Wine Opinion | The awkwardness of being a wine snob

The biggest fib in the wine industry: "There is no such thing as good or bad wine, it only matters whether you like it." It's a fib not because it's a false statement but because the people saying it often don't quite believe it. Consciously or not, it implies that the person to whom it is being said is too unaware of what good wine is for the speaker to be bothered debating the topic with them.

The mirror image phrase, often used by people who find themselves in conversation with a wine professional, is: "I don't know anything about wine, but I know what I like." Although it is almost always said with the best of intentions, to me it's the same as telling somebody who works in finance: "I don't know anything about finance, but I know which stocks I like."

From this point the conversation can go one of two ways: somebody glib could take the phrase as a cue to talk down to the person's level, most likely using lines like the one just mentioned, and possibly try to sell them something. The less glib, myself included, will instead melt into an awkward puddle of platitudes such as "that's great, it's important to know what you like" and "well, yes, I really like big reds, too" (and I admit it, that's also a lie).

These uncomfortable phrases appear hundreds of times over the course of all wine aficionados' conversations with self-declared "non-wine people". You can't begrudge either group using them; they're handy for papering over the awkwardness of many a potential impasse (for example, when somebody mistakenly extols the virtues of the pinot noir from Bordeaux). The problem with both phrases is this: while they pretend to say that wine is something easy and approachable, they ultimately stymie the flow of any mutually respectful, informative conversation that could genuinely help more people enjoy wine.

The underlying assumption here, of course, is that knowledge about wine has some impact on your ability to enjoy it. Whether this is true is a question I'm asked regularly (and yet another that inevitably transforms me into an awkward, platitudinous puddle). The askers are usually casual wine consumers, some of whom are genuinely interested in the answer while others are simply trying to gauge how big a wine snob I am.

After years of deflecting the question, I've finally decided to come down firmly on the side of "Yes, within reason". Do I believe that only those who sit either the Master of Wine or Master Sommelier exams, or have a burgundy cellar that runs back to 1945, are truly able to enjoy wine? Clearly not, even if perhaps the people peddling either wine education or mature burgundy might like you to think so.