WINE SNOBS & HOW TO MAKE THE WORLD A HAPPIER PLACE

We’ve all met wine snobs. They are irritating. My wife and I were once invited to another couple’s house for dinner. Our young boys were good friends, so it was a great chance to get to know the parents. We offered to bring something, and the wife said to bring a bottle of wine.

Big Mistake. She seemed to have forgotten that her husband was a huge wine snob. We opened our average bottle of Pinot Noir and poured. While we were having great conversation with his wife in the living room, he was in the kitchen dumping the remaining half bottle down the sink. Moments later he re-enters. “We’ve finished yours already, I’ll open something else up”.

While wine snobs are annoying, I’ve realized that we are all snobs of something. I’ll admit that I’m a snob of a few things. Among them, I’m a car snob. I’ll ride in a Prius only if it’s what Uber sends me, but I wouldn’t own one unless every other car on earth had evaporated. I’d call myself a Porsche snob, but I currently drive a water-cooled variety, which is unacceptable to a true Porsche snob (I may as well paint a scarlet letter on the roof). Regardless, the only good cars come from Germany. This isn’t true of course, but it’s how German car snobs see the world.

Beer snobs are the newbies. You used to be able to walk into a bar and say, “I’ll take a beer.” Now you have to wade through selection after selection, all with varying hoppiness to find just the right brew suitable of your refined palette.

My point is that we are all snobs of something. I’ve met a lot of people, and no matter what their means, they all have something that they feel is superior or unacceptable. I think the world would be a much happier place to live if we all just admitted it and mutually accepted the snobbery in others.

I could better respect the woman buying organic dog food (for a dog who’d be equally happy eating a dead rat in the backyard) if I could - at that moment - remember that she is going to put that bag in the back of her Prius to drive it home. In that moment, we are equals. I have a superior automobile that she couldn’t care less about. She has superior dog food that I couldn’t care less about. We are both clinging to something we hold dear to us and both mock the other for doing the exact same thing. Mr. Hoppy IPA thinks we are both being very silly.

So I am really going to work on this: Respecting the snobbery in others as a point of endearment and a reminder of my own silly snobbery. So long as they are wearing an automatic Swiss watch. I do have limits.

Let’s make the world a happier place to live!