Now some of you might think “Why Daniele is so concerned about what average Joe thinks”.
I’m not concerned, slightly bothered maybe but I’m not changing my habits out of what other people think. I haven’t been able to insulate myself enough.
I think I’ve mentioned this in Rudi’s thread, but I wanted to open a new thread to gather opinion and experiences.
Do you feel that wine passion (and also you as wine lovers) get questioned much more than other passion / hobbies by people from the outside? Because I do.
I’ve ecountered, online and offline, a pretty big amount of people claiming that all wine is the same / there’s almost no difference between 10 $ wine and 100 $ wine (they always talk about price points, never go deeper) / somms are a fraud and they cite some experiments / wine enthusiast are snobs. They always want to know how much correctly you can identify wines if you were to taste it blind.
I you said you love cinema, how many people would be intrested in knowing how good would you be at guessing which director was involved in a 10 minutes never seen before clip?
If you said you love arts, how many people would be interested in knowing how good would you be at spotting the original Monna Lisa from a good copy?
And we could go on an on with cars, travelling and other stuff. I think not many, since I’ve never seen any.
Why would they be so rattled about wine lovers? I have a couple ideas but I’d like to hear yours!
Wine is no different from most passions. I think because wine is a luxury item and expensive and visible, it gets more attention. Its easier to understand why someone spends $60,000 on a car instead of $30,000. It is a simple product: you can see it, hear it, feel it. But you’ll still hear people say they don’t understand why you’d spend twice as much for a luxury vehicle when a Honda Accord will get you from A to B just fine.
Wine has more finesse and it takes a lot longer to understand. At it’s core it’s a more intellectual pursuit (not that cars can’t be). You can’t hop in the drivers seat and go from 0-60 in 4.2 seconds.
That said, I’d say get over it. It doesnt matter what your passion is, there’s always someone who will deride you. Someone who won’t understand it. Frankly, just get over it. I, and you, don’t have enough time on this planet to worry about what someone else doesn’t like.
I have several thoughts on this thread, and it’s actually quite refreshing to read this, wonder why it hasn’t come up previously, in the literally 2million posts here!!
First thought, on :
I have a personal story about this…my mom was a drinker her whole life. Beer for most of it, then she moved to wine. She was a fan of the boxed Merlot (Woodbridge, Mondavi, etc) you can get anywhere. Would put it in the refrigerator, fill her pre-marked glass (5oz, of course) right to the line with the spigot, and enjoy it to the fullest. Whenever she’d come visit me, I’d try to find something as ‘sweet’ as possible for her, based on what she enjoys, so I’d pull an Old Vines Zinfandel, perhaps, something low in tannin as well, and she’d say ‘sorry, honey, I wish I liked your wine, I just don’t!’. I’d reply ‘mom! I WISH I loved your wine! How I wish I could get as much satisfaction from a $7 box of wine I bought at Walgreens as you do - it would save me so much money!!’ It illustrates that many DO find little difference between $10 wine and $100 wine, and even more couldn’t tell the difference, and prefer the $10 wine (or cheaper). Lucky them!
Another personal story, I often marvel at watching others at a restaurant gawk at wine events held at that same restaurant. Here are a group of wine geeks with 2-4 glasses each, 2 bottles each on the table, making for quite a scene when, to most people, one bottle of Santa Margarita Pinot Grigio is a ‘big date night’ option. They look over in wonder (and not just because of the gorgeous attendees, like @Robert.A.Jr or @K_John_Joseph ) and talk amongst themselves, likely berating us for our idiocy and gross expenditures, but every once in a while a curious onlooker will come over and have a chat - it’s those times I so love to share this passion with them, explain a little about the wines, share some with them, etc. They’ll most likely never join the ranks of WB but I do relish those experiences nonetheless.
Agreed. I think another example is someone looking at modern/contemporary art and saying “I could paint that”. It’s both totally true and almost entirely uninformed.
Ha! I was just about to type the very same thing. Those of us that are passionate about cycling, it’s a whole 'nother level of commitment. Not even most casual riders of bikes fully understand our quirkiness and our degree of commitment. The shaving of the legs. The matching of your bike to every part of your kit, including the clip-in shoes, helmet and sunglasses. Whether your sunglasses go outside or inside of the helmet strap. Whether the socks are low or high. Matching water bottles. It makes wine appreciation look pretty plebeian, and then of course, we have the sexy calves rather than the soft midsection.
I guess the story that wine enthusiasts are stupid snobs who throw away their money generates a lot of engagement. It’s easy to design a “study” that seems to show as much, since most people don’t spend any time thinking about whether or not said “study” was well designed or actually leads to the conclusion that’s offered. Add in the fact that a huge number of people assume their experiences with food/wine/etc. are universal. That part even seem to be widely believed here, as you can see in almost all of the pairing threads. When I worked at a retail shop, countless customers asked me if something was “good” and then acted surprised when I had follow-up questions to try to learn their preferences.
