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Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

Great article. I share many of the tastes of the author (e.g. "Coffee was drinkable—in fact, positively delicious—only with milk and sugar" and "I couldn’t imagine why anyone would eat a radish unless paid") but I don't have an aversion to wine.

What I have an aversion to is people who want to talk endlessly about wine. Or people who pretend they'd actually bother with wine in the first place if it didn't give them a buzz. Or anyone who expects me to spend more than five bucks a bottle (ok I can go as high as ten if it's a restaurant).

Aside from the whole issue of genetic differences between people and their fungiform papillae, I think the one line that gets to the heart of why people get so obsessive about wine is "no other pursuit made him feel farther from the lower-middle-class neighborhoods of immigrant Brooklyn from which he had worked so hard to escape".

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I had an interesting "blind" taste test. I had gone to a winery, sampled some of the wines and decided to buy the one I liked the most (it was about $100). I put it in the back cupboard thinking I'll save it for something special. Then on some random night me and the girlfriend are watching TV and she decides to get some wine. I'm thinking we'll drink one of the $10 bottles. Instead I start drinking and am like this is so good, which wine is this blah blah. Then I find out it's the super expensive one. Even if there wasn't any alcohol in that, I would've still enjoyed it.

If you don't know anything about wine, the safest thing is to just go with what you like. And this means first and foremost ignoring price and prestige even if you'll be called a philistine.

One thing about wine I really enjoy is that there are so many different tastes available, and that tastes may vary by year.

If you're still exploring your preferences, I'd recommend to stay below 30€/bottle (reseller price, not restaurant) and try a lot of different ones (not necessarily on the same evening thought).

> ignoring price and prestige

It's funny to lump these together. Having lived in a couple of wine-producing countries now, I've found the wine culture is heavily centered around finding the best price for the best wine. Finding a half-way decent low-priced wine is considered just as much a skill as knowing which high-priced wines are actually worth the cost.

> If you don't know anything about wine, the safest thing is to just go with what you like.

Even if you do know about wine this is what you should be doing. Drinking expensive wine because it's expensive is the wrong thing to do. The people who I know who really know wine are always in search of good wine that is also inexpensive.

Maybe you are talking to others, not me, but I'm not "still exploring my preferences" regarding wine. I honestly don't care...there are probably 10,000 things that I would rather spend my time exploring compared to wine. I enjoy wine 99% for the buzz, and if want something that genuinely pleases me as it goes down the hatch, and I'm not trying to impress anyone with my sophisticated tastes, my first choice would have to be a combination of whole milk and Nesquik powder.

it depends on what foods you are eating. wine goes really well with certain foods eaten in a certain order. if you could care less about maximizing the experience, thats fine, but drinking and enjoying wine is not about some 'pretending to be wealthy' feeling.

I think you underestimate the role culture plays in preferences. I don't doubt you can "maximize the experience", but you can do that with lots of things, for a lot less money. I could obsess over the exact balance and handle shape of the mug I drink my morning coffee out of if I wanted, to give the maximum pleasurable feeling on my hand as I lift the cup to my lips.

I think you are underestimating the role preference plays in preferences. We get it that you like wine mostly for the buzz, but it so happens that when people like it mainly for other aspects, they are not always faking it, and neither are they always posturing. When my wife and I enjoy a glass of wine at home, no-one else knows.

I think you are misunderstanding what I am getting at. It's like music... some genres of music are pretty unlikely that an individual would like except for the culture that surrounds them and promotes them. And yet, sure, those people that do like them, after being exposed to that culture, still probably listen to that music when no one is watching. I'm not suggesting that most people are consciously trying to impress people.

For what it's worth, this doesn't seem true to me for either wine or your analogy to music. People like different things.

I'm not a fan of "obligatory xkcd" references but this one is directly relevant and hits the nail on the head: https://www.xkcd.com/915/

Awesome.

its not just about money, although more expensive things tend to actually be better.

my favorite wine comes affordably in a box. there are better box wines than others, and not all wines are appropriate for specific settings.

