Hip Tastes Blog

Why Men Fetishize Wine
filed under: Goods & Gadgetry

I've never picked up a wine book I wanted to quote more than Lawrence Osborne's deliciously entertaining tome, The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World. In it, the Brit - who right up front gamely cops to a serious distrust of his own sense of taste - sets out to visit several of the world's foremost wine regions in search of answers to his own burning question - what exactly is taste? - as well as more (less?) controversial issues like "why do men fetishize wine, and woman don't?"

As you might imagine, this book delighted me. For those of you wondering what's behind the fetish question, it came up not so much as a question posed by the author but instead as a fantastically quotable tidbit offered up during one of the author's interviews, in this case with one Ralph Ewing, Opus One's PR guy. In response to Osborne's inquiry "who drinks wine?" Ewing said the following:

"In the $100-plus category, Parker rules. It's your white middle-aged male Ritz-Carlton crowd. Between $40 and $60, it's the Wine Spectator. But, you see, women actually buy 65 percent of all wine (woop!), and women are much stingier about how much they'll pay. Women will pay between $15 and $20, rarely more. Women don't fetishize wine. It's true across the world. Women motivate the consumption of wine - the romantic dinner - but not the collecting of it." (Woop mine.)

There are many more fabulous tidbits like this in the book, which does a great job exploring the psychological and cultural context of wine, without getting mired in all of the techo babble so many wine books fall into. Instead, Osborne focuses on the people who make wine (and market it, I might add) as well as those who drink it, and doesn't spare any barbs when his subjects unravel into self aggrandizing wine jargon (there's a hilARious bit about a French guy who describes a Rocchioli PInot as having "a spherical, sexy mouth"). As the New York Times put it, the book is a must-read for those "who find hyperventilated discussions of microscopic differences between hundreds of essentially identical wines to be little more than scholastic quibbling."

Hallelujah.

Posted by Courtney on July 10, 2008 09:24 AM