Joel Achenbach writes in the Washington Post about the pretentiousness that has become evident in the world of wine.
Recently someone tried to teach me how to drink wine properly. There is much sniffing and swirling and sipping, but you’re not allowed to swallow until you perform various gymnastics with your tongue while breathing, wheezing, gasping and coughing the wine all over the furniture.
But the hardest part, I find, is learning to talk about wine pretentiously. Everyone nowadays tries to imitate Robert Parker, the great wine critic. He’s the “Wine Advocate,” the man with the million-dollar nose, the most influential critic in the world. He has olfactory superpowers. He once told me during an interview that, walking down the street, he can smell more than 100 distinctive odors. He has a big head. At one point I asked him to stick out his tongue; the thing that emerged was like something you’d see wrapped in cellophane at the supermarket: beef tongue.
And Parker claims to have remarkable skills when it comes to wine:
He told me that, in a blind tasting, he can routinely tell not only the grape varietal, the country of origin and the region, but also the exact vintage, even the chateau.
Yeah right. Even if true, though, the biggest problem with Parker, according to Achenbach, is the way he’s influenced the way people think, or at least pretend to think, about wine:
Listen to him describe the 1990 Montrose St.-Estephe bordeaux:
“The wine is remarkably rich, with a distinctive nose of sweet, jammy fruit, liquefied minerals, new saddle leather, and grilled steak. In the mouth, the enormous concentration, extract, high glycerin, and sweet tannin slide across the palate with considerable ease. It is a huge, corpulent, awesomely endowed wine that is still relatively approachable, as it has not yet begun to shut down and lose its baby fat.”
Other wines have flavors of “damp earth” and “underbrush.” When Parker doesn’t like a wine, as in the case of a certain ‘79 cabernet, he’ll write that it has an”intense vegetative, barnyard aroma.”
This is all so impressive to me, since, blindfolded, I could not tell a ‘61 Chateau Lafite bordeaux from an ‘03 Goofy Grape Kool-Aid
And people read stuff like that and think it actually means something. It probably leads them to try wines they might not otherwise try, but it also leads them to stay away from wines they might otherwise enjoy. It reminds me of some of the descriptions I’ve seen at wineries that we’ve visited here in Virginia and elsewhere. If I see one more paragraph telling me which wines would go well with bison and rabbit, I will scream —- how about telling me what goes well with chicken and steak ?
Here’s my advice when it comes to wine — try alot of it, before long you will figure out what you like and what you don’t When you start finding yourself liking particular types of wine, or wines from particular regions, that can be your guide to trying new things. And, whatever you do, don’t sound like a pretentious snob while doing it.
