CBS Wine is made up of many people with divergent opinions. The following opinions belong exclusively to the author.
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I find that drinking wine in aspiration of social status is the worst reason for drinking at all. Drinking wine for nothing but escapist pleasure is better, because at least the motive is pure. Better yet is drinking wine because wine inspires, challenges and educates you.
But let’s not kid ourselves, we have all drunk wine within each of these mindsets and continue to switch back and forth depending on the situation and our disposition. Hopefully, for the most part we move between the second and third motivation.
Can Wine Offer Meaning to Life?
Everybody searches for meaning in their life. Søren Kierkegaard reminds us that we are individually responsible for finding the meaning to our individual existences – just asking what the meaning of life is does not make the grade.
We might be so lucky to stumble on grains, pebbles and boulders of meaning in our continuous search for answers. At other times, we walk head-first into pillars of non-meaning, things that at best do not fill this existential vacuum. I place status-driven wine drinking squarely in the category of non-meaning.
What Does Status Drinking Look Like?
You have come across status drinkers in your career in wine and probably know the character I am trying to isolate here. Still, for clarity’s sake, let us define the phenomenon.
The status drinker wants a specific outcome from showing you his wine collection and sharing his wine with you. The wine itself is inconsequential; it’s a delivery vessel for prestige intended to reflect back onto him. Outcomes of drinking his wine that don’t involve oohs and aahs are not desirable. These are the trademarks of status drinkers.
There is also the benevolent hope that wines we serve friends are well received, but this is vastly different. We all reinforce the bonds of friendship through positive, memorable experiences. Nothing conspicuous about that. In contrast, while the status drinker also wants his wine to be appreciated, his motivation is fully driven by ego.
So What’s Wrong with That?
Well, it’s a bit of an uphill battle for the status drinker for the following reasons.
The point that must be hammered in is that drinking wine has no intrinsic value. Glugging down wine, however prestigious the bottle, does not make you a contributor to human progress. You’re not decorating the fucking Alhambra, you’re putting a glass to you mouth. The drunkard’s Pinard Rouge, the oligarch’s Dugat-Py and the insider’s Jean-Francois Ganevat – it’s all mostly water and alcohol. And all we as consumers do is point at shelves in stores and whip out our plastic.
Yes, Dugat-Py might be the avant-garde of viticulture and objectively a healthier product than Pinard, but the drinker plays the exact same role with both wines. The wine drinker is just a strainer at day’s end, metabolizing the alcohol and pissing out the rest.
For this reason, there is no enduring benefit to wine-drinking in itself. It’s either going in or coming out. What can make wine an important activity is on the periphery of drinking; the meaning in life that wine represents to you – the ways in which it helps develop you as a person.
Drink For Yourself
I fear that status drinkers will never find peace in their hobby. What pleasure could they hope to extract from mixing good, clean fun with self-imposed social pressures. When a consumer buys the crop of legendary vineyards, hoping that his selections might reflect back onto him with a Pulp Fiction briefcase glow, he’s setting himself up for a serious disappointment.
Because, in the long run nobody cares what wines we have drunk. Nobody will speak at our funeral about last week’s Ducru-Beaucaillou vertical. So shouldn’t the choices we make about wine and what role we allow it to play in our lives be made entirely for our own wants and needs?
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