero-dosage sparkling would benefit from a bit of dosage 99% of the time.
Dry domestic wines listed below 12% (non-Riesling division) are rarely enjoyable, and cry out for more ripeness. (Maybe this is actually popular idk—you forget what’s what when you’re a Berserker.)
Pesto is actually a really easy pairing and goes with just about everything.
(And yea, diam/screwcap 4 life—but I think that might be a reasonably popular opinion around here.)
Wine pairing is subjective, as much as food preference and wine preference are. A famous somm saying something is a good pairing doesn’t mean it’s a universally good pairing. I believe there are a few outright bad pairings, though.
I think people describe too many things in wine just as “mineral” and it bothers me.
Preference and quality in wine are two different things, and should be talked separately. Honestly I hate it when someone says “it’s all subjective ”
Burgundy drinkers’ fetish to terroirs is often a little excessive.
I doubt the OP wanted each unpopular truth to be debated, but since you pushed back on this one, I feel compelled to point two things out about this oft-debated topic, which can be found in many other threads.
M-W are avowed descriptivists, not prescriptivists. As such, when an error becomes common enough, they throw it in. This makes their dictionary quite useful for interpreting what others are saying, even when they are saying it incorrectly, but completely ill-suited as a reference for determining which usage is correct and which is not.
While M-W’s definition does refute the assertion that varietal is “never” a noun, even their descriptivist definition supports noun usage only to refer to a wine (but only a wine that is produced principally from one variety) - e.g., “This wine is a varietal because it is 95% cabernet, but that wine is not a varietal because no one variety makes up more than 40% of the blend.” Their definition does not, on the other hand, support the depressingly common error of using “varietal” as a noun to mean “grape variety,” as in “Zinfandel is my favorite varietal” or “This wine is a blend of four different varietals.” Note also that in their definition itself, they use “variety” and not “varietal” to refer to the grape (as one should), and in their example sentence, “varietal” is used as an adjective (as it almost always should be).
“Varietal” should never be used as a noun to mean “variety,” even if M-W includes a definition of its use as a noun to mean “a wine made predominantly from a single variety.”
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