Wine’s Portrayal in Media
and How it Influences Public Opinion of Wine Culture
You probably don’t even realize how often our favorite shows or movies slam wine and wine culture. It’s a commonly used trope because wine culture is still, generally speaking, snobby and pretentious. We’ve discussed this topic a lot between the two of us, going into the micro whys, including but not limited to “the curse of knowledge” and ginormous egos using wine to posture status and circle-jerk. We’ll definitely tap into that keg later, but for now, let’s delve into the Pour Memory banks of our favorite shows and how they’ve alluded to or illustrated wine as being unapproachable and hoity-toity.
Some examples…
Bob’s Burgers
Looking past Kristin’s obsession with voice-acting and perfectly cast voices to play outrageous animated characters, we bring you Bob’s Burgers. In Season 4 Episode 15, The Kids Rob a Train, Bob and Linda go wine tasting on a train and meet Rick, a wine enthusiast. While the kids are trying to steal the train’s entire supply of chocolate, Rick is inserted into Bob and Linda’s tasting experience and offers up the most outrageously awkward, sexualized tasting notes and descriptions about the wines they’re tasting. Basically, Rick is talking dirty to the wine. It’s both hilarious and cringe-worthy, mostly because Rick isn’t the type of dude you would want talking dirty to you, let alone a glass of wine 🥴
A battle of the egos eventually commences as Bob and Rick compete in a showdown to determine who can guess a wine correctly. (SPOILER: The wine is a cuvée from the dump bucket, and Bob guesses it correctly).
How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM)
There are so many examples of the “wine drinkers are pretentious fucks” trope in HIMYM that it could have its own article, but the first example we see is in the episode Okay Awesome, S1E5, when Lily & Marshall host a wine tasting while the rest of the gang go to a hyper exclusive club. While Ted, Robin, and Barney (“the cool kids”) are dancing at the club, the guests at the wine-tasting party are high-fiving over 30-year fixed mortgages, and Marshall is bummed that he has to wait to drink the wine “to let the tannin’s mellow” (Marshall’s line, “Freakin’ Tannins” is an oft-repeated line in Heather’s household 😂).
The message from this episode is clear: people who do wine tastings are boring.
Gilmore Girls
In S3E5, Eight O’Clock at the Oasis, Lorelai recalls her date with Peyton Sanders (played by the adorable Jon Hamm) to daughter Rory, and she complains about how he spoke at length about wine, which bored her immensely. Lorelai describes how Peyton “sniffed, swirled, swished, and did every other pretentious and borderline-disgusting thing you can do with a glass of wine in a public place.” Her daughter Rory's horrified reaction, "Oh no, he's a winey?!" reflects their perception that an intense interest in wine can be off-putting and overly pedantic, especially when it dominates the conversation 🥱
Our Problem With It
Let us be perfectly clear: it’s not that we don’t find these jokes funny–they are–and there’s a good reason these tropes exist. Our issue with these jokes is that there’s a good chance that these portrayals are influencing a would-be new consumer. If a person’s first exposure to wine is a joke about how boring and pretentious wine drinkers are, they will be less likely to get into it. Would you want to be considered boring, pretentious, and pedantic? We think not!
Celebrating Positive Representations in Wine Culture
Even the positive representations of wine are paired with the negative assumptions and perceptions about wine and its accompanying culture. For example…
We love the film Bottle Shock. It kicks off with a light-hearted scene featuring Bo Barrett (played by Chris Pine, complete with a VERY questionable wig) dancing in the vineyard to "China Grove" by the Doobie Brothers, then contrasts this with a more pretentious depiction of the wine world through the character of Steven Spurrier (memorably portrayed by the late Alan Rickman, may he rest in peace). This juxtaposition captures the spirit of wine as both an agricultural product (Chris Pine describes them all as “farmers” in his voiceover) and a pretentious product of sophisticated culture.
And for the record, we are well aware that Bottle Shock takes creative liberties with its portrayal of the historic 1976 Judgement of Paris (looking at you, Chris Pine’s Wig)—it serves as a beloved, though romanticized, representation of the wine industry's dual nature.
We’ll dive deeper into the romanticization of the wine industry in the future, but for now, our mission is about finding the balance between celebrating the rustic roots and the refined reaches of wine culture.
In Conclusion
As we work to shift the portrayal of wine culture in the media, maybe the jokes won’t be as funny. Or maybe they will! Maybe they’ll become more relatable and make people feel they are in on the joke instead of being laughed at.
But the whole goal here is to decrease the barrier to entry and foster an environment that is welcoming rather than intimidating.
If we hope to shift culture to make it less pretentious and more accessible, then we should probably stop scaring the newbies. We want to invite people into the conversation and the experience instead of freaking them out about it. After all, wine at its core is an art form that serves as an extension of human connection. Full stop.
PS - For funsies we’ll revisit more of these wine references in popular media, including that very recent episode of The Simpsons.