A Treatise on Wine Jag-offs and Why They Ruin the World

I was at a tasting which I thought would be pretty cool. Everybody brought a bottle they liked and thought would be interesting. Wines were good and company better except for one guy. The evening started off well with a few whites (why people don't think white wine is real wine, I'll save for another time) & good cheese. I was sitting next to this guy I had not met before and everything seemed fine until he opened his mouth. Google pretentious and this dude's picture will pop up. He was doing the name dropping thing like, "I have 6 of this in my cellar" and "I had this wine which cost $150." It's not that I have something against expensive wine, it is pretty damn good, but don't talk about it just to make yourself seem special.

Wine is about sharing with your friends and family. The most valuable bottle I have is a $13 2003 William Hill Cabernet Sauvignon. Why, you may ask, because my wife and I had that at our wedding and it is the last bottle left in my cellar. Will we ever drink it ? Probably not, but it means more to me than any Caymus, Lafite, or Screaming Eagle ever will.

Wine is about who you drink it with, not the name on the bottle. I don't want to have good bottles just to say I have them, I want to share them with someone I can share the experience with. If my friends drink wine, it is usually a magnum of Yellow Tail, but I try to get them interested in something different. Any time we eat dinner together I bring a good bottle to try to expand their palates. This guy at the tasting was about my age (early 30's) and has it all wrong. Wine has the stereotype of being "expensive, only for old people, and stuck up." This guy personified all those opinions. He's my freakin' age! The image of the wine culture will not change if d-bags like this continue to perpetuate this stereotype.

Wine is not a status symbol, it's about the experience. Just drink it, enjoy it, and don't brag about it.

If you actually read all this. Thank You.

Wow you needed to vent! Guy must have been unbearable.

I think it is a good cautionary tale for any of us though. We are in to wine, and we can get awful nerdy about the geography, prideful about the experiences, and we are prone to drone on the sheer volume of facts committed to memory. It's important to identify who WANTS to hear about it first. I am surely guilty of wine-TMI, especially when at dinner with friends or colleagues. I just hope I don't come off as a w-bag*. It's especially tough when talking about French wine, for which I am most passionate. Even talking about a modest Languedoc sounds pretentious even if I do so little as try to pronounce it.

*w-bag is a wine d-bag

I appreciate your sentiment re: most valuable bottle. I had the incredible blessing to get engaged in France's Loire Valley, and we drank an inexpensive Cheverny that night. I bought more from the restaurant and held on to it for a time (however we did eventually drink it :-) I did save the cork and immortalized it in my coffee table.

How were the whites? I would love to do a white tasting one of these months in the summer.

Also, what showed the best at the tasting?

Amen to that ecola!

Guys like that, I just let them blather on so they get it out of there system; there's usually no viable solution to it in the midst of a gathering. It can ruin an evening, though.

I couldn't agree with you more that wine is for SHARING with good friends and family. After all, you can't take it with you.

I enjoy wine the most when someone else is experiencing it with me, so you can talk about it, learn from it, and anticipate the next experience (not unlike we do with our Pitt-area gatherings).

And while there are still folks out there as you encountered (always will be), I'm happy to know many others that appreciate wine drinking for what it should be: a never-ending, enjoyable experience.
Now, what did I do with my glass.....

So, is it best to not talk about expensive wine at tastings? At what price point do we draw the line?

jonradus - not bad to talk about expensive wine at a tasting, this dude was just talking to impress and brag and try to look like he was better than everyone else

Eric- probably the most telling part of your tale is the age allusion. Those of us in the PAWinetalk community with another 2 decades under our belts can tell you that jag-offs exist in all passions. By the time you're reached early 50's they just bother you less or you care less about saying something subtle like 'shut the hell up' to one of them. Whether it's 5 hours on a golf course, 3 hours at a tasting or 15 minutes at an art gallery, a jag-off can take the fun out of a nice day. That's their job - they are jag-offs after all. The good news is this guy could only piss you off; he couldn't make the wine taste bad!

(note: are there 'jag-offs' in Philly? Seems this may be a Pittsburgh term, like gum bands or slippy)

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Jagoff

BTW it was used by Joe Pesci's character in Goodfellas...

jlburd - i like that perspective, thanks

there are jag-offs in philly, but they are called philadelphians, just kidding don't want to make anyone mad

Ecola,
I apologize for my pretentiousness. Next tasting I'll sit next to Mark ;-)

BTW....I did a google image search on pretentious and found these.

J2K - love the photos, and to make it clear I like everyone at pawinetalk, and it wasn't anyone at one of our tastings.

:-)