In News That Makes Total Sense, Brooklyn Hipsters Are Growing Up to Become Brooklyn Wine Snobs

By Doug Barry  |  January 4, 2013 | 7:50pm
Latest

This fine Friday morning, the Wall Street Journal, a paragon of journalistic excellence and curmudgeonly fiscal conservatism, asked a very important, very incisive question that really cuts right to the core of modern civilization: can there be such a thing as “hipster” wine? The short answer? Fuck yes there is such a thing as hipster wine, if for no reason other than that wine snobs and hipsters were bound at some point to intermingle their cultural snobbishness in order to create a type of person so tremendously insufferable that this person eschews the more conventional — dare we say quotidian — grape for something far more “post-post-modern.”

Post-post-modern is, according to Brooklyn restaurateur William Fitch, a big selling point with the hipster palates that flock to Fitch’s Vinegar Hill House and Hillside near the Brooklyn Naval Yard for so-called “hipsterific” wines like Slovenia, Beaujolais, Jura, and Sancerre. Fitch then assured the Journal‘s bemused Lettie Teague that, yes, even so mainstream a wine as Sancerre sold big among hipsters, mostly owing to its post-post-modernness: “Sancerre is post-post-modern. It sells like crazy. I even have a Pouilly Fume on my list. Any kind of Sauvignon Blanc sells like crazy.”

Hipster wine lists in Brooklyn, the article goes on to explain, tend to be reasonably-priced, “adventurous,” and totally prejudiced against Chardonnay and Bordeaux. Alas, none of this is worth too much ridicule because, after all, who doesn’t like inexpensive wines from around the world? Some readers will probably bristle when they scan over Aska genernal manager Eamon Rockey’s glib observation that the wine list at his Scandinavian restaurant in Williamsburg is hipsterific in that “It’s a wine list for a certain type of person — a list that’s full of small and ambitious producers,” but, after all we are talking about wine, and when talking about wine, everyone’s sort of obliged to be douchey.

Besides, doesn’t it make perfect sense that an entire generation of Williamsburg hipsters living a cushioned Bohemian high-life would grow up into a generation of adult wine snobs with no patience for consumerist trash like Kendall Jackson Chardonnay? Of course it does! Years from now, wine columns in fancy, futuristic space papers will be penned by calcified old wine snobs who spent their idle youth traipsing from one Brooklyn wine bar to the next, ferreting out the most adventurous fermented grape and proclaiming to their companions, “I shall drink this nuanced Sancerre every evening until a stranger recommends it to me and I realize, sadly, that this wine has utterly lost its novelty.”

‘Hipster’ extends even to wine [WSJ]

Image via jcjgphotograph/Shutterstock.

 
Join the discussion...