First of all, let me say I’m a wine aficionado. For those of you not into wine you can translate that as, “wine snob”. Yes, I talk about things like tannins, complexity, aging, and many other esoterica. Wine aficionados (my brother Glenn and I in particular) truly enjoy discussing flavors and aromas and finish. (Just ask our wives.)
I know that a lot of people only recognize two types of wine, good wine, and bad wine. I can’t deny that is the true bottom line of wine appreciation. It’s where everyone starts, and you really don’t need to go any further to enjoy wine.
Having said that, those of us who consider ourselves to be “experts” on wine disagree greatly about one thing and that is the significance of wine glasses. Many people make a concerted effort to have the proper wine glass for the proper wine. They discuss the importance of the design of the glass for collecting the aroma and for allowing you to “swirl” the wine so that the aromatics can be released for appreciation. They talk about how the shape of the rim of the glass affects the way the wine is presented to the tongue.
For those who genuinely appreciate these subtleties, I envy you. I have never been able to tell the difference in the flavor or the aroma of wines based on the type of glass. It may be that I’m not as much of an expert as I’d like to think. That’s always a possibility. (Don’t tell anyone I admitted that. The first rule of wine snobbery is that you are never wrong.)
When we visited Italy, we found that most restaurants where locals dined served wine in glasses that can best be described as juice glasses. Only in the restaurants frequented by tourists did we find stemmed glassware. I think Italians know a thing or two about wine.
My thoughts on wine glasses are not shared by many of my friends, whose opinions I respect. I believe that good wine is good in any glass and bad wine is bad in any glass. I will make an exception here. You should never drink any wine, even bad wine, from a styrofoam cup.
If you drink good wine out of a water glass it will still taste really good. If you drink bad wine in an expensive and appropriately shaped glass it will not be good.
So, what does The Grumpy Doc say? Well, The Grumpy Doc says; “Enjoy your wine and drink it out of whatever glass you have. If it’s good, you will like it no matter what. But remember, wine is best enjoyed with friends. That, not the glass, is what really makes wine good.”
And that is my grumpy opinion.
Nine Out of Ten Doctors Recommend……
By John Turley
On May 28, 2021
In Commentary, Wine
It’s interesting to think about how the popularity of things changes overtime Sometimes they go in and out of fashion as a matter of preference. Other times it’s because we have learned that things done in the past were not beneficial or were perhaps even harmful. I’m going discuss a couple of those things and then try to wrap it all up with a guess about what may be popular in the future.
The first thing that comes to mind is cigarette smoking. There was a time during my younger days when cigarette smoking was not only acceptable, but it was almost mandatory if you were going to be sophisticated.
As illustrated by the advertisement above doctors were often employed as a vehicle to sell cigarettes. And in fact, I remember a friend telling me he was advised by his doctor to start smoking because it would “exercise his lungs”. (I really hope he misheard that.)
Movie stars all smoked. Check out Turner Classic Movies and look at any film from the 1940s or 1950s. The stars constantly had a cigarette in their hand. I can’t recall a movie with Humphrey Bogart where he wasn’t lighting up. The women were also lighting up. Lauren Bacall looked pretty sexy with a cigarette.
It wasn’t just the movie stars who made us want to smoke. President Franklin Roosevelt smoked, and he used a cigarette holder. He made it look elegant and made a lot of other people want to emulate him. Unfortunately for many who tried, very few could pull off the cigarette holder without looking foolish.
Smoking was also considered to be manly. President Eisenhower, when he was the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, famously smoked 5 packs of cigarettes a day, all unfiltered. And we could only hope to have looked as cool as James Dean did in Rebel Without a Cause when he lit a cigarette in almost every scene. We certainly can’t forget the Marlboro Man, the rugged cowboy who always had a cigarette in his hand.
When I was in high school, we couldn’t wait to start smoking. We were convinced it would make us look like grownups, and as soon as we were able, we started lighting up. For the most part our parents told us we shouldn’t smoke but since they were smokers themselves that really didn’t carry a lot of weight with us.
But it’s easy to understand why my cigarettes fell out of favor. Health warnings in the early 1960s helped to discourage people from smoking and the widely reported scientific studies linking it to cancer that occurred in the 1970s and 80s further lessened its popularity. Smoking is no longer looked upon as sophisticated or elegant. It is looked upon as deadly.
The popularity of wine is also interesting. In the early 1900s wine was considered the province of the upper classes. It was served at white tie dinners by formally attired butlers. It had an aura of aristocracy. Average people seldom had wine at home.
Prohibition almost destroyed the wine industry in the United States with only a few wineries receiving an exemption for sacramental wine. (It was good to be Catholic during prohibition.) After prohibition, the wine business initially did not recover in the United States. It wasn’t until the 1970s when a few wineries from California started challenging the Europeans that wine started gaining any popularity. We only have to remember that for years the term that was used to refer to a “Skid Row drunk” was wineo. The only people who use that term now are wine aficionados. We use it jokingly to refer to ourselves to try and offset the wine snob image.
Wine has reached an almost cult status now. It’s become not only popular but ubiquitous in any group that considers itself to be “with it”. The craft beer phenomenon is a natural follow on using many of the same terms and rituals. It has also created a new generation of beer snobs.
So, what is next? I wish I could predict. I’d start investing now. Using the principle that what was old will be new, I’m going to take a guess and say that vinyl records will make a comeback. Or is that already happening? Good thing us geezers never get rid of anything.