At the release of Sideways, everyone and their brother knew the major wine varieties, and had opinions. Indeed, a major reason the merlot spiel had such an impact with so many is precisely because it was so popular. Many like to be a contrarian, so if something knocks on the popular thing that can have an impact ("who else can't stand Tiktok, right?"). Most of the varieties of merlot were very high quality, and I doubt the overwhelming bulk of wine drinkers could taste any deficiency (many can't even differentiate varieties).

https://www.guildsomm.com/public_content/features/articles/b...

That's a much better article about the rise and fall of California merlot, and basically notes that merlot had plateaued by Sideways release, and there's a bit of a cause/correlation mixup happening.

I think it's probably more accurate to say that everyone felt they were supposed to be familiar with the major wine varieties so all had picked up the terms and desperately clung to a few half-earned opinions because they didn't want to appear unsophisticated. But I think most people didn't actually have particularly strongly held or individually acquired wine preferences. (It's well known that even professionals can often not correctly identify what variety or even what color wine they're drinking.)

This is a social situation that's ripe for a radical opinion swing. Because everyone is trying to look like they know what everyone else knows but there's little "ground truth" (i.e. actual personal opinions) slowing down the change. So when a movie like Sideways comes out with a character who clearly cares deeply about wine and knows a lot and expresses a strong opinion. Well, I guess merlot's not cool anymore.

As an aside, while I absolutely agree that most wine snobbiness is absolute horseshit (there is loads of it throughout the discussion in various other threads), that study on wine "experts" who couldn't tell the difference between red and wine is just terrible nonsense. It was some students who were recruited and smelled wines, given the visual cues of color.

It's even less than that. The study showed that if people are primed to think they're drinking red wine, their responses reflect that. If the experiments wanted a controlled study on whether the subjects could tell red and white wine apart, they could have blindfolded them or told them the wines had all been dyed the same colour, and the students would have discriminated between them very accurately.

Anyway, like you I tend to discount the opinion of anyone who misinterprets this study's results in the way that the article does.

This is demonstrably false, btw. Either those professionals you are referring to are completely untrained (just being in the wine business doesn’t mean you are an experienced taster) or it’s just complete bullshit.

Millions of drinking age drinkers in America then and today know nothing about wine. Perhaps I just missed the intentional exaggeration, but "living in bubbles" was a discussion I had with a friend recently and this struck me as that kind of line.

To me, those are things that allow you to elevate your enjoyment of tasting the wine itself. Anything beyond that (knowing region or grape by taste) is turning wine into a hobby, which is fine, but not necessary.

But you'll come far enough with general guidelines (older = better, except some years are very good and others... less so) to please guests. Except for the amateur vinologist, but he gets to be happy about showcasing his knowledge.

American wine palette has come a long way since then

Oh, come on.

Even budget grocery stores separate their wines by region and grape.

Just about every American who drinks wine has their favorites, even if it just goes as far as something like "I like Malbec because it's less dry."

True experts can distinguish an astonishing number of characteristics of wine in a blind taste. Most people are not experts. The price of wine is also largely decoupled from how much any given person will enjoy it. (However, psychologically, you will probably enjoy a bottle you paid $100 for more than one you paid $20 for.)

Basically: Wine is not all just indistinguishable fermented grape juice, but most stuff written about wine is a combination of bunk and rarified trivia no normal drinker should care about. Drink what makes you happy.

Corollary: the wine in a €4 euro bottle is 3x as expensive as the wine in a €3 bottle €1.50 vs €0.50).

That broadcast was a while ago, so the details might not be exact. But the main point is that after the first (about) 3 euro, you're starting to spend money on the contents. Before, you're literally paying a few pennies for the wine...

* well, better than the £5 bottles you get here in the UK