The wine delusion

part of an elite group that used fancy words like ‘tannin’ and ‘oak’ (Mayassi, 2013). So, why
is confusion revered? What is the correlation between confusion and popularity? In popular
culture for instance, there is a meme on the theme nerds are cool. It works because nerds
seem to have a certain IQ, too hard for the average Joe to understand. So cool that
Hollywood filmmakers have been ditching superheroes for nerds (Hu, 2013). Similarly, the
British adman Rory Sutherland thinks that wine’s popularity may be Freudian, ‘not in the
sexual sense, but in the sense of what the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud called der
Narzißmus der kleinen Differenzen or ‘the narcissism of small differences’ (Sutherland,
2013). As Sutherland (2013) puts, ‘The advertising business is often criticised for
exploiting this bias: to provide customers with a superficial sense of uniqueness endless
trivial product variations are created to provide “an ersatz sense of otherness which is only
a mask for an underlying uniformity and sameness”.’ In other words, the absurd complexity
of wine may be essential to its popularity. For its drinkers to show status and
connoisseurship, it is necessary for the market to be absurdly confusing to navigate
(Sutherland, 2013). Which creates a sense of snobbery among wine drinkers; the
superficial culture that is, wine. This peculiar narcissistic urge opens up an opportunity for
people to advertise their own discernment, of what good wine is.
Is wine genuine?
So, what really is good wine? How do people know what good wine is? What
makes one wine better than another? The Château Lafite Rothschild Bordeaux is
considered by many to be the world’s best wine. Thomas Jefferson was among its
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