There’s nothing worse than a wine snob

I can barely detect the difference between red, white and rosé. Poor eyesight and palate. Chablis? Claret? Don’t ask me. As far as I know it could be vinegar or raspberry cordial.

It has always seemed to me that wine snobbery is the snootiest and most expensive of snobberies.

Today, a whine about wine: of all possible subjects, it’s the one I know least about and couldn’t care less about. This ignorance is blind and wilful. It has always seemed to me that wine snobbery is the snootiest and most expensive of snobberies.

Admittedly the following tirade was quilled by a virtual teetotaller. Not because I’m Muslim or because I’m a recovering alcoholic. My column isn’t part of AA’s 12-step program. Indeed, I’m not totally teetotal; I quite like a glass of bubbly on special occasions, and am happy to be flexible on the definition of special. This whine about wine is focused on the pretentions of the connoisseur.

Despite irreligious tendencies I’d be delighted to invite Jesus Christ to one of my dinner parties (if I threw them, which I don’t), or to a last supper before my execution. JC’s ability to turn water into wine would be very handy. And he wouldn’t be a wine snob, I’m sure. He wouldn’t even be fussy about the water. No posh Pellegrino or Perrier. Just straight out of the tap, or well, as the case may be.

The New Testament neither specifies nor testifies as to what sort of wine Jesus conjured from the jug. Red or white? We don’t know. But being a good host (remember the slap-up dinner he provided the multitude from a bread roll and a tin of sardines?) I reckon it would be top-of-the-line Penfolds Grange. The same costly bottle (retailing at around $1000 a pop) that got a NSW premier booted out of office. But would JC waffle on with all that wanky stuff wine snobs do? Not Him. Just as the Catholic Church doesn’t get all artsy-fartsy about the vintage of the communion wine – how the grapes were grown on the left side of the hill, and crushed by the feet of monks, etc. Or how the resultant brew has as faint hint of persimmon.

I can barely detect the difference between red, white and rosé. Poor eyesight and palate. Chablis? Claret? Don’t ask me. As far as I know it could be vinegar or raspberry cordial.

My indifference to alcohol goes way beyond the wankery of wine, too. It also applies to whisky. Single malt? Blended? It all tastes like petrol. Which I remember from trying to siphon some when my Goggomobil ran dry. Half a century later and it’s still splutter and ugh.

How anyone becomes an alcoholic beats me. As far as I’m concerned, when it comes to whisky and water I’ll have the water. And Jesus can miraculously turn the wine back into H20.

I know this column is sacrilegious to those who regard their wine with religious solemnity. And I ask forgiveness of the wine experts associated with this masthead. By all means be a cognoscenti of claret or cabernet. But I’ll stick with the cheapest champers, indifferent to the birthplace of its bubbles – although I confess to once having a partiality to Bollinger, affectionately known in TV’s Absolutely Fabulous as Bollie. These days you could trick me with carbonated cordial.

P.S. This was written in the Upper Hunter, within drunk-driving distance of many of Australia’s most venerated vineyards – a major tourist destination! But the place displays a shameful lack of parochial pride in our three major industries. Wine, horse studs and, worst of all, coal mining.