Wine gaffes spill out in ‘Succession’
“You don’t hyperdecant? You’re just doing regular decanting?”
Connor Roy has just finished whirring a bottle of Burgundy in his blender — presumably to aerate it? — and he is shocked, shocked, that his sister, Shiv, does not treat her own wine with this level of care.
This moment from a recent episode of HBO’s “Succession,” which concludes its second season on Sunday, Oct. 13, is privilegedclass gaslighting at its finest. We laugh at Connor’s ridiculousness, his weirdest of possible flexes. But then we pause. We examine the smug, confident smile on his face, his expensive blender and haircut. Wait. Is hyperdecanting a thing? Are we just hooting rubes, and is this another one of those secret handshakes of the megarich? Should we all be hyperdecanting?! If I could pick an emblem for our decade, this would be it: Connor Roy with his blender full of Burgundy, i.e., a member of the billionaire class doing something incredibly stupid and then persuading us, the plebes, that maybe actually it’s really smart, that we’re the stupid ones for not “getting it.”
It’s 2019, and you’d like to think that we’ve been inured to this type of thing by now, but wine snobbery is a particularly
insidious (if mild) form of class warfare. It’s easy to fall prey to it. In the hands of the connoisseur class, wine becomes a weapon: an intimidating, rarefied thing, beyond our ken. A reminder of our inferiority.
That rich people love to weaponize wine to establish their own superiority is nothing new, and the Roy family and those in their orbit do so with relish.
Wine consumption is a luxury, simply because good wine — made in a conscientious way by artisan producers — can be expensive. But being a snob about wine? It’s gross. Unnecessary and unforgivable. Unless ...
Unless, of course, I’m the one being a snob. I, pure of heart, can certainly weaponize my own knowledge of wine to take down the powerful and cruel — or, so I told myself one evening, likely a bit tipsy, as I sat down to rewatch every episode of “Succession.”
My goal? To prove, in the immortal words of Countess Luann, that money can’t buy you class, and the Roys are knownothing wine fakers. And so I began to meticulously record all of “Succession’s” wine goofs and gaffes. Comrades, there were many. Here are a few of my favorites.
Wine gaffe No. 1: Connor’s blatant abuse of Burgundy
Back to hyperdecanting: When Connor describes the process, it almost sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. There are, after all, many benefits to decanting wine: removing sediment from old bottles, softening and deepening the aromas and helping the wine to open up through aeration. Could a blender help?
“It’s criminal,” says Christie Dufault, a professor of wine and beverage studies at the Culinary Institute of America, and a former sommelier and wine director at finedining restaurants like RN74 and Gary Danko. “Any producer of Burgundy, or any other quality wine, would freak at the notion.”
That Connor is pulverizing a bottle of Burgundy, from a region that lays claim to many of the most cultish and expensive wines in the world, is particularly hilarious. “I know people who buy a nice bottle of Burgundy and won’t touch it for a couple of months because they think that, after driving it home in their car, the wine needs to settle down,” Dufault laughs.
It’s a great point: Think of all the time, money and care winemakers spend cellaring and shipping their wines, making sure that they’re never exposed to temperature or humidity swings, extended daylight or jostling. Some importer of Grand Cru Burgundy just paid for a temperaturecontrolled shipping container to transport his wine across the Atlantic. Then Connor Roy blitzed it in a blender, heating the wine and pounding it against plastic, to create a frothy, lukewarm mess.
Adding insult to injury, Connor doesn’t even know how to hold or taste wine properly. He clutches the bowl of his glass with both hands and swirls it like a lasso — “a rodeo swirl,” to use Dufault’s phrase. Then, still holding the glass by the bowl instead of the stem, he takes a sip.
There is so much to object to here. First, the only reason to ever cup a glass of wine in both hands is if the wine is too cold, and you want to quickly bring it to temperature to better appreciate its taste and aromas. Connor’s wine was just buzzed in a Vitamix, so, um, I don’t think it needs further warming. Second: Swirling a glass of wine is a useful way to release its aromas, but Connor does it in a totally performative way, with the glass at chest level and far from his nose. He never actually pauses to smell. Last — and yes, this is petty, but I think you’ve come to expect that from me by now — holding a wine glass by the bowl is a big nono.
“I teach my students early on that wine glasses with stems are a tool, a utensil just like a fork or knife, and they should learn to use them properly,” says Dufault. The proper way to hold a stemmed wine glass is by the stem (and in certain situations, perhaps by the base), but never by the bowl, which accelerates the transfer of heat from your hand to the wine. Plus, as Dufault notes, “Who wants to see your greasy little fingerprints all over the glass?”
The Roys drink a lot of Champagne — at least, we assume it’s Champagne, because it’s sparkling and served out of flutes. That is, after all, the appeal of the Champagne flute: It is a clear and potent symbol, a signal that you are drinking something fancy, and, in all likelihood, expensive.
Sadly for the Roys, those crystal flutes also signal how behind the times they are when it comes to Champagne. Flutes are, to put it bluntly, très passé.
“Anybody with a passing knowledge of wine or who spends time in cool restaurants in cool cities sees that sommeliers, servers and wine directors don’t really use flutes anymore,” says Dufault. Far preferred are what Dufault calls “allpurpose” or “tulipshaped” wine glasses, for example the thinlipped Zalto universal wine glass — the same glassware you would use to serve still wine.
Dufault first noticed the shift away from flutes in the early 2000s. She said that producers told her that flutes are beautiful, but they came to learn that if you really want to smell the aromas, to volatilize the aromatic esters in these wines, then a wider bowl is better. Put plainly: To taste wine, you must smell wine, and it’s damned hard to smell anything from a tinymouthed flute.
Wine gaffe No. 3: Stewy throws around buzzwords but doesn’t understand the nuance
When, in the English countryside for Shiv’s wedding at the end of season one, Kendall and Stewy want to celebrate their planned takeover of Waystar, Stewy suggests they pop into the village pub for a drink. Kendall hesitates — “Here?” — and Stewy teases him for being a snob. “I think we can brave some nonvintage Champagne,” he smirks. It’s a funny dig, if a bit odd — does he really think they’re going to find any Champagne in a random village pub? — but it also reveals his facile understanding of the wine.
Vintage Champagne refers to wine that is made from the harvest of a single year, whereas nonvintage Champagne is a blend of base wines from multiple years. It’s true, a good vintage Champagne is often hardertofind and more expensive than its nonvintage counterparts, in part because Champagne houses make less of it, and because many producers reserve their highestquality grapes for vintage bottlings. But vintage Champagne as a category isn’t intrinsically better than nonvintage Champagne.
If you don’t want to go to the trouble of learning about various Champagne producers and their offerings, blithely buying “vintage” wine is one way of assuring a certain level of quality. But that assumes you’re buying from a quality producer in the first place. And it means you’re missing out on so many legendary nonvintage bottles. More Krug “Grande Cuvée” for the rest of us, I suppose.
Wine gaffe No. 4: Kendall brags about his dad spending $80,000 on wine
During a gala to honor his father’s 50 years in business, Kendall hops on stage to deliver “L to O.G.” — a now thoroughly memeified rap tribute. In one winerelated verse, Kendall brags of his dad’s “A1 ratings, 80k wine.”
Buddy, if you’re spending $80k on a bottle that isn’t old, French and/or salvaged from a shipwreck, you’re spending too much. Wine nerds can fight with me on this one. But I so love the notion that Logan Roy, the big man himself, is getting a bad deal on his wine. If he only knew, he’d hate it so, so much.