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Comment by dmcginty | Hacker News Reader

To expand on what you're saying, there's a big difference between "I don't like X" and "X is bad". I've never been much of a wine person. It's not without trying. I've had everything from cheap boxed Franzia to a several hundred dollar bordeaux (that was totally wasted on me). I took a wine class where I was given samples and explicitly told "this is what good wine tastes like". I don't dislike wine and I don't think wine is bad, but the 10% of wine that is good doesn't appeal to me that much.

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The thing about wine is, if you don’t physiologically have tons of fungiform papillae on your tongue (ie super taster) you’ll never appreciate the nuances in wine. If you’re a non-taster wine is pretty much wasted on you for sure and you should seek out enjoying food with regard to texture rather than flavor. So it very well may be that it’s not even a matter of preference, but a matter of nature.

This is equivalent of "if you don't have enough muscle fibers of specific type in your legs - you'll never win the Olympics". While it is probably true, it doesn't mean you can't run just for fun with friends or play football with colleagues or do a ton of other physical activities.

Taste can be trained, and to surprising extent. Any person without tasting apparatus injuries may learn to evaluate wine and distinguish good $10 bottle from bad $50 one in a blind tasting.

I don't know if I'm a super taster, but I am a huge fan of other beverages, alcoholic or not. I collect Scotch, rare beers, meads, and I used to help organize a liquor tasting/sharing group. I can definitely understand wine tasting notes - I may not be able to tell a vintage by taste but I can tell different styles of reds apart. I just don't think I like wine that much, which I'd assert is a preference.

How do you know if you have it? When trying different wines all I can notice is how strong the alcohol tastes. The same thing about vodka and other stronger drinks. I can notice change of flavor in beer and food more or less fine.

I knew a super-taster. She was a foodie and a chef. Her favourite things were Oreos and vanilla ice-cream. She could tell if the milk was left out of the fridge for a minute. She could distinguish all the variance in wines but didn't specifically enjoy any of them. I think a lot of the pleasure in wine tasting is the 1-upmanship. Personally I have been recommended wines for certain meals that complemented so well it made me notice. That's good but only in context not in isolation.

Is wine snobbery real and present here?

The wine example is a tricky one because there's another metric aside from like/dislike or good/bad that wine falls into. Maybe class related status bullshit?

I enjoy wine, but I also recognize a lot of the snobbiness about it (particularly at the high end) is a mixture of snake oil and rich people looking for a place to buy more status.

I remember some interview on NPR with a wine expert. The host was asking why in all the double blind trials people aren't able to consistently rate wines or even have consistent preferences. The wine expert complained that it's the fault of doing it double blind and 'when they're present with the people' (and likely giving them obvious clues about what's supposed to be good or not) 'they can tell the difference'.

There's good/bad, like/dislike, but there's also true and fraud, high status and low status. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference, sometimes there isn't a difference.

The middle-class version of this is craft beers. Oh god, the grief I was getting from my friends once almost everyone got infected by the "I only buy expensive craft beers, and I care for taste" showmanship. To each their own, but I really do think that a particular brand of cheap, mass-market beer that I like tastes better, and it's also cheap. I have other things that I like to pay premium for.

Yeah, I think where the trouble starts is when people take preferences as a declaration of some kind of Kantian universal imperative. So someone else’s taste becomes a judgment on you as a person. This drives people bananas on the internet, where you don’t have to treat other people like, you know, people. In particular, I think this accounts for the frothing rage that video game reviews can generate.

For my part, I’m just glad I grew out of giving a shit what kind of music other people like.

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