Am I a Wine Snob?

What is a wine snob and should we be trying to avoid them? Look up the Oxford dictionary under the word snob and you will find that a snob is a person who judges by social rank or wealth rather than merit and is a person who ignores what they consider to be inferior. Therefore, is a wine snob someone who favours certain wines over others, or is it someone who refuses to drink certain wines because of some pre-conceived belief about the wines quality or price. Or is it the person who thinks because they know a little it elevates them to a superior status above others.  Oh dear! That makes me a wine snob! I certainly favour wines like Aussie Shiraz and Californian Pinot Noir and I always avoid

major brands such as Gallo and Jacobs Creek and I definitely believe that knowledge is power. 

But am I a wine snob?

I don’t choose wines simply because of their price or recognition value - I like a bargain as much as anyone else. But if I am not a wine snob why will I not buy a bag-in-the-box wine or a bottle with a screw cap. After all, they are only aesthetic qualities that don’t actually affect the wine inside the bottle.

This has come as a terrible shock to me! I thought I was the antithesis of the wine snob!

I must know more about wine snobs. Who are they, where are they and more importantly what do they do?

To start with wine snobs are everywhere and come in all forms. There are those of them who can be called snobs simply because they prefer one wine to another and then there are those who are just plain boring individuals with no cause in life but to always claim the upper hand over others by telling you how they have drank the most expensive wines imaginable. There is usually always one to be found at every party the length and breadth of the country. They can usually be found in the kitchen near the drinks. This gives them the ideal position to launch an attack on unsuspecting party-goers who are there to have a good time rather than listen to Nobby No-Mates tell you that the party wine is crap whilst regaling you with stories of drinking fine wines that you have neither heard of or can afford and indeed are never bothered if you ever do. Their favourite story usually involves the one about the little Chateau that they “discovered” whilst driving through France where they had the most wonderful wine that ever existed. Of course you’ll never have heard of it-but don’t worry neither will anyone else! You can often find them in restaurants telling the same stories whilst at the same time showing off by buying the most expensive wines on the wine list which despite their grandeur have no chance whatsoever of matching the food that has already been ordered.

So what kind of wine snob am I?

Hopefully not a bad one. I certainly don’t like to show off, but yes I have drunk some wonderful and expensive wines and I have told people about them. And yes, if I go to a party and find that the wine is rubbish-I will gladly tell anyone who listens. And it gets worse; I have even stopped at a little Chateau in France and tasted a wonderful wine that no one has ever heard of. 

Despite my apparent snobbery we are fortunate in that today we are not half as snobby and select about wine as our predecessors. The death of wine snobbery in its very worst forms has only come about in the last half of the 20^{th Century.}

Since the 1950’s the United Kingdom has experienced a sustained growth in wine consumption. It is fair to say that wine has become increasingly popular to all classes due to the fact that over time the subject has been gradually de-mystified and has been made more approachable to the average consumer. But who was responsible for wine becoming more approachable? It wasn’t the wine merchant, nor the supermarket or even the high street chains-it was the wine snob!

You see, when the government of Britain lowered duty rates on light wine in 1949, in an attempt to help France recover from WWII, it merely encouraged the middle classes to return to drinking wine rather than attracting the working class towards wine, who instead continued to favour their more traditional alcoholic beverages of beer and spirits. The returning middle class market had been brought up to wrongly believe that the only wines worth drinking were those that had great reputations such as Chateauneuf du Pape , Nuits St George, Gevrey-Chambertin and Margaux. Ha Ha! This provided the perfect opportunity for many unscrupulous wine merchants to take advantage of snobbish and naïve consumers who gladly purchased bottle after bottle of cheap plonk firmly believing that the wine inside the bottle was the same as the famous name on the label. The fact that this was a fairly widespread problem with many merchants and even the Wine and Spirit Association turning a blind eye meant that for many years the problem continued without hindrance. It was only in the mid 1960’s that the practice was gradually exposed and acted upon. So, the middle and upper classes were being ripped off and were no longer prepared to tolerate such a situation and the growing working class had neither the money nor the desire to buy wine with a foreign sounding name whether it was genuine or not. 

The wine trade was now faced with a problem. If wine consumption was to grow they needed to encourage new customers. Yet the problem was, how do you attract new customers to a product with so many variations in style, names and quality and that up until this time had always been the preserve of the upper and middle classes?

The answer? The development of the “Branded Table Wine”.

