Hello good gentles all,
The last few days have seen (in the wake of a perfectly legitimate and
courteous question from a lady wishing to learn more) rise the spectre of
wine snobbism. The possibility has been mentioned that so and so is a wine
snob - others have embraced the term with sincerety.
Of course the group is heterogenous. It contains francophils and
francophobes, cork dorks and screwcap fans. There are members from New
Zealand to Norway and beyond. Newbies come and all too often go, whether in
pain and anger, or wonder and mystfication, or, having found out that it is
preferable to get a life, they being, apparently , very useful to many
things, some of which has nothing to do with wines whatsoever.

I wanted to look into the matter. To start with, what is a snob (I know what
wine is)?
Google-san-wa anata-no tomodachi-desu as I always say - and found that the
roots that I had heard, that it was short for "sine nobilitas", i e, without
nobility (which would have meant we were ALL snobs [1]) was, in fact, false,
and that it apparently originally meant shoemaker. I am not aware of anyone
on the group having proclaimed to be a shoemaker.

A snob is, then, "a person that adopts the world-view that other people are
inherently inferior for any one of a variety of reasons including supposed
intellect, wealth, education, ancestry, etc".

Do we do that? Does anybody here consider other people "inherently inferior"
because of their taste in wines? Harsh words, dangerous grounds ... Anybody
tempted to share their thoughts?

Cheers

Nils Gustaf
[1] Except Lord St Helier of course
--
Respond to nils dot lindgren at drchips dot se