I can only get buzzed so often and only to a certain amount (I'm over 30), so when I choose to drink I try to get the most out of it. Since money is not a bottleneck in how often I can get buzzed, I think less about it in that context.

> wine goes really well with certain foods eaten in a certain order.

> drinking and enjoying wine is not about some 'pretending to be wealthy' feeling.

I'm pretty sure that these two statements are contradictory. Wine tastes good, and it tastes good with other things, but in no way more special than say, other fruit juices or beverages.

Do you maximize the experience of a fine meal with a flight of six different orange juices? No, nobody ever does that. And yet there is certainly as much variation in citrus juice as there is in grape.

Wine is treated differently precisely for the kind of reasons that you have to explicitly disclaim "pretending to be wealthy" as a motivation.

> Wine tastes good, and it tastes good with other things, but in no way more special than say, other fruit juices or beverages.

No, wine is a bit special here. It's somehow similar to cheese - there is a whole universe of tastes and subtastes based on many factors. You can of course ignore it completely and treat these foods like eggs (or put any other uniformly tasting kind of food here). That's perfectly fine. Or you can discover that there are so many flavors of cheese, with some of them particularly appealing to you - and just let yourself enjoy these.

Of course there are snobs who make a show out of everything, but don't let that spoil the genuine joy of tasting some good wine (or any other food that may or may not be expensive at that moment).

There are a couple hundred varieties of orange, and if you extend it to citrus more generally, there are thousands of varieties.

Compare that to the varieties of grapes - there are certainly more strains of grapes in total (5k-10k), but if you restrict yourself to only wine grapes, they are of similar complexity, and the entire grape industry is based on Vitis Vinifera and Vitis Labrusca, whereas Citrus has at least 4 original species.

And Citrus reacts just as well as Vitis Vinifera to terroir, as well - Citrus grown in volcanic soil vs limestone soil vs california loam has a distinctly different composition and flavor.

You're going to have to face it, wine is special because humans have declared it special, not because it's not similar in complexity to dozens of other agricultural, natural, and fermented products :)

Fermentation produces many things, but grown things also have great variety. Tomatoes, for example. Picked fresh, some have such intense flavor.

While the Dutch water to tomato conversion process surely made them cheap, it also means that many people never tasted a real tomato.

Apples have quite a variety too.

If you go to a really fancy restaurant and buy their tasting menu they often have an alcohol free version instead of the wine package that often is a variation of juices and musts that is selected to pair well with the food.

If you want to try it out sometime.

> but in no way more special than say, other fruit juices or beverages.

> Do you maximize the experience of a fine meal with a flight of six different orange juices

A lot of people usually prefer to not have sweetness in their meal (at least where I live). Conversely I understand that people loving sweetness and not sour or bitter taste are perplexed by wine.

> And yet there is certainly as much variation in citrus juice as there is in grape.

You are underplaying the effect of fermentation, like from milk to a strong blue cheese. But yes other fermented juices could be as interesting, for example I heard Americans were quite into hard cider ("apple wine") in the past

It is as if wine had certain qualities that made it special. Don't blind yourself to something very good known for a very, very long time just because you don't want to be associated with a certain social group.

One of the biggest epiphanies I had in high school (a million years ago) was to not let their fans keep me away from the music of Led Zeppelin.

Orange juice clearly doesn't go with food in the same way that wine does.

As someone who enjoys orange juice and thinks more than 95% of wine tastes awful, I agree but probably in the opposite direction that you intended with your statement.

I enjoy orange juice too, but it doesn't go well with food.

I'm with the grandparent on this one - I like OJ with various foods.

I'm astounded by how many comments in this thread state as absolutes things that are obviously personal preference. I have never in my life felt a meal was better because of the addition of wine, but I find orange juice to be a compliment to a meal on a regular basis.

OJ goes great with my meals.

> Do you maximize the experience of a fine meal with a flight of six different orange juices? No, nobody ever does that.

I love orange juice, but I don't want it with my steak.

Steak cooked with ponzu sauce is a amazing. Ponzu is a sauce made from citrus fruits. So yes, for some oranges and steak go together great.

