The S.N.O.B. of the Month Club

I absolutely have to recommend the book The Wine Guy by Andy Besch. If you enjoy drinking wine, or just knowing about wine, this is a must-read. After a a few years of wine drinking, I decided that it was time that I got informed beyond just knowing that I tend to favor Syrahs and Zinfindels. But I was sort of nervous, because it's a tricky subject. There's the S.N.O.B. stigma attached to it (that story later) and all those complex names of grapes, regions, and labels. The wine guy's mission is simple -- getting each reader to know all the tastes available so that they can start to decide what they like when they find themselves anywhere wine-related. And dismantling the fiction-oid that good wine has to cost a lot of money.

When Russ was in San Francisco this past week, he and his friends found themselves looking for a wine bar one night. But they had no idea where they were, so Russ got bold and asked the first guy who walked by if there was a good wine bar opened in the area. The guy told him yes, there was, it was called S.N.O.B., and that it was a few blocks down, tucked away on the right side. Russ thanked the guy and told out the group, excited to check it out. The man loves a good glass of wine. His classmates refer to this wine persona as "Gruss."

As they started walking, discussing whether they should go or not, his friend Zach started laughing. "What?" Russ asked. "That guy just called us snobs," Zach said. And the rest of the group put it together (if they hadn't already) -- the letter S.N.O.B. spell snob. As in people who drink wine. Burn!

Russ's excitement would not be tempered, though -- he kept walking. "I guess I just have more faith in my fellow man than you," he said to Zach. It could be true, as Zach was once thrown into a Russian prison for a very minor incident. That tends to hamper the whole trusting-your-fellow-man thing. It also (sadly) takes away the appetite for pirogis for life.

So Russ and Zach had this sort of bet-non-bet going that there wouldn't really be a wine bar on the right side of the street called S.N.O.B. And I have to admit -- it does sound a little suspicious.

But what do you know? S.N.O.B. wine bar was there and kicking. Russ said it was awesome, except that the waitress kept sloshing wine onto their hands and the table. In other words, she was pouring challenged, perhaps negating the theory that all wine drinkers are neat, clean, S.N.O.B.s.