Wine Humor

Wine takes itself very seriously — perhaps too seriously. The lexicon of professional tasting notes has always offered rich comedy potential: wines described as "showing barnyard notes with a pencil-shaving mid-palate and a finish of dried violets and distant thunderstorm." Critics who claim to detect specific minerals in wine have given rise to entire academic subfields dedicated to debunking them. The spectacle of the grand vertical tasting, where identical glasses of dark liquid are lined up with ceremonious gravity and then pronounced "showing beautifully" or "still holding back," is — viewed from outside — rather magnificent in its absurdity.

The myths of wine culture are themselves a source of endless delight. The insistence that red wine must be served at "room temperature" — a rule originated in unheated medieval castles — still leads well-meaning hosts to present Bordeaux at 24 degrees in summer. The belief that a screw cap signals inferior wine remains stubbornly persistent despite New Zealand's production of some of the world's most awarded wines under exactly that closure.

The famous double-blind tasting at the Paris Judgment of 1976, where California wines defeated their French counterparts and reduced the assembled French critics to speechless disbelief, remains the funniest and most instructive story in modern wine history.

The best wine lovers, invariably, are those who find room for humor alongside reverence. They know that the label means less than the pleasure of the glass, that price correlates imperfectly with enjoyment, and that the most technically perfect wine can still, occasionally, fail to delight. Life is too short for wine snobbery. Open something generous, share it with good company, and laugh at the rest.