Ponzu sauce is made with a bitter citrus - much more 'lemon' than 'orange'. Secondly, of course, Ponzu sauce isn't a glass of orange juice. Comparing the two is ridiculous.

...since we're trading anecdotes, I'd much prefer juice to wine with my steak.

Although I typically go with my favourite drink of all -- plain water.

You're right, with a steak I'd much prefer a strawberry milkshake.

Certainly not wine.

Not 6 different orange juices, but pure juice pairings have become popular on top restaurants (e.g. the 3-star Geranium here in CPH, and Noma while it was open), similar to wine pairings.

Those are thoughtfully developed mixes, so few if any just out of a bottle and typical pricing is half of a wine pairing (the wine pairing is normally the same as the tasting menu). I wouldn't personally swap a wine pairing for them -- if you think a full menu is too much, you can often get a half or share the wine menu between 2 people, even if the restaurant doesn't mention so. But it is an interesting alternative.

I think you're ignoring the additional complexity added by the fermentation. It's not fair to compare juice to a fermented juice. As I understand it, it is objectively more special than other fruit juices.

> Wine tastes good, and it tastes good with other things, but in no way more special than say, other fruit juices or beverages.

Well, other than the fact that, on top of its own particular taste characteristics, it's also a vehicle for a substance with is both a recreational drug and flavor enhancer, which certainly has an effect on experience when it is consumed that has nothing to do with social pretense.

But ignoring that is a pretty big oversight.

I'm with you, I'll take chocolate milk over port every day of the week

But, a desert wine with dark chocolate taste so good together :)

Alcohol and chocolate are something that I will never understand putting together.

Have you tired it? A sweet vinsanto and good chocolate compliment each other and really enhance the flavors of both.

Yes, that's why I said what I said.

The mix of the two in my stomach is not a pleasant feeling.

Why do you seem so aggressive about this? Don't drink wine if you don't like it. Nobody cares what you do. Lots of people do like wine. What difference does it make to you?

> the safest thing is to just go with what you like.

I have never tasted a wine I liked. Ever. At best some were tolerable. The sweeter the better.

Dry wines taste absolutely disgusting. Like someone collected filth and put it in a bottle to trick people (the emperor has no clothes).

I once tried adding sugar to a dry wine to see if I could taste those flavor notes the bottle said they contained. It helped a bit, but not much.

Like a color blind person not believing color really exists, I have a hard time believing people that they actually like the stuff.

Pretty much.

I've tried cheap wines and a few stupidly expensive wines and I really disliked each one. It's just not a pleasant taste to me.

Same with champagne. Even expensive champagne is unpleasant.

The concept of wine or alcohol in general going well with certain foods is alien to me too. If I am eating and drinking alcohol at the same time, that warm fuzzy feeling in the head that you get from the alcohol makes my meal much less appealing to me, like it kills my appetite.

Alcohol and food is a case of one or the other to me. Never at the same time.

This is very much my experience. To me, wine takes exactly like fermented grape juice - not in a good way.

I used to grudgingly tolerate sweet whites, but red always tasted like something I shouldn't be putting in my mouth and drinking.

Some people clearly enjoy wine, but how/why baffles me.

I enjoy wine, but I understand where you're coming from.

It turns out that neuroscience has some intriguing things to say about the general concept of 'acquired taste'. For instance, the first time people heard Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring', they rioted. This Radiolab episode [1] discusses an interesting hypothesis that might explain the events of that night, and I strongly suspect the same factors are the reason for similar reactions to many different kinds of stimuli, possibly including your experience with wine.

Anyway, it's a great episode.

[1] http://www.radiolab.org/story/91512-musical-language/

I generally agree with you. I've never been able to stand dry wine.

But there are some sweet wines that are utterly fantastic. I was at place a few weeks ago (Umbra Wines in Grapevine, TX) where I had a moscato d'asti that tasted like I was drinking liquid pixy stix. Ever since then, I keep thinking about going back so I could get a full glass instead of the mini-glass in the flight I had (it was the only wine in the flight I liked... the other two were dry, and I had to force them down, but the cost of the flight was worth it for the liquid pixy stix). Well, that and the mead they had there. The mead was also fantastically sweet.

