Good Grape Wine Company

December 13 2006

Where Does Elitism Come From in the Wine Industry?

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As I’m coming to understand the wine industry from the inside out I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the issue of elitism and snobbery.

In a previous post, St. Vini from the Zinquisition had a dissenting opinion on my rant against Olive Garden—isolating a post he wrote on the value of wines with a national footprint on the smaller, hand-crafted stuff.

I don’t necessarily disagree with him and this got me thinking in a different direction—about the value of an Olive Garden trying to spread education on wine and where exactly wine elitism comes from.

In my previous life, closely aligned with IBM, I came to know all to well the insidious top-down fear mongering that is the management structure at the corporate behemoth.  While I wasn’t an employee of IBM, I worked closely with IBM’ers on a daily basis for years and years.  And, while they weren’t afraid for their jobs on a daily basis, (job security is quite good, actually) one of the typical motivating factors in their world was “looking good.” Or, perhaps I should say, not “looking dull” --because I heard that a lot. “We don’t want to look dull” was the refrain even as you were being asked to have ownership of information that was coming across four different layers in a weird game of responsibility without accountability.  A majority of decision-making was based on the harmful notion of looking good for the boss, or even better, looking good for the boss’ boss.  By proxy, most good sense was sucked out of a business situation based on this risk adverse quality of work life.

This is to say I kind of figured out the third dimension of the business—the gray area in between black and white where most people exist in a world that requires that things actually get done.

So, as I become acclimated to the wine industry one of the more curious aspects of my foray has been to try and decode where this mythical notion of elitism is propagated.  It’s the bane of the industry—most everyone likes to pay more than just lip service by providing actual real value to creating an approachable product and an approachable brand that invites a sophisticated, but accessible clientele. 

But, when I was more strictly on the consumer side it was easy to read some of the glamorized accounts of the wealth and sophistication in Napa, Sonoma and elsewhere and think that some of the wealth rub-off infected the industry creating a sort of snobbery that floated down the pike to the consumer like flotsam from a swollen, flooded river bank.

As my awareness becomes sharpened, though, I’m coming to think that I might have been off-base. As I meet producers, distributors, brokers, importers and wine technology folks, almost to a person this is a warm, friendly, inviting and CASUAL industry.  Dress is casual, perhaps a touch hipper than the khaki and blue shirt uniform of Silicon Valley and more agrarian. Attitudes are bright and egos seem mostly manageable.  This is a jeans crowd, and for the better.

Surely some subtle elitism that manifests itself as snobbery exists, but by and large I think the blame for this notion exists only a rung or two up from the consumer.

I’m blaming the Sommelier or Wine Director at fine restaurants as well as the high-end wine shop.  And, I’m blaming the very small percentage of wine enthusiasts that are wealthy collectors and enthusiasts. 

These guys are the spiritual robber barons and perpetuators of the velvet rope that cordon off the wine world for many newcomers. 

I was in a conversation a week or so back where the light bulb went off.  The jist of the conversation was around selling wine to restaurants the likes of which win Wine Spectator awards and the Wine Director has a slew of alphabet letters after their name from wine certifications.  We were discussing the difficulty in getting on those wine lists and the comment I received back was:

“I like to work with guys that don’t have wine certifications.  The guys that have certifications think they invented the damn stuff.  It’s too much of a pain in the rear to sell wine that is excellent to guys that did a little studying, hang out with cooks and think their wine pairings are the end all be all.”

Interesting stuff and I agree with him, I just don’t think the chasm is going to be crossed with Olive Garden pimping White Zinfandel to folks dining on the all you can eat salad and breadsticks. 

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