Status anxiety

I have become precisely the kind of wine bore that I used to humiliate at dinner parties

17 November 2007

Of course, being a wine snob is ruinously expensive, but there are some savings. For instance, I no longer go out to restaurants because I can’t drink anything on the wine menu that’s less than £60. Knowing, as I now do, that the same bottle costs £20 in Majestic, I simply cannot bring myself to part with the difference. I know I’d get much more pleasure from spending the money on, say, a bottle of Château Trotanoy 1999 Pomerol and drinking it at home with a nice steak.

Nowadays, the only thing that makes going out bearable is bumping into a fellow wine bore. There’s nothing I enjoy more than standing in a corner with some oleaginous Frenchman, comparing notes on different vintages of Pinot Noir. Occasionally, I even have the good fortune to discover that the host of the dinner party I’m attending is a wine snob himself.

‘This is far too good to waste on my guests,’ he’ll say, eyeing up the label. ‘Come with me.’

He’ll then take me down to his ‘cellar’ — usually some dingy, cobweb-ridden basement — and the two of us will drink the bottle ourselves as our wives shriek out our names above our heads. Heaven!

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.