To illustrate how much human tastes can vary: I don't like sweet drinks (coca cola makes me gag for example), and the idea of liquid pixy stix sounds like torture. (Though I'm now curious as to whether pixy stix would dissolve in water or alcohol, thus eliminating the need for the wine!)

Some of us don't like sweet things. All the best flavours are sharp or sour.

Not me. Put anything sour in the food and I won't eat it unless it's balanced with a lot of sugar. For salad I use just oil and salt - never vinegar or lemon juice, because they taste terrible.

> All the best flavours are sharp or sour.

That's an extremely subjective statement.

The thread is pretty much full of subjective statements, many posed as universal truths.

My contribution: Blueberry wine is delicious.

Do you like beer or coffee? Those two are also pretty harsh and not sweet.

The reason why I like red wine is because I can select ones that are not sweet and I really enjoy non sweet drinks with food. Water is nice and what I usually drink but it is pretty neutral and does not add to the meal the same way wine can do.

However I'm not a fan of alcohol so I have been starting to drink non-alcoholic beers (I like lagers and I think those are fine as non-alcohol) but I have not found a good non-alcoholic red wine yet. I would love to though so if anyone has any recommendations please tell.

> Do you like beer or coffee? Those two are also pretty harsh and not sweet.

As someone who also can't stand dry wines but loves sweet wines, it depends on the beer. My favorite beers are sweet thick malty beers like doppelbock, milk stouts, wee heavy, etc.

There's a semi-local brewery here called 903 that has a Milk & Honey Stout and a Chocolate Milk Stout. Drinking those is like drinking a little bit of heaven.

I do not like coffee, but I'll drink it with sugar if I need the stimulation (although normally I'll just swallow a spoonful of dried instant coffee instead to get it down quick). I'm neutral toward beer, don't really like it, but don't hate it either.

Can't you just buy caffeine pills? Must be cheaper.

I have a very similar experience with wines. I did find one kind of wine that I genuinely enjoy, though, and that's icewine. I think it's because of how much stronger it tastes like, well, grapes rather than alcohol. And also very sweet.

But because of that latter part, it's really more like a liquid dessert.

Do like the Spanish and mix half-n-half with fruit juice or soda. I suggest red wine and orange soda, but many people like to mix with Coca-Cola.

Well, there is a lot of evidence that your perception of the quality of a wine actually effects how you taste it. If you can somehow convince yourself that a $3 bottle is actually $30 bottle (or more), you'll actually like it better!

It's just not true at the very low price points. I can drink 3 buck chuck anytime but I will know it is 3 buck chuck. Why? It's much harsher and lacks any depth in flavor.

Now give me a good wine in the $15-20 range and it can be incredibly satisfying. There are also plenty of bad expensive wines. But as you dip below the $10 mark I have yet to find a wine that isn't much harsher and harder to drink.

3 buck chuck is not the same wine each time. It is whatever is surplus and they can get for a low price (and meets whatever their quality standards are), and sometimes it is the exact same wine that goes for $40 or more. They sell it off for cheap to reduce supply to maximize profits. I know a "wine snob" from Napa -- he actually was paid well to write about wine -- and he explained in detail, and mentioned that there were lots of "in the know" wine lovers who would go to Trader Joe's, buy a bottle, take it to their car and taste it to decide if they wanted to go back in and grab 20 bottles.

Interesting point, I did not know that and will have to try it (I don't live by a Trader Joe's so don't get to do this often). Thanks for the tip.

I should mention that Wikipedia contradicts this, so.... I don't know.

Any recommendations?

In terms of value: For red, Portugal can't be beat. For white, Gascogne.

Tempranillo. It's light like a Pinot Noir, but without the cachet that the Sideways movie gave, so they tend to be cheaper.

