News

He lurks in the shadows at most social gatherings, ready to pounce. Increasingly difficult to identify from his appearance, he's been mutating of late. Long hair or short, chic clothes or shabby - there's no way to tell.

Until you get too close. Then, when you least expect it, he goes in for the kill. You're stuck in wine-bore hell, forced to endure 20-minute disquisitions on such riveting topics as "malolactic fermentation" and "micro-oxygenation."

"Most people's perception of a wine snob is old-fashioned, out of date," says David Kamp, a writer and editor for Vanity Fair magazine, who has co-authored a fun and uncommonly practical little book called The Wine Snob's Dictionary with New York sommelier and restaurant manager David Lynch.

Consider it a critical field guide as you prepare to navigate the cocktail party circuit this holiday season. Perhaps you'll find a little bit of your husband or wife in it, too. Or maybe something of yourself.

It's getting hard to tell who's the wine snob and who isn't.

Forget the classic stereotype of a tuxedoed aesthete with a British accent who refers to red Bordeaux as "claret." A wine snob today is just as likely to drive a Tundra, wear an unruly mane of Robert Plant hair or dress in torn jeans. They're plumbers, salesmen, secretaries, even NFL draft picks who decided to spend their signing bonuses on a wine fridge.

"When a person makes their first bundle of wealth, they'll buy their insta-cellar, or EuroCave, as it were, and you see that a lot with athletes," Mr. Kamp says over the phone from New York.

A self-professed "apprentice wine snob" and NFL fan, Mr. Kamp knows several newly minted gridiron connoisseurs. He recalls being lectured on the relative status of one Napa Valley winery compared with another by Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu during an interview for a feature in GQ magazine. He said the 27-year-old football star, who "really knows his wine," plans to buy land in Sonoma County and retire as a gentleman vintner after he hangs up his cleats.

Wine snobbery, Mr. Kamp says, "has been democratized."

Though The Wine Snob's Dictionary is slim and aimed at the funny bone, it contains a good amount of contemporary jargon that makes it a potentially educational read even for connoisseurs.

Not familiar with "Burghound" (an influential consumer newsletter on Burgundy wines)? Or "grower Champagne" (trendy, small-batch bubblies more fashionable than stodgy old Mumm and Moët) and "priming" (a stemware-rinsing practice using wine instead of chlorinated water)? You're drinking old school, my friend.

Another characteristically of-the-moment entry: "Spoofalated - Scornful term invented by old-line winemakers to describe any wine so bombastic and overmanipulated by man ... that it lacks any discernible varietal character." And another: "Tanky - Dismissive term for a stale wine that was stored too long in a large vessel rather than bottled in timely fashion. Oh, that zin is just flat and tanky; I don't know where they get off charging $45 for it."

Mr. Kamp, author of an excellent 2006 history on the rise of gourmet culture in America, titled The United States of Arugula, has also written three other snob dictionary titles, on rock music, film and food. But he says research for this latest volume taught him that wine snobs are a breed unto themselves.

"In the wine world, snobbery is the default position of the enthusiast," he says. By contrast, in other fields of cultural appreciation, notably rock music, people tend to ridicule or dismiss zealous fans as losers.

"We all know that type, and yet we all make fun of that type. We all say, 'Give it a rest.' We don't do that with wine snobs. We respect them. We hold them in awe. We say, 'What's wrong with me that I don't know as much about wine as this person does?' "

One reason, he suggests, is that wine erudition often deals not just with esoterica, but also with ridiculously inconsistent and illogical classification systems, making those that master it all seem wiser than they are.

The development of labelling practices has been Byzantine and cryptic, he says. Most French wines, for example, are classified according to geographical origin, while most wines outside Europe are named for grape varieties. Even within France, a single region such as Bordeaux can rely on several classification systems "cobbled together in haste" and which have nothing to do with each other.

"It's just basically sloppy organization that has accidentally cultivated a mystique," Mr. Kamp says.

Wine snobbery also has evolved in recent years and fractured into various branches. The classic society sophisticate was supplanted in the 1980s by devotees of an American critic with a predilection for big-bodied, powerful wines.

"You had Robert Parker come along to glorify these big, jammy, high-alcohol Californian wines and basically reconfigure the palate of the wine snob," Mr. Kamp says.

"He was seen as a rebel against the old-line wine snobs. But then he got so popular that he's now the establishment against which the hippie-evangelist snobs rebel."

Those hippie-evangelists tend to frown upon Mr. Parker's enthusiasm for consultant-goosed wines lavishly imbued with the vanilla and toast flavours imparted by lengthy maturation in oak barrels. And they include an extremist branch devoted to the gospel of "zero manipulation," another entry in Mr. Kamp's book. Its godhead is Josko Gravner, a winemaking primitivist in northern Italy who ferments wine in beeswax-lined clay amphorae buried in the ground, a technique dating back to the Bronze Age.

"The wine doesn't look like wine. It's kind of cloudy and cider-like," Mr. Kamp says. "But you cannot buy it for less than three digits because of the cult surrounding it."

The author concedes he was forced to be extremely selective in compiling his 111-page book. But as with just about every paper publication these days, there's an associated website (Snobsite.com) where readers can peruse more content and post their own provocative and annoying submissions.

"They are invited to belligerently upbraid us for the terms we have failed to include," he says, adding facetiously, "and we will address their belligerent complaints either with apologies or belligerence of our own."