The introduction of Branded Wines took a fair amount of time to occur on any large scale. The problem faced by many producers was whether to invest in developing and marketing a product to a market that didn’t yet exist. But, at the same time how was the market supposed to grow if there were no branded products that were instantly recognisable to the consumer. 

During the late 1960s a couple of advertising campaigns were undertaken by Grants of St James that included TV adverts. The results were considerable and the company reaped the benefits with over a million bottles a week being sold of the Nicolas range which at the time accounted for half of all table wine sold in the UK.  The branded wine allowed many new wine drinkers to enter the market. The fact that most branded wines were simply labelled red, dry, sweet and medium aided the consumer in their choice when at one time they would not have chosen wine for fear of pronouncing the “foreign-sounding” names wrong. 

Despite the initial success of the Nicolas range their dominance was not to last forever. The problem with branded wines is that they have a definite product life cycle like most other brands. Should you have gone to any dinner party in the UK in the late 70’s and early 80’s you would have not doubt arrived at the door with a bottle of Blue Nun or Black Tower. Do this today and you can expect ridicule and social exclusion-quite right too!!. 

Branded wines continue to do well. Jacobs Creek and Gallo are now the two top selling wine brands in the UK and sell at unprecedented levels of volume. Their success is based on their ability to capture the demand for fruity new world wines of consistent quality and recognisable branding.

So what else has helped to demystify wine here in the UK?

Supermarkets have been partly responsible. But rather than applaud them for their help I feel that we should be rather suspicious of their motives. By placing wine and lots of it on their shelves the supermarkets went a long way towards helping consumers associate wine as an everyday item. But by stocking inferior selections when compared to the average wine merchant with a large bias towards Own-Label are the supermarkets really giving the consumer true value for money? Fair enough most supermarkets have too many retail outlets to make stocking a small boutique wine a viable option as there’s simply not enough to go round. But, it shouldn’t mean that all other wines must therefore be own-label and branded. There are plenty of producers out there who are able to supply wines of superior quality and individuality at the right price-it’s just that supermarkets would rather pursue profit than offer choice. Of course there are exceptions and some like Tesco should be applauded but in general supermarkets are reacting slowly to consumer demand for products with individual quality.

One of the main problems in demystifying wine has been the glass bottle sealed with a cork. I am sure that many of us have found ourselves in the situation of having a bottle of wine but not actually having anything that remotely looks like or functions like a corkscrew. I favoured a screwdriver driven into the cork and then forced into the bottle-I still bear the scar on my left hand where the screwdriver removed my flesh!

What most people don’t know is that cork is not the perfect seal for a bottle of wine. What is good for Coca Cola is good for wine. The humble roll-on screw top is the ideal seal for the majority of wines. So why don’t we like screw tops? It’s a matter of image and goes some way to proving that maybe wine isn’t perceived as an everyday item. If wine were an everyday item then surely consumer demand for an easier to open product would have led to the cork and the glass bottle being phased out in favour of something more viable such as a tetra-pack carton?

So is wine snobbery actually dead and has wine been truly de-mystified?

In a country like the United Kingdom with little or no indigenous wine production it is always going to be a long struggle to make an imported product an everyday item. However, things are clearly heading in the right direction and the future looks red rather than white.  The attack on market share led by the new world countries and in particular the emergence of widespread labelling of the grape variety has helped an awful lot. What would make wine drinking more common would be some help from those in a position to help. The introduction of duty and excise rates in harmony with our European neighbours, which would make the average £5 bottle of wine at least, a £1 cheaper would help. And whilst were on the subject the Government should change the licensing laws to 24hr and in particular let off-Licences choose when they wish to open.

Producers should take a risk in selling wine in alternative packaging particularly the screw top and remove the need for a corkscrew. And finally, retailers should train their staff to be a bit more knowledgeable. For instance, what chance have you got in finding a member of staff in your average supermarket who can tell you the right sort of red wine to go with the cheese or meat you’ve just bought at the Deli counter – If supermarkets can have separate fish, meat and cheese counters individually staffed why can’t they do the same with their wine departments. The same applies to the high street chains who pay such poor wages to start with and spend very little else on training staff to be knowledgeable. It’s therefore left to the few retailers who believe in wine and in investing in staff training and not just margins and targets e.g. Oddbins and the independent merchant staffed by enthusiasts to spread the word.

Praise be to Bacchus!!!!

So, am I a wine snob? Well yes I suppose that if the definitions are true I am and to be honest I’m rather glad as it means I know what I like and more importantly, I know what I do not like.

Now then, where is that fabulous bottle of wine I picked up at that little Chateau whilst I was on holiday!!!!!