Build a Bigger Table, Not a Dumber Wine List

On the matter of "elitism" in wine

This piece started after I read Jim Silver’s Wine Isn’t Suffering from Elitism. His argument is basically that wine didn’t lose people by being too fancy — it lost them by making itself ordinary. Strip away the codes, the history, the mystique, and you’re left with just another drink on the shelf next to hard seltzer. I don’t line up with him on everything, but he’s right that the “elitism” debate is looking in the wrong place. This is my attempt to reframe it.

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The conversation about elitism in wine usually starts in the wrong place. It assumes wine’s great sin is keeping people out, when the truth is that wine has always been an insider’s game — not because it’s exclusionary by nature, but because it’s been bound up with power for as long as it has existed. You can’t make wine less elitist without rewriting history, and you can’t rewrite history without erasing the very things that make wine interesting.

From its earliest chapters, wine has been made and consumed in the orbit of influence. The Russian Czars gave Champagne its royal sparkle. In France, the Papacy and the state codified entire regions into canon. Even the supposedly rustic wines of Tuscany were shaped by aristocratic landowners who set the tone for taste. This proximity to power is why wine has always been treated as a symbolic vessel for high culture. The aura remains even if you’re drinking a $4 bottle from Trader Joe’s — its lineage is inextricable from the historical centers of power.

There’s no shame in wanting to open that aura up to more people. I’ve built a career trying to do exactly that. But I tend to avoid the conversation about “pretentiousness” or “elitism” in wine because it often starts from its own set of assumptions — ones that can make the whole subject harder to untangle. The charge of pretentiousness usually says more about the speaker’s bias toward certain styles of communication than it does about anything having to do with wine.

I studied art history, and I think about wine the way I think about painting: the experience is subjective, but trained attention changes your ability to apprehend what is in front of you. Think about Picasso — wildly diverse oeuvre, many eras, each responding to what was happening around him. You can love one blue-period canvas without context; you might also find his work a bit obnoxious, knowing what you know about him as a person. But the people who know the most about painting tend to converge on his greatness across modes. That’s the paradox: a fundamentally subjective experience that still tends to produce stable agreements among people with greatest depth of experience. In wine, as in art, those convergences aren’t proof of elitism or of groupthink, necessarily — they’re the patterns you start to see after years of paying close attention.

Which is why accessibility isn’t about flattening everything to the lowest common denominator. It’s about putting the tools in reach for anyone who wants them. Give people a way to navigate a list, a basic sense of place, and an idea of what quality means. Make wine legible. Don’t pretend it’s just another canned beverage at the supermarket.

Where things go wrong is when “accessible” becomes “stripped of all its edges.” Think about Jordan Salcito’s Ramona — lifestyle-first canned spritz with zero discernible winemaking personality — or Richard Betts, who lends his Master Sommelier pedigree to upstart projects like My Essential Rosé or Sombra Mezcal, scales them up for mass production, then exits, presumably for a handsome payout. These are products designed to be consumed without context, as though complexity is a problem to be solved, rather than the whole point.

People who know wine tend to be annoying. This is a universal truth, and I won’t argue otherwise. But that’s a communication problem, not a wine problem. In my experience, most bad wine communication falls into one of three categories:

1. The Sideways Reflex

Some guests recoil at the idea of tasting notes before I’ve even said a word. Call it the Sideways effect: the “I am not that guy” defense. The swirl-and-sniff has become shorthand for snobbery, so they make sure to parody it before I can — the exaggerated nose dip, the over-earnest nod, the “ahhh” as if they’re channeling Paul Giamatti. It’s meant to signal I’m in on the joke, but it’s also a projection: they assume I see myself as the pretentious aesthete, so they get there first. What gets lost is any real engagement with what’s in the glass — we’re just performing competing stereotypes at each other.

