Drawbacks of Knowing Wine

I realized yesterday that there are some significant drawbacks to knowing quite a bit about wine.  For example, being familiar with wine will make you realize how marked up it is at restaurants and will get you thinking: “did I really just pay $8 for a glass of this wine when I could have bought the bottle for $10?”  It’ll also inadvertently make you aware of what wines you give or receive as gifts.  For example, giving a nice bottle of wine is a great gesture, but will the person I’m giving the bottle to realize this, or will it be just another bottle to them?  Will giving a cheap, but good wine send a bad signal just because of the price tag?  I like to always try a wine and see what it’s like before jumping to conclusions, but there is that little fear that knowing a wine’s price or reputation will skew my view, or more importantly the view of someone I give a bottle to.

This realization on my part speaks to two of the worst aspects of the wine industry.  First, is the perceived prestige associated with price.  Second is the almost unavoidable aspect of snobbery in the wine industry.  Prestige and price are problems for the wine industry, because prices from top to bottom of the industry are so extreme.  You can get wine from $2 a bottle all the way up to $1000+ per bottle.   The price aspect of wine is a lot of what accounts for snobbery in the wine industry, but there is a different kind of snobbery that I find myself guilty of on occasion.  Like I mentioned previously, I always try to leave my perceptions about wine until after I’ve tried it, but I find myself guilty of being a snob when it comes to varietals and location in which they are grown.  This is mostly because I’ve got wines that I know that I like and those that I know I don’t, so I’m always going to be excited about a Chianti, and always skeptical of Pinotage.  My kind of snobbery isn’t all that bad in my opinion, but it’s snobbery nevertheless. 

I’ve written about prestige in the wine industry and how a brand name or even a numerical score from a critic can make the difference between a $50 wine and a $100 wine, but back to my initial questions.  When you give a nice bottle of wine to someone, will they really appreciate it, or will it be just another bottle?  I tend to think that the answer to this question doesn’t matter, and it is why I’m not in the practice of giving out expensive bottles of wine (I can’t afford to either).  I just give people wine that tastes good, or something that I think they’ll like.  I don’t think about how much it costs, I want them to have a positive impression when drinking my wine, and I want them to enjoy it more than anything else, so I try to throw price and prestige out the window and go for enjoyment.  I think this argument answers the next question of “will giving a cheap wine send a bad signal?”  Sure, two buck Chuck or Franzia won’t going to knock anyone’s socks off of, but that doesn’t mean that wines on the cheaper side are bad gifts.  I wrote about how wine at all price levels is improving, so going back to the enjoyment factor, if you can find a cheap, good bottle, give away, and should the recipient like it, they will likely be happy that they can buy more bottles of it cheaply and will thank you for introducing them to something that they may have previously overlooked.

Moral of the story (same story as in many previous posts…), wine is about enjoyment, so when giving or receiving wine, think about that first and foremost and give the wine an honest try before making any kind of judgment.  It’s hard to do, but  keeping an open mind will let you learn more about wine and help you enjoy it more.