Is spitting the dirty secret behind wine’s generation gap?

Let them swallow, and maybe they’ll figure this wine thing out

The Wine Curmudgeon has solved wine’s generation gap. It’s spitting.

This came to me the other day after reading Alisha Miranda’s piece in Pix.wine, when she detailed the difficulties in learning to spit wine: “I couldn’t fathom spitting out good, free wine.”

Cue light bulb moment.

Wine is telling young people, who see a $20 bottle of wine as something to be respected and savored and appreciated, that they have to spit it or they really aren’t wine people. Is it any wonder they think wine drinkers are crazy and move on to something else?

Actually, I should have realized this years ago because I’ve seen it dozens of times – in my classes at the old Cordon Bleu and Dallas College, at wine seminars at the State Fair of Texas, and almost anywhere I’ve done a wine tasting. When I get to spitting, everyone starts laughing (and laughs even harder when we get to sniffing).

In fact, I can only think of one other thing that requires spitting, and that’s chewing tobacco. Which, frankly, is not the comparison wine needs to make.

So how do we get around this spitting thing?

How about we let young people drink wine the way they want to? Yes, revolutionary, I know, and especially for a top-down business like wine, where our betters not only tell us what to drink – scores! — but how to do it.

And this might even work. One of my Cordon Bleu classes was particularly young and male, lots of caps on backward kinds of guys, and they thought it was pretty funny when I said they should spit when we did our first big tasting.

So many of them swallowed, lost their train of thought (to be polite) and came to class the next day feeling a bit off (to be polite). Said one: “I guess there’s a reason for spitting.” And they did, too, for the rest of the class – without the need for me to be snotty about it once.

Experience is often the best teacher, yes?