Great article. I share many of the tastes of the author (e.g. "Coffee was drinkable—in fact, positively delicious—only with milk and sugar" and "I couldn’t imagine why anyone would eat a radish unless paid") but I don't have an aversion to wine.
What I have an aversion to is people who want to talk endlessly about wine. Or people who pretend they'd actually bother with wine in the first place if it didn't give them a buzz. Or anyone who expects me to spend more than five bucks a bottle (ok I can go as high as ten if it's a restaurant).
Aside from the whole issue of genetic differences between people and their fungiform papillae, I think the one line that gets to the heart of why people get so obsessive about wine is "no other pursuit made him feel farther from the lower-middle-class neighborhoods of immigrant Brooklyn from which he had worked so hard to escape".
What I have an aversion to is people who want to talk endlessly about wine. Or people who pretend they'd actually bother with wine in the first place if it didn't give them a buzz. Or anyone who expects me to spend more than five bucks a bottle (ok I can go as high as ten if it's a restaurant).
Aside from the whole issue of genetic differences between people and their fungiform papillae, I think the one line that gets to the heart of why people get so obsessive about wine is "no other pursuit made him feel farther from the lower-middle-class neighborhoods of immigrant Brooklyn from which he had worked so hard to escape".