Whether you want to believe it or not wine snobs are faking it more often than not. They might tell you after their ‘extensive’ years of wine-tasting and their expensive vocabulary that one wine is better than another, but here’s a tip: feel free to ignore them. They might like to make you think that they have the skinny on every little trick there is to tasting wine but the idea of anything in this world when it comes to eating or drinking is to do what you like and eat or drink what you find appetizing. Don’t depend on anyone else to tell you what you’ll like, get out their and experiment.
Wine experts seem to love telling people everything they know about the wine industry. So yes, some wines are aged differently, some are given different taste profiles, and some are in fact very different when it comes to being ‘wet’ or ‘dry’. But when it comes to taste it’s all subjective. Don’t base your choice in wine on something like the bottle design, the name, or anything other than the taste. A house wine might be just the thing you’re looking for rather than the bottle that costs a few hundred dollars and can’t be ordered by the glass. This is something that servers and wine tasters alike are taught to pitch to the uninitiated that know little to nothing about wine, as it allows them to upsell on the basis of being an ‘expert’.
The truth is though that while some wine experts do have very well-refined taste buds they’re not going to tell you with any accuracy which one you should try, because they don’t have YOUR taste buds. That’s right, everyone’s taste is just a little bit different from the next person’s and as a result someone telling you what you will or won’t like is kind of ridiculous. By the time you’re old enough to legally drink wine you should be able to make up your own mind on what it is that you want. If you’re still letting an ‘expert’ tell you which wine you want by this time then you’re either not confident at all in your choices, which is common, or are far too likely to go along with what other people say just on basic principle.
Do you know what wine is? It’s fermented grapes that are given added flavor and then stored in glass bottles for the drinking pleasure of those that are willing to pay through the nose for the ‘privilege’ of having something that’s supposedly high quality and not like anything else on the market. Unfortunately those people paying hundreds of dollars for a single bottle of wine that was made a hundred years ago or more are really just getting an old, fermented, aged grape juice that’s been sitting around for a long, long time. I know, I get it, sometimes it’s because of the vineyards they came from and sometimes it has to do with a historical moment, but people, if you want to drink wine, just pick one and see if you like it. Don’t bother with the experts.
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