Wine Snobs Caught in the Act

If you grow weary at the prospect of listening to hours of Gary Vaynerchuk in order to hold your own at a wine bar, the good news is that there is no need to bother. To be a wine snob, one doesn’t need to know how to taste the stuff so much as to take queues from the bottle and price.
Even the experts seem to do it that way:

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was “agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded,” while the vin du table was “weak, short, light, flat and faulty”. Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.

No doubt Gary can give you the appropriate “conspicuous vocabulary” in order to suitably impress at the next bacchanalia.

But if you are actually just interested in drinking the stuff, then work out your favourite plonk and save a few good bottles (to transfer the wine into) for when guests visit.