A lot of people love putting things in boxes, especially when that allows them to feel somehow superior to other people.
I think it’s the difference between people who drink vs people who taste. I wonder how many of us, if we were to drink a $10 wine and a $50 wine in similar category could tell which was which.
drink = over filled glass, no smelling, no swirling, take a good swallow (not sip), don’t think about it. Kirsten Bell has it nailed … this clip gives the idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vik0kdPIxF8
That is part of what makes this passion so cool, is sharing it with others that truly want to learn and appreciate wine as well. And we often learn from them, also.
While I may have been a bit baked that night, I distinctly recall us doing that at the highlands in North Carolina with that nice couple that started talking to us about all of our wines. Next thing you know they are getting healthy free pours of some amazing stuff. And then the two guys and their wives that joined us at the table at the end of the night in Dallas, same thing, plus we sent them home with a couple of bottles, which included the remainder of a 2014 Juge (1/3 of a bottle). I really enjoyed wrapping with those folks, the two guys were cool as shit.
In my experience regular people don’t try to discredit most wine lovers, but they do however, have their fun with bombastic, snobbish wine bores who drone on, and on…
It doesn’t bother me in the least when someone asserts there’s no difference between a $10 & $100 bottle of wine, it’s true in some cases and many inexperienced wine drinkers (the vast majority of society) really can’t tell the difference. That’s a fun conversation to have with someone or a group and I can talk intelligently on the subject. Imagine if the group wanted to talk about something divisive or boring like politics or the merits of Keynesian vs. Supply-side economics?!
Then there is this sort of thing. A couple of decades ago when I was in the corporate world, I was at a conference for our sales agents and was at a restaurant for dinner with a few of them. Knowing my interest in wine they handed me the wine list to select some wine with this advice “if it’s under $100 it’s no good”. Of course that became my upper limit. Can’t recall specifics but Rioja hit the mark ( I didn’t say what I’d picked until they had tasted).
I think wine enthusiasts sometimes have subconscious avoidance mechanisms around the perception of seeming weird or uncool about their love of wine.
You constantly read on here how you shouldn’t drink wine at restaurants which serve [insert most cuisine from around the world outside of Europe], shouldn’t have it while on vacation in the tropics, shouldn’t drink it at tailgates and sports viewing gatherings, and so forth.
One thing I notice is that those are places where it might seem weird or out of place to others that you’re drinking good wines. “Most people aren’t drinking wine at a Mexican restaurant.” “It seems weird to have wines at Dim Sum.” “Most other people drink fruity cocktails in Hawaii.” “At football game gatherings, everyone else is drinking beer and White Claw.” “I don’t see anyone else drinking wine at the sushi restaurant.”
So maybe some wine enthusiasts, on some level, convince themselves that wine isn’t really enjoyable in those settings, as a way not to be uncomfortable that their hobby and interest feels out of place?
That will probably be an unpopular take, since many WBers declare strong feelings about how you should only have wine at dinner with traditional/conventional food pairings from wine. But if anyone is open to being introspective about those feelings, maybe dig a little and see if part of the aversion to all those pairings, locations, weather, types of gatherings, etc. might not be partly about avoiding going outside your comfort zone or being willing to be your real self in settings where it’s more unconventional.
I have never felt discredited by wine laymen, except when some of them assume my hobby makes me a drunkard. My biggest beef is with this hobby’s manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
There’s a difference between lack of understanding and discrediting. I don’t get negative vibes about being into wine unless I start going on about it. Sounds pretentious to the uninterested and/or uninformed.
At least with cycling people admire the fitness that goes along with it. With wine most people have more negative than positive health connotations.
I’d be curious to know how prevalent this is in Europe where there has been wine culture for centuries, both high and low. The perception of snobbishness doesn’t surprise me in the US because we don’t have a basis for wine culture here. Its something seek out rather than being part of their common culture. Whereas beer and liquor are a more common entry that many people seem to share.
Maybe because a lot of us have tried these and found that shoehorning wine in just because we feel the need doesn’t actually work? I find it much more extremely snobbish to tell people that they should try wine with Mexican food when we know very well that a nice lager is going to work MUCH MUCH better 999 times out of thousand.
I think I’ve probably more often experienced tables around us marveling and enjoying our wine dinners. We get plenty of interest, and sometimes end up pouring wine for them. I guess we wouldn’t know if they were making fun of us lol.
And a comment: this is why so many of us resisted the new forum sw. Like we need new blood introducing new conversations we haven’t had yet
