A Hint of BS: Can it be that wine snobs are even worse than art snobs? Yes, it can.

Image Gallery image by Jason Raisch

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One night when we were teenagers, a friend and I took the bus to the Gentrified District in our town to attend gallery openings. We weren’t going for the art: Broke and underage, we were lured by rumors of free wine and lax policies on checking ID.

Score. Shuffling around chugging Franzia at a painting exhibit, we happened to hear a man describe one of the splotched atrocities on the wall as “percussive.” This meant nothing to the two of us, if it even needs to be said, except that the guy was a blowhard. But we gained courage as the evening went on and the box wine kept flowing, and we began sidling up to people at random and using percussive to describe whatever they were looking at.

“I don’t know; it’s a little percussive for my taste.”

“Red, yet percussive. It’s breathtaking.”

You can probably picture the reactions. Furrowed brows, pursed lips, and nodding heads. Deep in contemplation or fettered by politeness, no one asked us to explain this usage. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them even chided themselves for not having thought of it first.

Spend enough time around experts (or people who so fancy themselves), and you might start to talk funny. If you happen to be an expert yourself—real or imagined—you assume your listener has a given level of knowledge, and before long shorthand communication becomes not only convenient but necessary. As far as those gallery patrons could tell, we really knew our stuff, and we could have been saying something profound.

Many years later, I still enjoy wine and propagating BS. I recently took a job translating winespeak into English, with the aim of selling wine to people who don’t want to be sold, our angle being to cultivate an image of knowledge, authority, and hipness. The only snags are that I have little wine knowledge, I am not an authority on anything, and I have never been described as “hip.” Luckily for everyone involved, my employers continually forbid me to write anything that sounds too knowledgeable or authoritative or hip. No problem.

Every single time I tell people I write about wine, they make some sort of crack about all the ludicrous language I must have to use: hints of walnut skin, candied lychee, nettled gooseberries, and on and on. Everyone who has ever read anything about wine knows that something’s up. To the non­expert, wine writing seems at best uselessly esoteric; at worst, bald fabrication. A food-friendly acid frame is suffused with a pleasant barnyardiness.

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