I am super pissed in a not actually pissed at all sorts of way that my local liquor stores seem to be stocking entirely 100% tempranillo. I don't know if Spain just gave into the American obsession with varietals or what but personally I love a 70-90 trempranillo but it's very much a grape that benefits from a blend.

Also, a wine rating app like vivino is a good way to explore wines while (hopefully) avoiding the ones that are utter shit. Just pick whatever's cheap and rated 3.8 or higher, and you'll usually find something decent.

>One thing about wine I really enjoy is that there are so many different tastes available, and that tastes may vary by year.

Are there? You may be missing that not everyone even notices this enormous variation in taste[1]. For my part, all wines taste like sting-y grape juice, and most beers taste like empty sting. This persists after numerous wine/beer connoisseurs have insisted that I just need to try one more of this special brand, or insisted that each wine in a particular flight has a very different taste.

For that matter, perhaps you're just imagining the flavor variation and have tuned yourself to give the socially-correct answer?

Furthermore, there may be an unrecognized disagreement in the basic ontology of "liking" something. I know people who will swear up and down that they "like alcohol", but it turns out they only like it when it's heavily diluted with other, universally enjoyable flavors (e.g. sugar). In my book, that's not what liking something looks like.

See also this reddit thread, with numerous posters agreeing that all alcohols taste gross to them:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/2juncs/d...

[1] Important reading: "What universal human experiences are you missing out on without realizing it?" Punchline: people casually assume that all humans experience X, ground major beliefs on X, and turn out to be mistaken. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex...

> Or anyone who expects me to spend more than five bucks a bottle (ok I can go as high as ten if it's a restaurant).

Apart from the fact than nobody should expect you to spend any money on anything... Just like everything else, wines differ, among others, in quality. If you spend 5 bucks on a bottle, chances are what you're drinking is really bad. It is possible to find decent wine in this range, but it's quite difficult.

Then there's Aldi's wine that won a wine award: http://www.ajc.com/news/national/wine-aldi-wins-prestigious-...

I often find people have a kind of placebo effect when it comes to expensive commodities. It's expensive so it has to be better. In the meantime, professionals buy generics: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/25/334459041/when-...

Spirit awards are a very fishy business. They tend to charge high entry fees and give out lots of participation trophies. Something that sounds prestigious like a "double silver" probably means that it didn't taste quite as bad as rancid cat pee.

Perhaps. There's also just difference tastes, some people prefer different types of wines (e.g. a blend containing more merlot, etc).

That said, I can tell for a fact price often does not matter past a certain point -- it definitely isn't a good way to determine quality. I have had great bottles that sell for $15, and (not horrible but) not special ones that sell for $50 or $100. There are plenty of good $15 wines and plenty of bad ones. Same applies to the higher priced ones as well.

Often it's hit and miss, and you need to do your research! (Which isn't necessarily a bad thing)

I have found some pretty good wine from Australia that is only about seven dollars a bottle. Merlots and Cab Sav are my favorites. I got a bottle of Merlot from Portugal for so little I thought it would have tasted terrible but in fact, it was great. Now, I am not a wine professional by any stretch of the imagination but I think you can find some great wine for ten dollars or less.

Just don't buy a bottle based on how the bottle looks.

Yeah, $5 wine is basically cooking wine. It isn't meant to be consumed as a beverage.

On the other hand, the average person is unlikely to be able to tell the difference between a $25 bottle of wine and a $2500 bottle of wine.

This is completely misguided.

When you cook with wine you lose all the alcohol, which is the only constant between two bottles of wine. You're just left with the rest from which comes the taste.

There's no such thing as "cooking wine". Bad wine is bad wine. If you wouldn't drink it, don't cook with it.

That all being said, I personally think wine snobbery is basically bullshit and I think blind taste tests tend to support that view.

Still, a wine isn't bad because it's $5. Nor is it good because it's $30.

When I lived in the UK I'd often get by with the table wine from Tesco for under 5 pounds and honestly it was fine. I found quite a few decent bottles of Portugese and Chilean wine for under 10 pounds. Beaujolais wasn't more than 3-5 pounds.

