Pretense in the Wine Circles

Shit, I just blogged like an hour ago, but I got inspired real quick(probably due to the boredom here at work).

I attended my 4th bartending class last night and it was about wine. I liked white wine and could stand red wine before this class, but I left with a greater appreciation for wine culture as well as a 1/4 of a bottle of fume blanc. It was awesome. I learned to properly serve wine at the table and i learned the proper way to drink wine. It's quite the complicated process, but does it ever make a difference! Wine that tasted austere and acidic and overly tart became agreeable and grassy when you applied the right method of tasting. FYI, those are some of the proper words to use when describing the quality of a wine. But, along with all the good, I learned of the snobbery of wineheads. Now, I knew they were pretentious asshats. But, I did not know how much pretense or asshattery was, in fact, involved.

"Still wine" (all the wine that people drink, not including champagne) is only still wine if using the classic set of french grapes. It's got to be made of Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet, etc to qualify as wine. You can make alcohol from concorde grapes the same way as other grapes from france, but you can't call it wine. It's "Fortified Wine."

Did you know that wine packaging does not matter for the finish product of wine? I was led to believe, due to the my impression formed by the winers that only in a corked bottle does wine mature properly. But, if you put the same wine in three separate containers, a corked bottle, a screwtop bottle and a plastic bladder for boxwine, THEY WILL TASTE THE SAME! The reason why boxwine is usually not good is not because putting it in a plastic bladder makes is awful, it's just that the younger vineyards, who don't have as reputable and good wine are more likely to be putting their product in such contraptions. "Legitimate" wineries (the old and established) legitimize their wine through adherence to traditions. They scoff on the cheaper packaging of box or screwtop wine for fear that they would be considered of lower quality by those aforementioned asshat wineheads.

True, wine in a bottle just looks so much better than wine in a box, but hey, its potentially the same shit. And yes, part of the experience of wine is screwing off the cork. Boxwine and screwtop wine should be served when this experience doesn't matter. But, due to the potential judgment that those winos could pass, restaurants don't usually serve this less expensive alternative.

Now, I'm just ranting, so ignore me.

Point is, wine is awesome, and it could be more awesome if stripped of its elitist snobbery.

But, at the same time, it's probably from this elitist snobbery that winemaking has been refined into the art form it is today.