I Might Just Be a Wine Snob

In my twitter feed, one of the features the other day was the Wine Guy doing a bit on What Wine Snobs say.  It was beyond funny.  It made me think about how intimidated people get when they get around these wine snobs.  But then, the other week I found myself in the position of being the wine snob.  I must say I wasn’t really pleased with the picture I saw in the mirror. 

Let me explain.  The other night I met some friends for a wine tasting at a local spot called Tasting de Vine which features wines created by an Illinois winery.  Truth be told, I thought we were headed somewhere else or I might not have ventured down that path.

While there are a lot of things that I love about the Chicago area, we’re not exactly known for our fine wines.  That’s why there are great flights from Chicago to San Francisco so we can head up to Sonoma and Napa. I also have to confess that I’ve had a bottle or two of their wines in the past and to say I was unimpressed would be an understatement.

That being said, I trust my friend Nick.  He’s a fan of the Purple Pig in Chicago so he can’t have bad taste. We planned on meeting after work on Friday so I was ready to leave by about 3 in the afternoon.  The only problem is that someone had scheduled me into a conference call at 5 pm on Friday.

Now who schedules a conference call at 5 pm on a Friday? Obviously someone who doesn’t have a wine tasting to get to.  Not only was it scheduled for 5 but it ran long. And then it was clear by the time I left the office there were only amateurs on the road. You know them.  They’re the ones that are proud they’ve never even so much as been stopped let alone receiving a ticket but have caused hundreds of accidents around them.

Not only that, every single light I came to turned red just before it was my turn to go through the intersection. Remember when I mentioned that I thought that this was a different place? I parked by the place I thought we were going only to find out I was all wrong.

Not only was I an hour late, and 4 glasses behind on the tasting no matter how slow they were trying to drink, But I now wasn’t sure I knew where I was going. Thankfully there’s this technology called cell phones.  As I was guided into the tasting room like a 747 is guided to a gate, when I realized where I was headed, my heart sank a little bit.

My expectations sank a lot more.  As I sat down, I was looking forward to the evening if not the wine. I began working my way up to their current drink in a reasonable fashion and the more I tasted the more I was pleasantly surprised. I found myself really enjoying their wines.

It was while I was sitting there working my way up to the rest of the table that I realized that the recessive wine snob gene had taken over. I had pre-judged a wine based on my perception of its location and some of my previous experience. 

So what did I learn from this experience? That you can’t always judge a wine from its region. I guess the only thing I can do is to taste before I judge.  What’s been your experience?