Pomposity? Insularity? Elitism? Take Your Pick! It’s a NYT Trifecta of Assholishness
15th December 2019
“Natural Wine” means exactly nothing. A lot of those vineyards would be dead and gone if it weren’t for modern viticultural and wine-making techniques. It’s a marketing tool designed to attract exactly the kind of people who write and read the NYT, and has very little to do with the quality of wine in the bottle. Sure, some “natural” wines are good, just as some mass-market wines are good. But there are plenty of crappy “natural” or “organic” wines that taste like spoiled grape juice filtered through a hobo’s sock, but they command a market and a price premium precisely because pompous asshats at the NYT tout them as something special. They specialize in linking banal, everyday events and products with some heightened sense of the world around us, as if the bottle of wine one drinks or the toilet paper one uses to wipe one’s ass is in some way imbued with special powers to bring one closer to…something. Anything. As long as it isn’t one of us.
I don’t drink wine so I don’t have a sneer in this fight, but the position of the New York Times as a Voice of the Crust is so solid that I assume whatever they like is probably crap, and they haven’t let me down yet.