Bailout

Will wine ever be democratic?

By Felix Salmon

My latest wine column is up, and because I couldn’t do it there, I’d like to send out a big thank-you to Mike Veseth, whose post I drew liberally from both for quotes from Thomas Pinney and for its central idea.

One of the subjects of the column is a look at the pitfalls inherent in writing a wine column at all:

Pinney draws a distinction between what he calls Wagnerians, who aren’t happy unless they can drink a sound wine every day, and Martians, who are unhappy with anything less than the superlative and the rigorously-informed. (Wagnerians are named after Philip Wagner, a journalist and winemaker active in the 30s and 40s; Martians after uncompromising California wine pioneer Martin Ray.)

Most wine drinkers — including sommeliers, and retailers, and journalists — would put themselves at the Wagnerian end of the spectrum. But look at how they behave in public, and you’d be forgiven for considering them die-hard Martians.

They might happily and unceremoniously drink cheap and wonderful wine daily at home, but put them behind the counter of a wine bar, or give them a wine column, and they’ll suddenly start acting as though the only way they ever drink wine is with great concentration and connoisseurship.

The gist of the column is that although we can all laugh at someone who thinks they need to spend $350 in order to get a wine worth drinking, the fact is that a weaker but fundamentally identical message is sent by far too many wine lovers, far too frequently. And the message gets through: you can tell, quite easily, by looking at the number of wine drinkers in this country compared to the number of beer drinkers. Beer is democratic, in a way that wine simply isn’t, in this country. And, sadly, probably never will be.

Full post as published by Macroprudential on July 20, 2010 (boomark / email).