4 ms·
Hah. Realize that wine is made, literally, by farm boys who spend the year picking and crushing grapes from the field. When you visit a winery you realize how
by memset 13y ago
Hah.
Realize that wine is made, literally, by farm boys who spend the year picking and crushing grapes from the field. When you visit a winery you realize how far-removed the winemaking process, which is as down-and-dirty as any other farm work, is from its cultural air.
This is my experience with many wine professionals - people who procure, ship, or teach about wine for a living. There is a valid criticism of sommolier culture (which is only one facet of the industry) of propagating pretentiousness. But perhaps you need that air when selling a $300 bottle of wine, but you want to market yourself as "just a beverage" when selling a $10 bottle.
This reinforces my original point! There's more to $topic than your perception of it. There is more to fashion than "pretty people who are arrogant." There is more to IT than "Star Wars references." There is more to wine than "pretentious people with their cellars."
- DanBC 13y agoI found wine-types much easier to deal with once I learnt that there's a bunch of chemicals which cause tastes in wine, and there's a list of recognized names that people use to describe those tastes. Still, I would strongly prefer any tasting sessions and reporting to be done double blind. With only a sub-editor knowing the name of the wine and putting that in at the last minute.
- stickfigure 13y agoWine-types are always much easier to deal with after your second glass.
- sanderjd 13y agoThe right approach to someone who says they have a particularly delicious bottle of wine is always "let's talk about it after I've had a couple glasses".
- mjn 13y agoI think there may be some overexposure issues in some parts of wine as well: if you work in a popular place like the Napa Valley, it's easy to slip into the equivalent of the jaded tech-support worker who assumes everyone they talk to is going to be a total idiot, and isn't going to be very subtle about that assumption. One way to avoid that is to go to places that aren't over-exposed. I did a short driving tour of Texas wineries a few years ago, and it was quite low-key and pleasant. People were pretty friendly and wanted to explain things. Some people were actual wine makers in the literal agricultural sense, but even those who weren't—mostly semi-retired people who decided to run a winery in their late-middle-age as kind of upper-middle-class dilettantes—were pretty friendly.