I ain't no connoisseur

I am convinced that at least 51% of the so-called wine connoisseurs do not really drink wine at all. They may buy wine, read about wine, sample wine, pair wine with food, disapprove of other people’s choices of wine, or maybe even bath in wine, but they do not really drink the damn thing. They are people who give wine drinkers a bad name. Consider this, wine is a food product, grape juice semi-fermented some months before consumption. At the places where wine has been in production for hundreds, even thousands, of years, most people usually do not even know what kind of wine they are drinking. They sit down in a restaurant and a carafe is on the table. They go to a farmhouse with buckets, barrels or bottles and fills up on wine like gasoline. They drink it, enjoyed it and not think too much about it. They are not connoisseurs, they are just people drinking wine and know what they like. Connoisseurs ruin the whole thing. They read Hugh Johnson, and demand what he likes. They pay great sum for it, for a hand full of styles. They become didactic because they do not know or trust their own tastes. And wine becomes the same everywhere, that hand full of styles. Herein lies the irony: connoisseurs prides themselves at being above consumerism, but they are the driving force behind the worst of it.