Dear Jonathan,
I have been thinking about one of our greatest joys. No, not our toddlers. Our wine.
In particular, I have been thinking about its poor reputation. In the popular imagination wine drinkers are pretentious, elitist if not aristocratic, and therefore probably un-American. Every campaign season, the political media compares “wine track” candidates and voters with “beer track” candidates and voters, with the unspoken assumption that no candidate would ever want to be the wine candidate, or even court wine-track voters—because nobody likes them. Because they (we) are snobs.
How we might vindicate our tribe of oenophiles? Last Saturday night, after exsanguinating a bottle of Sagrantino di Montefalco, I had an idea. Naturally I sat down to write to you immediately but, just as naturally, I was unable to. Now though, in the clearer light of day, I shall.
We must draw a distinction between snobs and enthusiasts.
Snobs and enthusiasts are easy to mistake for one another. They both profess to love their subject, be it wine, Italian footwear, or country music. They want to know everything about it. They read books and take classes and go on pilgrimages to far-flung places like Avignon for the finest Rhone varietal blends. And once they have started talking about their great love of whatever, they will not shut up about it. Of course, they have strong and settled opinions about every minute facet of their obsession, which they can’t believe everyone else doesn’t hold.
Yet they are not the same. Imagine for a moment yourself in a different life, one in which you know next to nothing about wine but find yourself discussing it at a party with someone who does. “You know what I had the other day that I really liked?” you say. “Yellowtail.”
The enthusiast and snob have very different thoughts at this point:
The enthusiast thinks, “you would love better wine.”
The snob thinks, “better wine would be wasted on you.”
The difference is important, Jonathan, and has implications far beyond wine, implications for our politics and moral anthropologies.
1. Of Snobs
A snob is someone who turns a difference in knowledge, opinion, or manners into a summary moral judgement. When you disagree with a snob, or don’t know what he does, the snob thinks less of you. This is because snobbery is about social rank. Snobs act offended by lowbrow opinions and tastes, but in truth they are pleased to hear you have them, because to the snob appreciating something rare or knowing something obscure is a chance to raise himself above the rabble. He does not really enjoy the wine or country music for their own sakes. They are first and last a chance for invidious distinction.
One might think that snobbery is a constant feature of human nature. In some sense it probably is, but the word itself was coined in the late 18th century, when English schools labeled students without noble titles as “s.nob.,” sine nobilitate. Snobs were those who aspired to higher rank but had no rights to it. It wasn’t long until the “s.nobs” themselves were accusing others of social-climbing snobbery. One can imagine the poor little public school boys desperately affecting the manners of their superiors, and looking down on those who couldn’t. The term quickly caught on, especially after William Thackeray wrote a regular column for Punch titled “The Snobs of England, by one of Themselves.”
It was a term whose time had come. Indeed, it seems that snobbery fits some periods of history better than others. Take a look at this little chart, from Google Ngram, which tallies a word’s printed appearances over time. Instances of “snob” take off after 1840 (Thackeray wrote his satires in 1846), and its use peaks around 1870, remaining roughly the same for the next hundred years. Then something curious happens. It skyrockets again starting in the 1990s.
Why might this be? What strikes me about the periods of 1840 to 1870 and 1990 to 2020 is that both are periods on the latter end of larger economic transformations. England was industrializing rapidly during the early decades of the 19th century, resulting in both social upheaval and massive inequality. The old merchant class of cobblers and pin-makers were becoming factory owners, suddenly able to put their sons in school with the children of Dukes and Earls. A similar economic disruption happened in the United States after 1980. As the financial and digital economy overtook the old industrial economy, new fortunes were minted overnight, and wealth inequality soared. Like a good Marxist, I am suggesting that material conditions changed, and then culture followed along after a decade or two. First, the economic base of society shifted, upending a settled social order. Then, in an effort to secure their new places in society, or reaffirm their old ones, people started acting snobbish, and calling each other snobs too.
It makes sense to me that snobbery should appear during periods of economic inequality and upheaval. Despite the seeming surety of his judgements, the snob is terribly anxious, aspiring up the social ladder but afraid of tumbling off of it; snobbery about wine or shoes is a way of furiously signaling membership in the higher-status group, of clinging to that next rung for dear life while kicking down at everyone below. But charges of snobbery reflect class anxiety too. Calling someone a snob is a way of saying they’re pretending to be better than you, putting on airs, but they probably have no rights to their titles at all. Accusing someone else of being a snob is a good move in the status game. It marks you as above the fray, even as it pulls a rival down.
Reverse snobbery works much like snobbery itself. Some people proudly say they’d never buy a bottle of wine for more than $10, because it all tastes the same, or they only drink the cheapest beer, or they love Luke Bryan and can’t see why everyone’s so crazy about Willie Nelson. No less than the snob, the reverse snob is obsessed by status and distinction, although in a familiar kind of transvaluation of cultural values, they accrue status precisely by pretending not to.