> When you cook with wine you lose all the alcohol, which is the only constant between two bottles of wine. You're just left with the rest from which comes the taste.

This is a myth. Even after 2.5 hours of simmering/baking, 5% remains. Flambeing leaves 75%, and a 15 minute simmer still leaves nearly half.

https://www.oasas.ny.gov/admed/fyi/fyi-cooking.cfm

You can almost always substitute 3/4 cup white vermouth (e.g. Martini) for 1 cup white wine. Generally tastes just as good, and you don't have to drink the remainder of the bottle.

>and you don't have to drink the remainder of the bottle.

You say that like its a bad thing.

Cooking with the wine is a great way for it to end up on the table surrounded by random glasses where "I don't want to trouble you", becomes "well, since its open anyway".

Oh, I'm not really a drinker, so I miss these things. Do you mean for getting girls drunk with plausible deniability?

Pretty sure nothing that creepy was intended. More like wine is often thought of a "special occasion" type of drink (especially in the US), and so opening a bottle is a non-standard occurrence at dinner time. If you're a guest, it may seem rude to ask somebody to open their "special" wine.

But if you are cooking with the wine, you already have the bottle open. Since an opened bottle of wine will rapidly deteriorate if you don't drink it within a fairly short time period (day or so), you may as well drink the remainder, thus put the open bottle on the table (where family/guests are gathered), and it will be consumed with relish.

Ah, thanks for the explanation. For whatever reason, the idea of finding ways to encourage dinner guests to accept food or drink is foreign to me.

Traditional stews like boeuf bourguignon or coq au vin actually cook for 3+ hours. So most of the alcohol is gone by then.

Right, this chart would support that.

Stuff like red wine sauces, whiskey glazed veggies, rum cakes, flambeed mushrooms, etc. that aren't cooked as long contain a very significant amount of alcohol.

Maybe you just live in the wrong region. Over here, you can get a decent wine for 5 EUR, if you know where to buy. That said a wine for 30 EUR from the same wine maker most likely is a lot better. One thing I've learned is to buy from good local wine makers (I admit that's not possible everywhere though :-) and to forget about wine stores, international prizes etc.

I wholeheartedly agree. If you live in Tuscany, you can buy wonderful vino sfuso from 2014/2015 at €2/liter in a small local shop. But there is no chance you could taste anything similar at the same price in the USA.

Not really, you can find plenty of decent Italian and Portuguese wines for that price. To take the first example I found, the 2014 Quinta de Cabriz is 46th in the world top 100 of the Wine Spectator and costs $5 in Portugal, and less than $7 in the US.

The last wine I drank was a Montepulciano d'Abruzzo; I can't remember the specific winemaker, but it was quite nice and was less than $9, despite being bought in another European country.

$20 per bottle is quite sufficient at the grocery. Maybe $25 for variety.

Depends a lot on the grocery and city ime.

I'm still in shock about wine prices in the US but SF in particular. ~18 months after I moved here. In Germany I could buy the same Californian wines for cheaper than here, not to speak of pretty good French, Italian, Spanish ones. It's less bad if you're outside of SF.

>>What I have an aversion to is people who want to talk endlessly about wine

Do these people actually exist or have you just heard about them on TV and over-match any time you hear some one talk about wine for more than 30 seconds?

I have certainly been to parties where we are standing around drinking wine, and my eyes glaze over as people talk about wine for a lot longer than I'd like. And they talk about going to tasting events and whatnot where they can presumably talk at even more length about it.

So sometimes, when drinking wine, people talk about wine? And that's just too much for you.

I went to a wedding celebration for friends that eloped recently. It was put on by a wealthy friend of theirs, who happened to be a bit of a wine fanatic. He had hundreds of bottles worth hundreds of dollars each, and basically said "enjoy whatever you want" to the guests.

Most of us were drinking what was already opened, or even the beer in the cooler.. but one guy... one guy, had to talk about every bottle. Go through a glorious ceremony for each. Find the perfect glasses, and people to talk to about it. It got pretty annoying, to the point the wine loving host himself was like, great to meet you, but why don't you and I get together some other time, let's focus on (couple's name) instead.

