confessions of a wine snob

On Sunday night, I was listening to Lynne Rossetto Kasper's Splendid Table on national public radio. (All right. That one sentence is freighted with enough clues that I could stop right here.)

Let me give a little background. Hello. My name is Steve Cotton and I am a recovering wine snob. Not just any wine snob. I am an instant wine snob.


I was raised in a household where alcohol was forbidden for religious reasons. I never even tasted alcohol until I was 24 -- and that was just a sip of banana liqueur in Greece. The experience almost made me a lifelong teetotaler.


But along came the 1980s, and I ran with the worst peer pressure group to appear on the face of the planet: yuppies. Gourmet clubs were all the rage to show that we were better than our franks and beans upbringings. And good food needed good wine.


We all knew that none of us knew anything about wine. But I was a pioneer in instant knowledge. Somehow, I learned about the Penthouse of wine: The Wine Spectator. There were fancy vintage charts that could be sequestered in wallets. A confusing new vocabulary describing tastes of tobacco, tar, and smoke. (I would occasionally check to see if I had accidentally picked up a cigar magazine by mistake.)


But, best of all, the complexity of wine was quantified. Every review, with its baffling vocabulary, would be reduced to a number. We yuppies understood that. We all got As in school; we would buy a wine that was just as clever as we imagined ourselves. We didn't know what it meant; but if it was expensive and had a high rating, it had to be good -- even if it did taste like tar.


Reading Richard Lander's Gangs of San Miguel de Allende makes me realize that I was simply a member of a subset of the Getting Fully Arted - Watching Art gang. (I know it is not really a gang, but my group certainly was.) We all lived in fear some new member would ask a question like "But why do you like it?," and we would all be forced to look off into the middle distance hoping that someone else would ask a simpler question.


But I finally feel that I have my revenge. It turns out that The Wine Spectator is every bit as shallow as the use I found for it.


On Sunday, Lynne Rossetto Kasper let everyone in on a little secret circulating in the wine world about Robin Goldstein, the author of The Wine Trials. Mr. Goldstein created a restaurant out of whole cloth: a name, Osteria l’Intrepido (Italian is always good for a toff spoof); a menu; a web site; and a wine list. He purposely made the dishes on the menu a bit dodgy. But the wine list was his masterpiece. He included only wines that The Wine Spectator had panned.


For those of you who do not know, The Wine Spectator publishes a list of restaurants every year that deserve its "Award of Excellence." It turns out that all you need to get the award is the $250 application fee and a nice serving of chutzpah.


Mr. Goldstein submitted the application, the fee, and his terrible menu and wine list for an imaginary restaurant. In turn, he was awarded his "Award of Excellence."


Schadenfreude is a dish best served as left overs. In this case, because the mentor was caught, and the pupil was not.