Snobbery is a nuisance, Jonathan, but it is even worse than that. It is politically corrosive. As I said, snobs’ judgements about wine or music are really character judgements. By looking down their noses at supposed friends and foes alike, snobs of every kind set up and maintain hierarchies, not only of taste and judgement but of personal worth. This is noxious, or it ought to be noxious, to a democratic spirit. At its best, the United States is supposed to embody such a spirit, which is to say a sense that every citizen deserves to have an equal say in public affairs, which in turn rests on the philosophical premise of equal human value.
Not that democratic equality has ever been realized in this country, of course. Or even consistently pursued. But it runs like a faintly visible golden thread through our founding documents, philosophy, and poetry. Snobbery is incompatible with it.
2. Of Enthusiasts
Enthusiasts differ from snobs not so much in the strength of their obsessions as in their estimation of their interlocutors.
The snob and enthusiast will both be incensed to hear that you like oaky Napa chardonnay, but only the enthusiast will insist that you try Chablis, his Chablis, the one that he has downstairs, and you should try it now. Isn’t it better? Do you notice that mineral undertone? It’s like wet pebbles or, as the French say, goût de pierre à fusil, gun metal. A far cry from those fat oaky beasts they breed outside of San Francisco! Right? Right?
I should admit that enthusiasts, like snobs, are often pedants and bores. Not everybody wants to be Shanghaied into an impromptu tasting.
But though they may be annoying, I insist that they are not, like snobs, closeted aristocrats. On the contrary, there is something generous and, yes, democratic about this kind of enthusiasm. It assumes that everyone deserves the very best of something. The wine enthusiast insists you try the Chablis, the country music maven wants you to listen to Lefty Frizzell, and the Swedish death metal aficionado wants you to listen to something I can’t even imagine. The assumption that everyone deserves the best wine in turn rests on the idea that everyone is equally deserving on a more fundamental level, and that human beings in general deserve good things. Pollyannaish? Maybe so. But it is the farthest thing from snobbery in the world.
Regrettably, instances of the word enthusiast have fallen precipitously since the 1800s, though enthusiasm hasn’t fallen off quite as badly. Part of this may have to do with the bad connotations of “religious enthusiasm.” It was the great bugbear of enlightened skeptics like David Hume, who said that the source of religious enthusiasm was “hope, pride, presumption, a warm imagination, together with ignorance.”
The enthusiast does have a tendency to get carried away and go on and on as if possessed by divine madness. What irritated Hume most, I think, is that enthusiasts, precisely due to the strength of their passions, were immune to rational argument. Sure enough, not everybody agrees on what wines are best, and it is notoriously difficult to argue about taste.
Difficult, but I contend, not fruitless. In fact, I think we can learn much from giving and asking for reasons about our love of wine. Namely, we learn about our criteria for judgement. There are dozens if not hundreds of reasons to like or dislike any particular wine, and when we argue about it we can become more aware, more explicit, about which of those reasons are dearest to us and dearest to our interlocutors. Do we like drier wine or sweeter? Red fruit or black? Acidic or smooth? Do we like to sip wine or drink it with food? And why?
If others know something we don’t about a particular grape or region, then arguments about taste in wine (or about poetry or painting) may teach us new facts, but they are ultimately opportunities to pursue self-knowledge and, what is at least as important, intimate knowledge of another. As our criteria become clearer to us, we may find mutual areas of agreement and attunement, or even change our minds when we realize we were a bit hard on the Napa chardonnay.
In my experience, at least, enthusiastic arguments about wine lead not to contempt but to mutual respect and friendship. This is even the case if we ultimately disagree. There are real differences in taste, sometimes incommensurable differences, where you or I just cannot see how the other could like or dislike that, but even in these cases at least we will have arrived at a point of real disagreement, as opposed to the snob’s flimsy snap judgement. I have left arguments over wine feeling more tolerant of, and even humbled by, the breadth of human variety.
All of which is to say that while snobbery is politically corrosive, enthusiasm can be a tonic. Mutual toleration, respect, and friendship, I hope you’ll agree, are good emotional pillars for a democracy to rest on. So, I encourage you to remain enthusiastic about wine or whatever you like, and none too shy about sharing it! (Preferably with me.)
I don’t manage democratic enthusiasm all the time, of course. Too often, I am indeed a snob. Once I met a friend of a friend who also liked country music. I asked him what he was listening to these days, and he said that he was going to a big festival and couldn’t wait to hear Luke Bryan. I couldn’t wait for the conversation to be over. Nor am I immune to the pleasures of reverse snobbery. I am inordinately proud of disliking the novels of Don DeLillo. Going by demographic likelihood (age, sex, education, race, religion), I should adore them, so disliking them lets me feel superior to my peers without any of the effort that would go into truly distinguishing myself.
And as for wine, more than once I have shared a fine bottle with friends or family and looked suspiciously around the dinner table, wondering if I should have saved it all for myself, wondering if they were enjoying it enough.
So perhaps our fellow Americans are right to regard us wine-lovers with suspicion. Insofar as we are snobs, we are bad citizens. But they may change their minds about us, Jonathan, if only we could get them to try the Chablis.
Yours,
Paul