I spend about an hour most mornings reading. It could be the news, some left-wing opinion columns or just a few blogs. If you didn’t know better, you would call me a slug-a-bed because I have nothing to show as a result of this “wasted” time.

However, I find this habit deeply inspiring. Not always for the right reasons: there are some moments (like this) when I find the subject matter so infuriating and the words form so quickly that sparks fly off the keyboard.

On other occasions, I agree so wholeheartedly with the content that a simple retweet wouldn’t do it justice. It just so happens that this morning was one of those moments. It was this wonderful feeling of clarity when you just go “Yes. This. Word.”

It’s a piece in Punch by Jon Bonné called “Why It’s Time to Stop Fetishizing Wine Expertise” and carries the sub-line: “Our current fascination with wine expertise—and, often, the wine experts themselves—has actually made it harder to enjoy wine.”

As an aside, for a glimpse into “The Parker Effect”, I highly recommend this 10 minute podcast with Jancis Robinson on the BBC. Having only started in the wine industry in 2010, to hear about the moment that the most influential US wine expert Robert Parker locked horns with UK goddess Jancis in 2004 was very interesting to me. 

Anyway, back to Bonné’s article, I’m going to take a few excerpts with which I couldn’t agree more passionately.

“But the old ways of wine are fading into the distance. A new generation of drinkers has arrived, one with little interest in the fear and pomposity of the past. The blossoming sphere of natural wine has complicated old discussions about quality. And both wine journalism and wine discourse have been transformed—although not entirely for the better. We’ve thankfully lost a fair amount of imperiousness and talking-down. But we’ve also unearthed a lot of faux-egalitarian BS and first-person preening.”

Truth!

Next up – how being a so-called “wine expert” actually means creating an elitist language which only fellow wine experts can understand. (I’d actually just written something similar last month – here.)

“The more I thought about it, the more I had to acknowledge that our current fascination with expertise has actually made it harder to enjoy wine. Wine needs experts, of course, like any other pursuit. But rather than democratize wine, we’ve traded out reductivism for an infatuation with the mechanics and mystique of expertise.

We’re dazzled by tales of blind-tasting La Tâche and sabering Champagne, because they’re good clickbait and they sex up what otherwise could be a dowdy topic. But they’re parlor games, as is the obsessive memorization that some experts swear by. It all merely enhances a myth of expertise—namely that to understand wine, you must engage in a furtive, Masonic quest for truth.”

We move onto Bonné’s conclusions. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t printed them out and pinned them to the wall behind my computer in order to remind myself of these home truths every day.

“You discover that wine isn’t a thing to be fetishized. Its cultural value comes from the traditions surrounding its long history, and the improvements upon those traditions. Its prices have more to do with rarity, and ego, than innate quality.”

And finally…

“Frankly, we can embrace this complex world and still appreciate experts, without putting them on pedestals. For those of us who are experts, we might all be well-served to work on injecting a bit more humility into our work. Talking to everyone, not just our peers, like they’re grownups. A bit less Insta-bragging. A bit more acknowledging our relatively boring lives, and the many ho-hum wines that occupy them. This can only help to humanize wine, and that in turn will help to build a strong, diverse wine culture for the future.”

True dat.

Read the whole article on Punch by following this link.