The Hidden Hierarchy in Wine Culture

Let me start with the thing nobody in this industry likes said out loud, don’t cancel me please. The rituals we treat as timeless markers of refinement, the swirl, the sniff, the knowing pause, the correct vocabulary deployed at the correct moment, did not descend from heaven fully formed. They were built by specific people, in specific rooms, at a specific point in history, and those people were almost always serving the interests of empire, class, and the market at the same time. When you feel small in a wine room, you are not reacting to wine but to a hierarchy that was designed, deliberately, to make most of the world feel small. And I think it is worth understanding how the machine was assembled before we agree to keep feeding it.

Consider that crazy document that still quietly governs how billions of euros of wine are valued: the 1855 Bordeaux Classification. We always talk about it as though it were a scientific instrument, a measurement of intrinsic quality handed down by tasting gods. It was nothing of the sort in my opinion but it was commissioned at the request of Emperor Napoleon III for the Exposition Universelle de Paris, a giant 19th century trade fair designed to show off French prestige to the world. The brokers of the Bordeaux trade were asked to rank the châteaux, and the metric they reached for was not some rigorous sensory analysis but was price $$. They ranked the estates according to what the wines had historically fetched on the market, then froze that ranking into a tiered system of growths that has barely moved in over 170 years.

A ranking built on market price, at a moment of imperial peacocking, is still shaping which bottles get called great and which get called ordinary, and by extension which producers can charge what. The classification did not discover a hierarchy of quality, it manufactured one, and then dressed it up as nature. That is the founding move of wine snobbery, and everything after it is variation on a theme.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu gave us the language to see what was actually happening. In his 1979 study La Distinction, he argued that taste is never innocent. What we call good taste is a form of cultural capital, a set of coded preferences that the dominant class acquires early, wears lightly, and uses to mark the boundary between people who belong and people who do not. The genius of the system, Bourdieu showed, is that it disguises a social advantage as a personal virtue. The person who “just knows” which wine to order is not smarter or more sensitive. They were simply raised inside the code, and the code was written by their own class to keep the door shut behind them.

Wine is my homie’s Bourdieu’s argument in liquid form. The specialist vocabulary, the pronunciation policing, the raised eyebrow when you say a name slightly wrong, none of it is about helping you taste better. It is about sorting the room into insiders and outsiders in real time and once you notice that sorting is the point, you cannot unsee it.

Now add a little word “empire”, because you cannot tell the story of European wine prestige without it. The taste that came to define “fine wine” for the world was not a neutral global consensus. It was, overwhelmingly, British and French mercantile taste, exported along the same trade routes that moved everything else. The English even have their own word, claret, for red Bordeaux, because the British trade in these wines is centuries deep and the British palate had an outsized role in deciding which regions rose and which were forgotten. Port, sherry, Madeira, the whole canon of fortified wines that European gentlemen sipped by the fire, were products of colonial and mercantile networks, shaped by British merchant houses operating across an empire that treated the rest of the planet as a supply chain.

So when a particular set of European styles became the global reference point for excellence, that was not the free market of taste selecting the best, but the infrastructure of empire deciding whose wine got carried to the centres of power, written about, scored, and canonised, and whose got left off the map entirely. The reason so many extraordinary wine cultures outside Europe are still treated as curiosities is not that their wines are lesser. It is that they were never plugged into the machine that confers seriousness.

You might think this all belongs to the past, to powdered wigs and imperial trade fairs but jokes on you, it does not. The single most influential force in modern wine valuation was one American palate. Robert Parker founded The Wine Advocate in 1978 and popularised the 100 point scale, and within a couple of decades producers around the world were quietly reshaping their wines, riper, oakier, more powerful, to chase a high score from one man. Critics call it Parkerisation, and whatever you think of the wines it produced, the structural point is undeniable. A subjective preference got expressed as a number, the number got treated as objective, and the market reorganised itself around it. The 1855 brokers dressed price up as quality and Parker dressed one palate up as science.

Here is what I want to be clear about, because I am not interested in the lazy version of this argument. Quality, balance, complexity in wine is Real but the difference between a thoughtfully farmed vineyard and an industrial one is real, and I have spent my career learning to taste those differences precisely because they matter. I am not telling you that everything is relative and a supermarket bottle is secretly the equal of a great Grand Cru of Bourgogne, that would be its own kind of dishonesty.

What I am telling you is that the hierarchy of who gets to define quality, whose palate counts as authoritative, whose wines get carried to the centre and whose get called exotic and left at the margins, that hierarchy is not a law of nature. It is an inheritance and it was assembled by emperors and merchants and one influential critic, and it carries their assumptions inside it like a fingerprint. You are allowed to love wine deeply and still refuse to treat that inheritance as sacred. In fact I would argue that loving wine honestly requires it.

The next time a room makes you feel like you have not earned the right to speak, remember that the room was built to make you feel exactly that. Then pour yourself something wonderful and speak anyway.