True wine snobs: People who judge a wine by its package

I apologize that this video is a little oddly edited. I turned on the TV and a show called TMZ was ignorantly dissing box wines, with the narrator saying, "Johnny Football's insane for buying box wine."

The gist is that somebody took a cellphone photo of Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel shopping, apparently with a box of wine in his shopping cart. It's not clear to me, looking at the image, what exactly Manziel is buying. But Manziel has become gossip bait, so even a photo of him with a shopping cart fills a little airtime.

Manziel is a former college football star who doesn't appear to be good enough for the NFL. This happens (see Tim Tebow).

When Johnny Manziel has a drink, cameras flash

The media's stance on Manziel drinking is interesting and worthy of a post in itself.

He checked himself into a rehab center for alcohol addiction treatment in February 2015, so one could say there's a reason for scrutiny. But because he's a bad quarterback, the media has jumped all over him for legally drinking in a way that they wouldn't if he were successful on the field.

In November, when somebody put a video of Manziel drinking Champagne on the Internet, he was benched by the team and vilified.

Problem is, that week the Browns were off. Can't an adult drink Champagne on his week off? I know the self-righteous will say that if he didn't drink wine, maybe he'd play better. That strategy never worked for Tim Tebow: he even refused to have sex with his girlfriend, Miss Universe, and he still can't complete a simple pass over the middle.

That's presumably why this video was on my TV in San Francisco: Oh My God the backup quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, during the off-season for football, is buying wine in the supermarket! And he throws too many interceptions too. The outrage!

That's bad enough, but the TMZ hosts take advantage of the photo to rip box wine, saying the only reason to drink it is to use the plastic bag afterward as a bladder.

This is true wine snobbery. Myself, and my enophile friends, who get called wine snobs all the time, if you pour us a glass of wine from a box and it's good, we accept it and enjoy it. I posted last year about drinking from the same box of wine for a month and loving it. I recommended some good box wines in a story last year for Wine Searcher.

Enophiles are NOT true wine snobs. True wine snobs are not people who drink wine every day and spend 20 minutes going over restaurant wine lists and discussing whether or not a certain wine is still in its youth or is over the hill.

True wine snobs are people who judge a wine by its package.

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