It feels odd today, but there was a time when science was considered an aristocratic pursuit. Tycho Brahe was a nexus of Danish noble lineage, Lavoisier was the intellectual face of the Ancien Régime, while Darwin was the happy beneficiary of decades of haute bourgeois accumulation. Even Newton, often taken as the plebeian of the lot, was the son of a wealthy landowner – 17th century Cambridge was not known for recruiting from the working classes. Many of the practices we take for granted, from the naming of laws after their discoverer, to the scientific journals, are part of that gentlemanly tradition. In that distant era, the scientist is a hobbyist, and science practically a liberal art, the Aristotle-inspired concept of pursuits for men who did not have to worry about putting brioche on the table.

Around the turn of the last century, there is a shift. It is slowly becoming clear that the benefits of having people look at this stuff seriously is good for more than the occasional Victorian exhibition. The people that do science change too: they come from a greater (if still limited) segment of society, and have a different degree of support. Two world wars and a Russian Revolution later, and the activity is entirely transformed. Education is systematised and access progressively increased. A scientific establishment, of varying success, becomes a feature of practically every country.

Here is the funny thing though: the more successful science as a pursuit became, the less prestigious the profile of the scientist. The aristocratic enquirer gave way to the lone genius, who deferred to the inventive technocrat. But, in my lifetime at least, this had mutated to someone slightly, or even entirely, off. The Anglo-American world in particular, presented the oxymoron of leading in scientific output, while casting anyone moving down that path as a figure of derision. The only way for someone with a science doctorate to redeem themselves to the eyes of society seemed to be to fail out of a research laboratory, and move to shuffling imaginary numbers around, offloading Credit Default Swaps and causing the occasional global financial crisis.

Do you see where I am going with this? It is not a huge leap to draw parallels with wine connoisseurship. At its birth, in the English and French traditions at least, it is synonymous with aristocracy. Wine knowledge, such as it is in that phase, does not convey much of a skill or even particular interest, but simply membership to a club. Let the peasants drink field blends and ale. You drink Bordeaux or Champagne. You know they have vintages.

This is replaced by the golden age of the connoisseur. It can be expressed by Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s romantics, or Hemingway’s rugged stoics, or the super-hero that is James Bond. The common thread is that wine knowledge here is not a birthright: it is a choice, demonstrating effort, skill, and an affinity for the good life. It is also a background, not foreground, activity, understanding Epicurus much better than the Oxford English Dictionary does.

Then comes the era of systematic wine education. You can be as critical as you want about it; I might agree with you, then point out that no education or training in anything is ever perfect. Can you doubt its effectiveness though? Is there another leisure activity with that level of rigour? The blind tasting feats I semi-routinely see people perform dwarf anything I have seen from other professionals, let alone hobbyists. (Give your local jazz aficionado 20 seconds of a random, non-blockbuster solo. Ask them to identify the artist. I’ll wait.)

Mirroring the science effect, the wine expert passes through the stage of an almost technocratic figure, providing interpretation and assessment, to a rather unsympathetic one. At best an insufferable bore, at worst, a conman. In the middle, as a vaguely malicious figure, the mythical wine snob. Either way, there is something off.

It is an imperfect analogy, I know, and not only because of science’s prevalence, importance, and reach. Fundamentally, wine knowledge is nearer to the Arts. You don’t need to know the chemical formula for acetylsalicylic acid for an aspirin tablet to work. The validity of the theory of evolution does not depend on your feelings. By contrast, wine is not unlike literature, painting, or music. It is your prerogative not to care about Jackson Pollock, and there is no way to prove experimentally that James Joyce is better than Lee Child. All that is left for the expert to do is point out the labour involved and, perhaps, provide insight into an aesthetic.

Here, however, is where the divergence starts. People who engage casually with the Arts, rarely question, let alone get angry with, the hierarchy. Few devotees of the MCU feel their pleasure diminished by cinema theorists considering Andrei Tarkovsky a superior artist to Jon Favreau. Metalheads will almost automatically defer to the artistic superiority of classical music, even if they are unlikely to ever make it through a performance of Mahler’s Third.

Wine though? For some reason, it seems to irritate an awful lot of people. Casting scientists as weird is usually born from jealousy and insecurity: the gnawing feeling that this is what intelligence actually looks like. Not dissimilarly, casting wine knowledge as wine snobbery seems, to me at least, to be rooted in some deep seated anxiety. Not a lack of interest in the topic. Not thinking it’s all smoke and mirrors. Instead, having the creeping suspicion that it is all true. It is not a coincidence that the most vehement critics of wine expertise seem to be those that wish to buy their way into it. It would make everything so much simpler.

With this desire come also the credentialled turncoats. Mercifully, there are few reputable Professors of English Literature who will sing the merits of Dan Brown for an extra penny. Classical music scholars by and large don’t tell you that their years of study have demonstrated that, yes, you are absolutely right to enjoy Taylor Swift. Wine, however, has an endless array of characters (other words are available), who seem to think that the main purpose of the letters after their name is to sell out the principles that made those letters worth achieving in the first place.

And here is where the science analogy comes full circle. Oil companies are filled to the brim with science PhDs who will assure you that the climate is just fine. You can find an engineer to make your lifecycle analysis what you want it to be. And it seems there is nobody who will sell their qualifications to the highest bidder more quickly than a Doctor of Medicine. Except perhaps a Master of Wine.

Photo by Mark Vihtelic on Unsplash