David Kamp - The Wine Snobs Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Oenological Knowledge

THE WINE SNOBS
DICTIONARY

Contents

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Aime Bell, Josie Peltz, Graydon Carter, James F. Bell III, Dana Brown, Rob Allen, Melissa Davis, Andrus and Andrew Gates, Peter Richmond, Steve Rubin, Charles Conrad, Jenna Thompson, Suzanne Gluck, Georgia Cool, Sarah Ceglarski, and the late Art Cooper. And the good earth and its indisputable sense of terroir. And the bibulous but unbelligerent people with expense accounts.

An Introductory Note by the Authors
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Wine Snob. Isnt that a redundancy, like saying wet rain or nuisance telemarketer?

Well, yestheres no getting around it. Central to the very premise of wine appreciation is the notion that it requires an advanced skill set; that, in order to most fully understand and enjoy the experience of sniffing and sipping fermented grape juice, one must have a cache of special knowledge to which mere ordinary people do not have access.

Wine Snobbery is, therefore, the default state of the wine enthusiast. In this regard, it is unique among Cultural Snobberies. In other realms, such as music, film, and food, the Snobs are the hard cases, the ones who have taken their passions to irrational extremesdevoting their lives to, say, the post-Monkees work of Michael Nesmith, or frame-by-frame dissections of Peter Jacksons early splatter pics, or the pursuit of the perfect round of Portuguese semisoft sheeps-milk cheese made with thistle rennet. We recognize such figures as grotesques, at best euphemizing them as intense, at worst calling them out as scary nutjobs.

The Wine Snob, on the other hand, can sit judgmentally as a bottle is presented to him, watch intently as its contents are decanted and poured, swirl the liquid centrifugally in his glass, hold the glass up to the light, lower it under his nose, close his eyes, take a sip, pause in contemplation, open his eyes, and declare what he has just drunk to be Complex, cola and pencil-lead on the nose, with leather, dust, barnyard, and raspberry on the mid-palate, and a medium-long, tannic finishand not only will this man not be led away in restraints to the sanitorium, he will find himself actually being admired for his taste and acumen.

Far from existing on the freaky margins of society, like the ever-resentful Rock Snob or the madly dogmatic Food Snob, the Wine Snob commands center stage in his chosen area of cultural fanaticism. So why, then, should a book such as this one exist? Arent there already plenty of wine references out there that are de facto guides to Wine Snobbery? In a world where library shelves groan with multiple titles by the likes of Jancis Robinson, Oz Clarke, Hugh Johnson, and Andrea Robinson, is a Wine Snobs Dictionary really necessary?

Why This Book Is Really Necessary

As much as the Wine Snob is widely and correctly perceived to be the archetypal wine connoisseur, his profile and tendenciesprecisely who he isare only dimly understood. There persists an outmoded notion that the Wine Snob is necessarily wealthy, wellborn, and Francophilic, when, in fact, Wine Snobbery has many faces, some of them surprisingly homely. Indeed, one of the reasons the 2004 film Sideways proved so jarring was that it revealed a breed of Wine Snob that, while eminently recognizable to other Snobs, was unfamiliar to the public: a drab schlub who knows his stuff and commands the respect of winemakers and pourers, but who is also professionally unsuccessful and abjectly unglamorous. (Indeed, the films surprise-hit status sent Snobs into defense mode, railing against purported slights and inaccuracies: Cmon, the Central Coast isnt even representative of the rest of California! Hes totally wrong about Merlotit only happens to underpin some of the greatest Bordeaux of all time! Well, let me tell you that Ive never stolen money from my mother!)

There are Wine Snobs all around us, and they range widely in age, income bracket, and hair length. Theres the standard-issue hedonist-aesthete, for whom Wine Snobbery is another trait in the portfolio, along with the vintage-car fetish and the permanent tan. Theres the hippie-ish evangelist who wears muddied boots and baggy shorts, and likes to remind you that viticulture is a kind of farming, man, and that the juice youre diggin tells a magical story about the special chunk of earth from which its grapes came. Theres the NFL offensive lineman whos spent his signing bonus on an insta-cellar and learned about wine from the top down, evolving from label whore (Ptrus! Awesome! ) into shrewd collector (An Araujo vertical! Awesome!).

Put simply, you never know when or where youre going to encounter a Wine Snob. And then, before you know it, youre weathering a storm of terms like malo, extracted, and Cab Franc leafiness that leaves you feeling bewildered, humiliated, and inclined to drink nothing but beer (which will expose you to Microbrew Snobs, who speak a still-more-incomprehensible language of porters, doppelbocks, and dunkel weiss, but never mind).

The Wine Snobs Dictionary equips its reader with the tools and survival skills to endure a Wine Snob encounter, and possibly even disarm the Snob with a casual reference that he doesnt see comingto, say, the 78 La Tche I was fortunate enough to share with Aubert, or the damnable, spoofalated swill that the McMansioners drink. The book further serves as a helpful cheat sheet for those who simply wish to understand advanced-placement wine chat without actually getting caught up in tastings and spit buckets, and as a legitimate study guide for trainee Snobs who aspire to be wine professionals. Would-be sommeliers are warned, however, that even a book such as this is no substitute for experience, runty stature, a persecution complex, and a tightly cinched dark suit offset by an assaultively loud necktie.

A Brief History of Wine Snobbery

Though references to wine abound in the Bible and in ancient classical literature (the word symposium is a corruption of a Greek term meaning drinking party), Wine Snobbery as we know it dates back only to the middle of the nineteenth century. It was in 1855, on the occasion of that years Exposition Universelle de Paris, that Napolon III enlisted his countrys wine merchants to put together a system of ranking and categorization for its finest Bordeaux wines. The result, the Bordeaux Wine Official Classification of 1855or, in Snob shorthand, the 1855 CLASSIFICATION (see entry, )was at once baldly hierarchical and utterly idiosyncratic: ideal breeding conditions for Snobbery.

There were already plenty of wineshops in the Anglophone worldsuch as Londons Berry Bros. & Rudd, founded in 1698, and New Yorks Acker, Merrall & Condit, founded in 1820but the advent of a classification system, with its Premier Crus (first growths) and exalted chteaux, equipped wine-lovers with a common set of standards to be upheld, absorbed, dissected, and showboated. In Britain especially, it became the mark of a true oenophile to drink ones way through all the classified Bordeaux and jot down TASTING NOTES (see entry, ) about ones impressions, as much for purposes of social one-upmanship as for ones own edification.