There you have two kinds of wine fans, one I like, one I couldn't stand being around. My mother is a third kind, the one obsessed with finding the highest quality to cost ratio she can. I'm not sure how I feel about her :)

To play devil's advocate: If you're going to break open the good stuff, drink it right, and proper glassware _does_ matter.

Don't be the dude who grabs a bottle of my good scotch and pours it on ice in a rocks glass. The bottle of Jameson was right next door for a reason.

I mean I guess but again you anecdote here is that one time one guy, while everyone was drinking wine, started talking about wine.

The length and detail annoys me. I tolerate it, I just don't enjoy it. It comes off as pretentious. And it just falls into the "why is this so important to you?" territory.

Thing is, even if you completely ignore wine flavor there is so much to talk about. One, wine is often grown in picturesque areas that make great travel destinations. Wine has it's own battles like oak vs. no oak which brings people to same level of arguing as vi vs. emacs debate. If you're at all a history buff, wine intersects all throughout. Then there are generally cool, geeky things about wine. For example, how the wine in Santorini is cultivated is fascinating: http://www.winesfromsantorini.com/the-vineyard.html

I don't find any of this pretentious, and more general interesting conversation.

Indeed. They should be discussing something everybody agrees is important, like the relative merits of various programming languages or vi vs Emacs.

> "why is this so important to you?" territory.

You mean, "terroir".

Again though how much length is it really and how much length is it you mentally adding because it is for some reason important to you that it shouldn't be important to them. And by 'important to them' I mean: 'discussing the activity while, and only while, they are currently doing it'

Well I don't consider parties to be all about what is being consumed. Sure, it is while they are doing it, but typically a party is a generalized social occasion, not an activity based get together like a book club.

Is there no topic that you like to discuss at length, that others don't enjoy and wonder why it is important to you?

I'd say it's not so much about how often people talk about wine, but how they approach wine in general.

For example, there's a group of wine selections that I've found to be pretty tasty (and often pretty affordable, with many in the $15-$25 range). I went into a busy wine store in an affluent neighborhood and asked the people in the wine department if they had any wines of that select, and they looked at me as if I was from the moon. They told me that's not the way wine is organized - they wanted me to give them a price point and tell them if it's red or white. That's how a lot of people approach wine: "I want to spend N dollars on a X color wine."

(I went to a smaller wine shop near a college, and they knew just who I was talking about)

People have said it's like talking about Vim vs Emacs, and it is somewhat, but it's like hearing people who have never used Vim or Emacs talk about Vim vs Emacs. Have you ever come across those conversations? Everyone is just repeating things they read and saying what they believe the common consensus is, and no one is thinking for themselves.

Sure they do. I used to work in the wine industry. It's full of people who love to talk about wine. Most of it is complete and utter bullshit, and don't get me started on reviews (Has anyone done NLP work on wine reviews? I suspect they're mostly indistinguishable from each other).

It’s perfectly normal to have an aversion to people who want to talk endlessly about anything. Wine isn’t special. I have had similar issues with Android handset aficionados.

My. God.

That's got to be one of the silliest, most insane things to actually care about.

Are you referring to headsets or to people who care too much about what other people enjoy?

On a similar note, I have an aversion to people who tell me that I'm drinking wine wrong because I prefer sweet wine.

I will gladly wolf down moscato, red moscato, moscato d'asti, kosher concord wine, gewürztraminer, port, etc., and I'm just not a fan of any wine that isn't sweet.

I had someone tell me to my face once that "the good wines aren't sweet". I honestly don't care. I like what I like, and if someone tries to tell me that I'm wrong for liking what I like, my opinion of them goes down.

I used to be the same way. If you have the stomach for it though, I urge you to pick up a $10 Malbec or carmenere. The flavor is much more distinct (and spicy).

I find they go great with even heavy, spicy meals.

> What I have an aversion to is people who want to talk endlessly about wine.

I'm trying to popularize the term "enanists" for that sort of people.

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