Wine: Why's It Have to be Fancy?

There's a great article on Vinography today (well, sort of a rant . . . but entertaining anyway) on "The Travesty of Wine and Social Class in America." What that boils down to, is that when people came over to America, just about everyone drank wine. Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out how to properly grow grapes in American soil and importing bottles from France was costly.

So, most of us started drinking more beer and bourbon, and the President and elite class kept drinking wine. Then came the industrial revolution, widening the gap between classes. Then came prohibition, ruining new American-grown wines chances of gaining a foothold amongst the lower and middle class.

And as it were, now we have this huge gap in drinking habits - with most of the lower class feeling like wine is just a snobby, elitist fru fru drink. Here's a snippet from the post:

"Meanwhile, wine to many people represents the intimidating, elitist, and snobbish rich. Sarah Palin's quips during the recent campaign about the wine and cocktail drinking elite perfectly illustrate the way that many people think about wine. So too do the many comments on a recent New York Times blog about the words that are used to describe wine. I can't tell you how sad it makes me to see how many people think that attempting to describe the flavors and aromas of wine is an exercise in pretension and snobbery. But it gets even worse. It's bad enough that the average beer loving American (whoever that is) at best thinks that wine is really just for special occasions, and at worst believes that the people who drink it are rich, stuck-up, pedants. But unfortunately, a lot of wine lovers actually act that way."