…[I]t is not wine that makes us happy for no reason; it is alcohol that makes us happy for no reason. Wine is what gives us a reason to let alcohol make us happy without one. Without wine lore, and wine tasting, and wine talk, and wine labels, and, yes, wine writing and rating–the whole elaborate idea of wine–we would still get drunk, but we would be merely drunk. The language of wine appreciation is there not because wine is such a special subtle challenge to our discernment but because without the elaborate language–without the idea of wine, held up and regularly polished–it would all be about the same, or taste that way. Wine talk and wine ceremony are not simply snobbish distractions that lead us away from the real experience; they are part of what lets the experience happen. To turn wine away from happiness is the drinker’s sin. A good fruity bottle of a Santa Barbara Pinot Noir, with a pretty label and a decent story, makes us happy, and happier than that we don’t really deserve to be.

Being an expert on wine and writing about it is what the English call “naff,” embarrassing and uncool, while being a non-expert on wine and writing about it anyway sounds merely boozy. No subject produces a literature so anxious, expressed not so much in its grandiosity as in its defensive jokiness and regular-guydom.

Thank you for stopping by again to share your thoughts.

(For those who didn’t see Matt Kramer’s article from this week, here is the link.)

While I appreciate your comments and understand where you’re coming from, I think that the paragraph at the end of the story didn’t really fit. I also think that using the term “brainwashing” was regrettable. But I do think the topics are very much worthy of exploration; it would be great if Asimov will take them up again in a blog post or future column so that he could elaborate on something that appears to be on his mind.

That is, I think he has misread and over-extrapolated a simple, fundamental point that Eric made.

I don’t take Eric Asimov’s remark that “beer consumers . . . have “had a solid grounding in their subject” to mean anything more than they are comfortable with beer, because in American life it has been around forever. Americans are to beer as Italians are to wine.

In Italy, and among Italian emigrants to the United States, grapes, wine — homemade or bought — has been on the table daily, often in tumblers, and is as natural as breathing out and breathing in. Not only is it routinely in their homes, it is in their Roman Catholic Church, in the liturgy, hence in their souls. By contrast, it is not even in Americans’ bones.

I believe that when Eric writes about Americans being “brainwashed,” the word is a shorthand allusion to our society’s historic uneasiness with wine. In America the word wine, the very idea of wine, is fraught, loaded, encumbered — indeed, virtually crippled by associations, most of them negative, few of them related to pleasure. In this way, it has “brainwashed” us.

To counter that societal situation, American wine educators and their wine-writing cohorts have been — it’s their word — “demystifying” wine. That is, have been striving to normalize it. To transform it from being a Big Deal to no deal whatsoever.

So, yes, we have been brainwashed, by our inheritance at birth, which not so long ago, during Prohibition, depicted wine, like booze, as the work of Satan.

Thanks for the comments. If anything, I think it shows that the topics here are rich and worthy of further exploration.

Just to clear up any confusion, wine can definitely be intimidating–nobody is arguing otherwise. But Asimov delivered his broadside against wine education, which is something very different and something I find puzzling.