Points Of Contention: Wine bars
Things we can all agree on. Or not.
Image via Flickr
Uncorked, one of the many places where jerks like to drink fancy wines like they're so special.
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Like all cities catering to the well-educated and conscientious, Austin brews self-entitlement the way Seattle brews lattes. While it’s all too easy to tout the city’s advantages—from a live-and-let-live philosophy that borders on hegemony to the vibrant music scene and so on—that civic pride can oh-so-easily slide into vanity. As such, Austinites can be brutal about slamming anything they see as threatening their cherished way of life. Here The A.V. Club examines some of the city’s most common points of contention and debates whether they deserve their bad rap. This time, we look at the sudden proliferation of fancy wine bars supposedly threatening to turn Austin into Little L.A.
Why you hate it: Oh, those fancy wine bars, with their unnecessary accénts and flights of snooty reds and impenetrably named whites! Who the hell do you think you are? Where the hell do you think you are? This is Austin, and in Austin we know that alcohol is for drinking—not cooing and waxing poetic over and then spitting out. Nothing, save for yammering on your Bluetooth in mixed company or ponying up for valet parking on Sixth Street says, “Look at me! I have too much money!” like sitting in a wine bar for a few hours, gushing over the “complexity" of fermented flavors of grape.
Why you're right: Does Austin have some sort of inferiority complex that it needs 15 of these places? Are we trying to prove something to all of our Los Angeleno immigrants? L.A. has lots of wine bars, and it also has lots of deluded, self-important assholes to fill them. That can’t be a coincidence. And besides, lots of bars and restaurants in Austin serve wine already; isn’t the specialization offered by the "wine bar" annoyingly unnecessary?
Why you're wrong: To cite just one example, visiting Uncorked—part of the fabled gentrification of E. Seventh Street—is a fairly unpretentious, not overly expensive experience. (Uncorked does bill itself as “the unpretentious wine bar,” so there’s that.) The waiters wear tennis shoes and speak plain English, and sure enough, there’s also Lone Star on the menu at a Regular Joe-friendly $3 a bottle. While it’s a bit condescending to be asked to imagine “boot straps and tobacco” in one of the reds, wine tasting in almost any other region has a tendency to be even further up its own ass. At least in Austin, most of the wine bars are trying to adapt to the city, instead of forcing the city to adapt to them.
Verdict: True, wine bars are a harbinger of lameness, often leading to a viral spread of bottle service, dress codes, and fortysomethings trying to appear sophisticated in their Ed Hardy shirts. But let’s face it: You could stock the entire Warehouse District stem to stern with wine bars, and it would still be a minor tributary compared to the mighty river of beer and margaritas flowing through this town. Nothing’s ever gonna change that. And after so often being relegated to whatever corked bottle of Yellow Tail is cooling underneath the Foster’s at most local bars, it’s nice that wine drinkers have a place they can call their own—and even for the non-oenophiles, most of these are very tolerable and welcoming to newcomers. So give one a try, and just stop yourself before you turn into a snobby douche. Study Paul Giamatti in Sideways. Hear the way he talks about wine? Don’t do that, and we’ll all get along fine.