2. The Tech-Spec Dump

Then there’s the opposite problem: pure data with no translation. This is the wine rep special — vineyard age, fermentation vessel, élevage details, soil composition, and, inexplicably, “female winemaker.” That last one is always a bonus; the weirdly clinical attempt to awaken a feminist conscience in the buyer, but it lands like a Nat Geo voice-over: “In this species, the female makes the wine…” All of it may be technically accurate, but without a bridge to how those details translate in the glass — texture, structure, flavor, feeling — it’s just noise.

3. The Narrative-Without-Wine Move

Finally, there’s the natural wine party trick: skip the wine entirely and tell a whimsical, possibly apocryphal story about the winemaker. Their dog in the vineyard. Their stint as a stonemason in Marseille. Their former career as an elementary school teacher. I do this myself — I sell Martin Texier’s wines by telling people he worked at Uva Wines in Williamsburg in the aughts and was a cool-guy DJ by night. What am I doing when I tell that story? Passing along the same coded shorthand I’m critiquing. Sometimes it’s a hook. Sometimes it’s filler. Sometimes it’s me amusing myself. But it’s still an arbitrary performance — just another way of transmitting a vibe without saying anything about the wine.

When any of these fall flat, the problem isn’t the approach itself. It’s the failure to read the room. A good somm isn’t there to impress you with their encyclopedic knowledge; they’re there to meet a guest where they are and pull them one step deeper. That can happen in all kinds of ways — our job is to figure out which one will resonate.

It’s not as if wine education is scarce or necessarily expensive (though wine itself sometimes is). There are shelves of generously written books, beginner courses that teach you what to look for, endless chances to taste with people who know more. The basics are out there. But wine still takes work — geography, history, language, farming, sensory attention. Competence comes from time and repetition. If you don’t care about wine, then don’t care about wine! But if you do want to learn wine, come at it with some humility and do not ask for a hopelessly dumbed-down version — ask for a clear one.

It seems like the prevailing model of understanding plots wine on the axes of knowledge and power. Knowledge is the skill set; power is what that skill set lets you do — sell expensive bottles, impress a date, win a blind tasting, win an argument. The assumption is that knowing is stable and directly leads to some kind of power to be leveraged.

But what if we thought of it along the axes of direct experience and performativity.

• Direct experience is the grounded and embodied act of tasting — noticing what’s in the glass, where it comes from, how it moves through your senses.

• Performativity is what happens when you take that private sensory moment public: the words you choose, the gestures you make, the references you reach for. I don’t mean this as a stand-in for dishonesty — but rather, as an acknowledgement that we are all always performing something.

Direct experience is a practice. If you’ve meditated, you know what it is to sit and watch your own mind. If you’ve taken psychedelics, you know what it is to be hyper-attuned to sensory input — to catch things you’d otherwise miss. Tasting wine isn’t those things, but it draws on the same skill set: precise, nonjudgmental attention as sensation unfolds. Like meditation, it improves with repetition. Like psychedelics, it can open unexpected doorways — to memory, to place, to sudden experience of beauty. No amount of branding or sales copy can give you that. You have to train yourself to show up, and let the wine lead you somewhere.

Thinking in these terms also opens up the field. You can build wine knowledge along any number of vectors: agriculture and soil science; the biochemistry of fermentation; Burgundy via land-tenure history; the epidemiology of phylloxera; natural wine as a lens on labor, stewardship, and class. All valid. But framing growth in terms of direct experience and performativity destabilizes the old knowledge/power hierarchy and forces context-aware communication — which, as I have argued elsewhere, is the most essential skill a sommelier can have.

If we approached wine this way — valuing both the intimacy of cultivated attention and the expressive possibilities of performance — we might finally move the conversation past “elitism” altogether. The point wouldn’t be to dismantle wine’s complexity or history, but to multiply the ways it can be shared. That’s not lowering the bar — it’s building a bigger table.

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I’m working on some new educational resources that reflect what I think wine education should look like today — something that understands wine as a facet of broader culture, rich with context, and free unnecessary, outdated junk. If you have suggestions, opinions, or hot takes on what wine education should be in 2025, I want to hear them. Upgrade to the Founding Tier to get a first look at future products.