Serious Grape: Some of My Best Friends Are Wine Snobs
Editor's note: We're pleased to bring you a new voice here on Serious Eats—Deb Harkness. You might already be familiar with Deb's work on Good Wine Under $20. If not, now's a great time to clink glasses with her and get to know her. She'll be joining us every other week with some insight on the vino in a column we call Serious Grape. Welcome to Serious Eats, Deb. Cheers! —Adam
My dad is an unlikely candidate for the label “wine snob.”
He has never taken a single wine course, reads no wine books and only occasionally purchases a wine magazine, keeps no more than a handful of bottles in the house for immediate drinking, and never spends more than $25 on a bottle of wine. He does not wear a cravat, smoke a pipe, or eschew the simple pleasure of a hot dog and a beer at a Dodgers game. Yet he loves sticking his nose into a glass of wine and calling out what he smells at the dinner table. “I smell blackberry!” he cries triumphantly. “And cloves, cinnamon, and chocolate, too!” The enthusiastic descriptions keep flowing after he’s sipped, and continue into the second glass and beyond.
Today, such enthusiasm for what's in the glass is enough for you to be branded a wine snob. In a recent Los Angeles Times article, columnist Joel Stein mocked the pretentiousness of people like my dad. Stein wrote that all he detected was “a whole lot of jackass” when reading wine critics who use fruity and flowery descriptors to tell you about a wine. After the disarming confession that he actually has a weak sense of smell, Stein went on to explain what he wants in a wine review instead: “Personally, I want to know if a wine is rough, balanced, acidic, sweet, simple, tannic, soft, hot with alcohol, mineraly, watery or has a long finish. I want to know that a Zinfandel, our greatest native grape, tastes like America: big, bold, unsubtle and ready to fight.”
Huh?
