wine snobs
Sep. 18th, 2004 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eIt always gives me the pip when I overhear people talking about the qualities of wines.
It is a poison! Get over it! Let's be honest here. It is something which has one use only: getting intoxicated. That doesn't always mean blind drunk -- it can mean a relaxing glass with a meal, but it differs only in degree.
The aesthetic pleasure of wine is an illusion. Remember your first drink of wine? How revolting it tasted? That is how wine really tastes. If you think it tastes nice now then you have been conned by the simplest of pavlovian responses. The pleasure centers of your brain look forward to intoxication and generate a nice feeling when you drink the wine. You have associated that with the taste and mistaken the taste for the source of pleasure. So why does a Brown Brothers wine taste better than a cheap cask? The latter also has other, less pleasurable poisons, for example sulphur dioxide, added to prevent spoiling. And what about the supposed health benefits of wine? I think that was the most brilliant P.R. job of the century. I have read far more believable surveys (in my opinion) that showed the healthiest, longest lived people turned out to be Seventh Day Adventist teetotalers.
If you drink wine then for heavens sake be honest with yourself: it is to get yourself off.
It is a poison! Get over it! Let's be honest here. It is something which has one use only: getting intoxicated. That doesn't always mean blind drunk -- it can mean a relaxing glass with a meal, but it differs only in degree.
The aesthetic pleasure of wine is an illusion. Remember your first drink of wine? How revolting it tasted? That is how wine really tastes. If you think it tastes nice now then you have been conned by the simplest of pavlovian responses. The pleasure centers of your brain look forward to intoxication and generate a nice feeling when you drink the wine. You have associated that with the taste and mistaken the taste for the source of pleasure. So why does a Brown Brothers wine taste better than a cheap cask? The latter also has other, less pleasurable poisons, for example sulphur dioxide, added to prevent spoiling. And what about the supposed health benefits of wine? I think that was the most brilliant P.R. job of the century. I have read far more believable surveys (in my opinion) that showed the healthiest, longest lived people turned out to be Seventh Day Adventist teetotalers.
If you drink wine then for heavens sake be honest with yourself: it is to get yourself off.
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 09:18 pm (UTC)Letting yourself be classed downwards by the kinds of wine you like is really buying into the whole deception propagated (unwittingly) by the wine snobs themselves. They don't realise that there is actually no great advantage in the wines they tout, and that their devotion to their favorite plonk is just a result of pavlovian association of a taste with their preferred drug, added to the snob-value of thinking that the exclusivity of expense automatically equates with "better".
If you like a wine then your enjoyment is just as valid as theirs.
I gotta say I like grape juice... though apple juice is even nicer. :)
I should mention, I guess, that I'm not anti-drug, and not anti-alcohol (though I don't drink). I just don't have a lot of time for snobbery based upon "my drug of addiction is better than yours" delusions. If people like something then that is great. I hope they understand their reasons for liking an intoxicant... but it hardly matters if they don't. :)