As a Sommelier, This Is Why I Can’t Stand Wine Snobbery

Or indeed, reverse snobbery

Wine snobbery is really weird because it often doesn’t come from the people you expect.

You expect Sommeliers and other wine trade fanatics to be snobby. People like me.

Except when you speak to these people, they’re not especially snobby unless you’re at some fake fancy joint or perhaps an old-school French place.

No. Most of the time, snobbery comes from consumers. And a lot of the time, it’s the perception of snobbery that people are so afraid of. That they might be perceived as snooty by their friends if they drink anything further up the ladder than a $10 Merlot.

It’s a problem because I’ve seen it stop so many people from learning about and enjoying wine. It can suppress the market so $5-$10 wines rule the roost which is bad for literally everyone involved in making it. At the other end of the scale, it can send status-driven wine prices so high that no one except the very rich ever gets to drink them.

Wine snobbery does no one any favours and as a Sommelier-turned-wine-writer, I’m not here for it.

You shouldn’t be either.

Snobs are missing out

Don’t get me wrong, snobbery in the wine trade absolutely exists. I’ve met enough gold-button blazer 60-something men who bluster around wine trade tastings declaring they’re only interested in the Bordeaux and Burgundy.

I once overheard one of these such dudes say to his friend I suppose I’ve got to slum it with the Beaujolais now.

The wine trade should know better. They’re never going to improve at what they do if they refuse to believe that 90% of the wine world exists. There are plenty of wine regions — including Beaujolais — that are producing incredible wines that simply don’t have the same kudos as the fancy stuff. Lambrusco, Bourgogne Aligoté, and most of Portugal spring to mind.

Wine trade snobs are one thing but consumer snobs are another.

You might have met one of these — the person who knows a smattering of status-driven Bordeaux or Champagne houses and refuses to drink anything else. The person who knows a tiny bit about vintage variation and waxes lyrical about the 2005s or 2010s or whatever.

A little bit of information on wine is a dangerous thing because wine is extremely complicated. The only way you’ll learn anything is to understand that you know nothing. I’ve been in this game 10+ years and I pride myself on being very good at what I do, but I still learn every single day.

When people refuse to let go of the little pieces of information they have about wine — especially if that information comes from a snobby or status-driven place — then you have a problem.

Champagne is a really good example of this. There were times when people visited my store asking for blingy Champagne like Ace of Spades or Dom Perignon.

These wines are…fine. But I can name you 20-odd small Champagne growers that knock the socks off the top names and will cost you a third of the price. These snobby customers however refused to believe me. They wanted the name and the status. They had heard Dom Perignon was good and wouldn’t budge.

They weren’t interested in what’s most important about wine.

Quality.

Those people were missing out. Wine snobs always do.

Make no mistake — snobs are dicks

I don’t know how to stress this enough. If you meet a wine snob out in the wild, you shouldn’t be concerned with what they try to tell you about wine.

You should be concerned with the fact that they are a dick.

A dude recently told me I “can’t be very good at my job” because they asked me to blind taste what they dubbed an “easy” wine and I got it wrong. There is nothing easy about blind wine tasting and those who practice it on the regular would never make you feel bad about getting it wrong.

Yes, this guy was a snob. But he was also a dick.

Wine snobbery is judgment. It’s simultaneously looking down upon lower rungs on the ladder whilst believing yourself to be a better person because you can afford the levels above. It’s enjoying wines just because they’re expensive or status-driven, not because you actually appreciate the wine.

Now, does that not sound like dickish behaviour to you?

It’s why I’ve got no time for it, both from people in my trade and from the customers I serve. I’ve got no time for people who show off telling me they’ve been to some fancy-pants winery. I’m not interested in your I only drink first-growth Bordeaux.

Wine snobbery does not come from a good place which means you have permission to ignore it.

Wine snobs are a danger to themselves. Reverse wine snobs are a danger to other people

However much I find wine snobs irritating, they’re not my biggest problem. They can snub my Beaujolais all they like, that just means more for me at lower prices.

What bothers me is reverse snobs.

I saw them in my wine store and bar all the time. We would have customers who realised we were friendly and snob-free. Then they’d bring their mates to our bar who would spend the whole evening a) feeling very uncomfortable and b) masking that discomfort through reverse snobbery.

They would jibe their friends for knowing our bar exists, for me knowing their friend’s name. They would loudly delcare that wine over $10 is a rip-off. They would sulk and make everyone at their table feel super awkward.

In some cases it would bother the original customer so much, we’d never see them again.

This is not fully the reverse snob’s fault. They have been fed a cocktail of misinformation and wine stereotypes through film, TV, and the occasional real-life wine snob to believe that everything to do with $10+ wine is snobby.

Or indeed, they’ve met enough wine snobs IRL to believe they don’t want to be that person.

Believe me, no one wants to be that person.

Reverse snobs are such an issue for those of us in the wine trade because we see the damage they do to people who are actually interested in learning more about wine. They can cause people to feel bad about wanting to learn more about wine and that sucks.

An even bigger issue is what this does to the wine market as a whole.

The average bottle of wine in the US is $9.99. In the UK it’s $8 despite our high alcohol taxes.

Whether wine should be a commodity sold at a low price or a premium product is a whole other article. But what I will say is that bottom-of-the-market wines are terrible for everyone involved. Literally no one wins, from the people making the wine (it’s an expensive product to make so to keep it cheap you’ve gotta cut corners) to the environment (go to a big winery vineyard and see the damage it does) to you (your body should not be ingesting that stuff).

Wine snobbery keeps certain status-driven wines and wine regions out of limits for most of us and that sucks. But reverse snobbery can be just as bad. It can be just as judgemental as your dyed-in-the-wool wine snob and I’ve got literally no interest in any of it. All of it comes from a bad place.

So if you don’t want to be a wine snob or a reverse wine snob, what do you do?

You do this:

Look for quality, not for status

There is a reason the likes of Burgundy and Bordeaux are expensive regions. It’s because back in the day, they had the best quality wine.

Times have changed as has wine technology and viticulture. Nowadays there are plenty of regions churning out incredible quality wine. Which is good news because I can’t freaking afford Burgundy anymore (and am not a fan of Bordeaux).

The line between price and quality became blurred because status got all involved. I’m looking at you, big-name Champagne. I’m also looking at you, Napa Valley. But that’s not the case everywhere.

Wine snobs care may care about price and status but the wine trade (the part that counts anyway) cares about quality. And the only thing we want is for you to care about quality too.

This is one reason why most of us aren’t bothered about $5 or $10 wine. It’s not because we’re snobs but because we know how that wine is made.

Quality is why we drink Beaujolais over Burgundy. Why we drink quality Cava over Champagne. Why we drink a fantastic producer’s Cotes-du-Rhône over a mediocre Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Quality is the only thing you should care about too.

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