THE TEN MOST PRECIOUSLY NAMED WINES

Back in 1985, it was refreshing when the iconoclastic Santa Cruz winemaker Randall Grahm, of the Bonny Doon Vineyard, forsook the European tradition of naming wines after geographic appellations, instead giving one of his Rhône-style wines the irreverent name Le Cigare Volant (“the flying cigar,” or UFO)—a reference to the ordinance passed by the southern Rhône town of Châteauneuf-du-Pape forbidding UFOs from landing within the town’s limits. While Grahm gets a pass likability and the overall quality of his lineup, he still has a lot to answer for: a New World epidemic of precious and cringeworthy wine names and labels that has now spread to the Old World, where a Languedoc Chardonnay called Fat Bastard has become an international bestseller.

1. Merlot Over and Play Dead. Standard-bearer for the unfortunate “critter brand” explosion, from the aggressively cute Mutt Lynch Winery in Sonoma’s Dry Creek.

2. Chateau La Paws Côte du Boan Roan. More doggy whimsy and pan-linguistic punning, this time, tragically, from California-Zin powerhouse Rosenblum Cellars, which ought to know better.

3. Goats do Roam. Still more critter-brand egregiousness and punning, in this case from South Africa’s Fairview Winery, which has also introduced a “Goat Roti” and a “Bored Doe.”

4. Chat-en-Oeuf. The Cleveland Amory–ization of wine. Yet another critter pun, this time on behalf of a cheap Languedoc red made by a French concern that’s trying to mimic the New Worlders. Comes with literalistic label depicting—wait for it—a cat sitting on an egg.

5. Cat’s Pee on a Goosebury Bush. A funny-enough Oz Clarke description of a Sauvignon Blanc loses all cred when repurposed as the name for this plonk from New Zealand, which, after Australia, is the worst offender in the precious-label stakes.

6. The Little Penguin. Australian maker of cheap, nonvintage wines—evidently, given the adorable bird on the label, for children.

7. Woop Woop. Australian winery known for its decent Shiraz, if not its cleverness.

8. Mia’s Playground. A line of wines from California’s Don Sebastiani & Sons (Mia is Don’s now-grown daughter), which has taken precious branding to alarming extremes; they also have a screwtop line called Screw Kappa Napa and a luxury blend called Used Automobile Parts.

9. Folie à Deux. Napa Valley pioneer in precious labeling, founded in the 1980s by two psychiatrists with a fondness for swirly watercolors.

10. The Poet. High-end Cabernet blend from Napa Valley’s Cosentino Winery. Big, balanced, luscious . . . and utterly embarrassing to order.

A Brief History of Wine Snobbery 

Though references to wine abound in the Bible and in ancient classical literature (the word symposium is a corruption of a Greek term meaning “drinking party”), Wine Snobbery as we know it dates back only to the middle of the nineteenth century. It was in 1855, on the occasion of that year’s Exposition Universelle de Paris, that Napoléon III enlisted his country’s wine merchants to put together a system of ranking and categorization for its finest Bordeaux wines. The result, the Bordeaux Wine Official Classification of 1855— or, in Snob shorthand, the 1855 Classification — was at once baldly hierarchical and utterly idiosyncratic: ideal breeding conditions for Snobbery.
There were already plenty of wineshops in the Anglophone world—such as London’s Berry Bros. & Rudd, founded in 1698, and New York’s Acker, Merrall & Condit, founded in 1820—but the advent of a classification system, with its Premier Crus (first growths) and exalted châteaux, equipped wine-lovers with a common set of standards to be upheld, absorbed, dissected, and showboated. In Britain especially, it became the mark of a true oenophile to drink one’s way through all the classified Bordeaux and jot down tasting notes, Tasting notes) about one’s impressions, as much for purposes of social one-upmanship as for one’s own edification. The image of the Wine Snob as a fancy English or Anglophile toff remains powerful in the public imagination, as antiquated as it now is; only the white-haired wine sage Michael Broadbent has legitimately played such a role in contemporary Snob discourse. But not for nothing has the image persisted in America. The period of Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, was such a profound setback to winemaking in the United States that it really wasn’t until the 1970s that there was enough indigenous wine of high quality to get Snobby about. Prior to the Nixon presidency, American Wine Snobs, their ranks thin and suspiciously émigré-heavy, looked invariably to Europe.

But in the ’70s, events conspired to legitimize both American wine and American oenophilia, opening entirely new frontiers for Wine Snobbery. In the so-called Judgment of Paris, a collection of condescending French judges, presumably on loan from central casting, convened for a blind tasting of French and American wines, and, to their utter consternation, reserved their highest praise for a Chardonnay crafted by Napa Valley winemaker Mike Grgich and a Cabernet Sauvignon crafted by Napa Valley winemaker Warren Winiarski. Near the end of the decade, a thirtysomething Maryland lawyer named Robert Parker (see entry, Parker, Robert) gave flight to his latent Wine Snob urges and came out with a newsletter called the Baltimore-Washington Wine Advocate (its name later shortened) that connected with a like-minded audience of young adults who pleasured in tilting balloon glasses into their faces for extended periods of time.

Parker instituted a practice of rating wines on a 100-point scale, which, while more user-friendly and easier to comprehend than the Bordeaux classifications, essentially opened up all wines to scrutiny and discussion. Suddenly, there was much more wine out there to be knowing about, and much more knowingness to be achieved through borrowed opinion. The Wine Advocate became, and remains, a Snob juggernaut.

As is so often the case in Snob discourse, where yesterday’s indie band/film/coffeehouse becomes today’s corporate sellout, the upstart Parker soon enough morphed into the Establishment, bemoaned for his outsize influence and alleged preference for “international-style” wines whose makers have crafted their products just to please him. Yet this has hardly sounded the death knell for Wine Snobbery; rather, it has created a powerful new strain of Reverse Snobbery in which wines and winemakers are esteemed for existing off the Parker grid. As with Food Snobbery, which has taken on a locavorist, sustainable-ista, sociopolitical dimension in recent years, Wine Snobbery is now sometimes informed by a crunchy consciousness that finds its adherents proclaiming their fealty to the purity of Terroir) and Zero manipulation).

Meanwhile, Parker’s Establishment Snobbery trundles ever onward, turning small-batch favorites like Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvingnon and Mollydooker Velvet Glove Shiraz into feverishly pursued cult wines. And somewhere, heard faintly from old drawing rooms with faded wallpaper and Noël Coward playing on the Victrola, there still persist a few members of the old Brit-Snob school who insist on calling an aroma a “bouquet” and a red Bordeaux a Claret. Wine Snobbery is, like the wines it inordinately celebrates, a living thing that changes over time.

By David Kamp and David Linch in "The Wine Snob's Dictionary", Broadway Books, New York, 2008, excepts p.14-15-8-9. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.