Once it enters your mind, the question becomes so persistent, so obstinate in its highlighting of an anomaly, that it’s impossible to remove. What if the Emperor’s weavers were telling the truth?

You know the tale, of course, in all likelihood first heard it as a child and have internalised it fully. Two con men approach a vain Emperor claiming they can make the most gorgeous clothes for him. But there is a twist: those clothes will only be visible to those of a certain intelligence. The ruse works. Even though nobody, Emperor included, can actually see the clothes, everyone plays along, lest they are found wanting.

Only, here is the catch. The sole proof of the weavers being fraudsters is Hans Christian Andersen’s name-calling. Would a scientist be satisfied with that? The fact that none of the cast can see the clothes doesn’t say very much. Couldn’t they all just be very, very thick? Let’s try to look at the hard evidence. Throughout the story, none of the capital’s inhabitants does anything that suggests much intelligence. But we do know that they all consider monarchy an acceptable form of government.

I am being facetious, but there is an underlying consideration here that has always had implications for wine. What is the inherent value of good wine if it takes a certain amount of interest, attention, and experience to appreciate it? Or, more simply, what’s the point of wearing, and paying handsomely for, the finest clothes if, as far as almost everyone else is concerned, you’re walking around butt naked?

Wine is particularly vulnerable to this criticism. Identifying quality in the beverage itself has little practical purpose. Though a drug, it is not a medicine. Raveneau does not cure gout more effectively than Aldi Chardonnay (if anything, both might cause it, I would guess at about the same rate). Proxy metrics that excite the modestly endowed in other domains are of little use in fermented grape juice. I imagine there is still a type of person that goes around bragging their car does 0 to 60 in that many seconds. Bragging your Cabernet comes at 15.5% alcohol doesn’t quite cut it the same way. All that is left is price, but paying outrageous sums doesn’t suggest connoisseurship so much, as a background in rapaciously pillaging State assets.

What is connoisseurship then? Largely, being able to identify, more or less reliably, how a certain item fares against some aesthetic framework and, hopefully, deriving pleasure from it tending towards some idealised paradigm. But what’s the use of that?

The problem is hardly unique to wine, of course, but other sectors have it better. Art, music, literature might all share the weakness, but they have the shield of academicism and the muscle of culture to fall back on. They may be occasionally mocked but there is a loose agreement they are somehow good, even useful, the intellectual vegetables of life.  Fashion is lower down the rung, but still way above us. The absurdities of haute couture might give any wildly overpriced Bordeaux a run for its pre-phylloxera money but, on the ground, clothing is still a major vector of culture. Corporations and their designers run as often behind the public as ahead of it.

You would think we would find camaraderie in food culture, but even there we fall short. Food culture is actually much more akin to fashion: histrionics at the top, but a strong attachment to craft, with strong emotional and cultural attachments all the way down. And food has the added advantage of involving co-creation. The inspired layperson’s fashion has combination, repurposing, and assembly, but cooking has actual production.

We can only dream of such public engagement with wine. Despite the fables a thousand sommeliers might have sold you, wine region locals for the most part couldn’t care less about wine quality, let alone connoisseurship. They might claim knowledge or birthright, but professional excellence rarely translates to individual sagacity. (Think of it this way: American universities lead the world in mathematics, yet the average American still needs to take off their shoes to count to twenty.) As for trying one’s hand in production…let’s just say that lived experience in a country where everyone and their uncle (especially the uncle), makes their own wine, suggests that it does very, very little for discernment. When I first got into wine, people used to ask me constantly why I don’t try to make my own. I used to reply that I also enjoy air travel, but I don’t try to make my own planes.

This poses a question for the wine connoisseur. Is there a point to the whole endeavour? Well, for starters, hopefully nobody is engaging in wine, as either professional or drinker, thinking they are improving their character, their soul, or the world at large. Hobbies need no justification beyond the pleasure one derives from them. (Professions add the factor of remuneration for effort.) Wine knowledge is useful as far as it enhances one’s understanding of, and pleasure from, the wine itself. For the more romantic, knowledge can be its own reward.

And what about reaching others? I heartily dislike terms such as educator (with its vague aura of punishment), communicator (only a step away from interpreter, and then a short hop to whisperer), influencer (for purposes that can only be nefarious), and the dreaded evangelist (all the fervour of the religious cult). Yet someone who likes wine, and knows a bit about it, can open a different world for you. They can demonstrate there is depth there, if you want to explore it. Most of all, they can bring their enthusiasm. We often underestimate how many things we picked up simply because someone near us was really, really keen on them.

So, if you are among the lucky ones who see the gorgeous clothes, all you can hope to do is make others who might develop an interest in extra fine silk see them too. And if they don’t want to, that’s alright too. They can enjoy the sight of your handsome derrière instead.

Photo by Kristína Krúžková on Unsplash