When we began to make plans for the conversion of our BioCellar into a winery, I, only half-jokingly, said to my wife Brenda that I was going to have an artist draw me a life-sized image of a man’s profile. He would have his nose down deep into a wine glass, sniffing, with a disdainful look on his face and his pinky finger extended. The image would have a red circle and X on it, with the caption “No wine snobs allowed.”
Brenda, who is somewhat accustomed to my often off-the-wall ideas (and on occasion is tolerant of them) immediately said, “Oh no you’re not!” in a tone that she rarely uses, but one that lets me know I’m going to be overruled. There would be no sign.
However, while I didn’t debate the issue (it simply wasn’t worth it), I nonetheless bided my time.
We recently hosted a very successful (at least in terms of attendance and the wonderful time everyone had listening to Distinguished Gentlemen of Spoken Word, followed by three members of the Cleveland Orchestra, while some sketched the vines under the tutelage of a gentleman from the Cleveland Museum of Art) fundraiser, and social media were somewhat abuzz with comments within a few days.
However, when one woman asked a male friend of hers if he had heard of our vineyard, he replied, “Yes, but unfortunately I’ve heard that the wine is undrinkable.” When Brenda read this on Facebook she almost popped her cork — blew her lid in her quiet, unruffled way.
She pointed out the comment to me, and I just sort of chuckled and said, “You knew comments like that were coming, didn’t you? Pay it no mind.”
But she couldn’t let it go. “This guy has never even tasted our wines!”
What I knew was there are folks out there that fashion themselves critics of anything that’s subjective in nature. And further, I know that even if this guy did come by and sample our wines, he still could declare them horrible. But if I were to put our red wine into a bottle that was labeled as a 2005 Château Lafite-Rothschild, Pauillac (which retails for $2000) he would taste it and swoon, and once coming back down to terra firma, begin praising it in all of the pantywaist jargon used by wine snobs the world over. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s been proven to be bullshit.
About 15 years ago a professor of mathematics retired from a California university and used part of his considerable nest egg to buy a fairly rundown winery. He studied the craft of winemaking (something he knew quite a bit about before he bought the winery) but, although he vastly improved the quality of the wine, the snobs were still disdainful because of where it came from. The winery had a tarnished reputation.
So he did a test: He put the same red wine into three different bottles and entered them into a number of the hundreds of wine-judging competitions around the state. The three wines were never rated even close to each other — and these were supposedly the “experts” doing the judging.
Next, he went back and looked at the judging competitions for the previous 25 years. He wanted to see how a wine that won a blue ribbon in one contest fared in the next contest. Now, since these are usually the same judges, one would assume they would still like a wine they favored the first time the next time around. Not true.
In the next contest the wine that won the ribbon in the previous contest often didn’t win anything, while the wine that didn’t win a ribbon in other contests won a blue ribbon. There was no rhyme or reason to it, and the mathematician came up with a graph that proved his suspicions.
Young winemakers in California are now locked in a battle with Robert Parker, the man who came up with the wine rating system — you know, that number you see on a bottle on the shelf, a 92 or 93 or higher. The young guns of the industry are calling the system what it is: Nonsense. Did I use the term “bullshit” already?
The thing is, Parker, who is fighting tooth and nail against these young winemakers (after all, he makes a ton of money off of his specious system), is a wine purist, the snobbiest of all snobs. He abhors blends, which are now being acclaimed as far superior to just one variety in a bottle.
The younger winemakers tell folks to drink what they like, even if it’s “Two-buck Chuck.” But personally, I do draw the line at wine that comes in boxes.
One other fabled wine story: About a decade ago some French joker put food coloring in a bottle of white wine and turned it red. He then entered it into the top wine-judging competition in Paris, and not one of the judges knew the difference.
So much for experts.
Brenda did contact the gentleman who had made the unfair remark and invited him to at least come taste our wines before criticizing them, and he did offer up an apology. But I don’t think that he’ll ever take my wife up on her offer to come visit.
Nonetheless, dozens of the people who attended our fundraiser made an additional donation on the spot so they could go home with bottles of our wines. They wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t truly like our product. Still, who can account for varied tastes — or opinions?
At some point I’m going to revisit the conversation with Brenda about my wine snob drawing — since her opinion just might have now shifted somewhat on the subject. Anyone know a good cartoonist?
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com
One Response to “MANSFIELD: Wine Snobs”
Mike
Consider me a fan of the wine. I’m far from an aficionado, but I have sampled my fair share and visited wineries from the NY region, through Ohio, and out to Napa Valley. I’m sure where and how the grapes are grown does factor into some of the best stuff out there, but in the same vain, shouldn’t the mission of Chateau Hough do the same? Wine snobs be damned. It’s fermented grape juice. The story of it’s local origins make it taste better to me, just like vegetables I eat from my own garden, though I doubt they’d ever receive acclaim. That said, maybe it’s just a different form of snobbery b/c you could mix some vodka and Welch’s and put it in your bottle and I would say it’s good.