Daylight Snobbery

Sun, May 18 12:45 AM

One of the principal problems with the current food and wine boom is that it has led to the creation of a new kind of snobbery. And once you take the fun out of food and wine and turn them into snobby things that you can show off about, you destroy the whole point of eating and drinking.

Not only do food and wine snobs come across as pathetically insecure creatures, the sort of people who need to drop the names of great wines or fancy foods to retain their confidence, what's worse is that they are nearly always the biggest bores in the room. I will make exceptions for passion.

There are people who are passionate about wine, who have great palates and who delight in discovering new wines. So it is with food.

Sometimes when I hear a Hyderabadi talk about the biryani of the city or I hear a Frenchman explain the strengths of his native cuisine, I recognise that they are not holding forth to impress people. They are genuinely passionate about food.

Years ago, I asked my friend, the prominent British American food-writer Paul Levy, what he would prefer: good sex or a masala dosa. "Oh dear," said Paul.

"That's a tough one." So yes, there are people for whom food and wine have become passions to the extent that their priorities differ from yours or mine.

But they tend to be exceptions. The majority of those who brag about expensive foods and first growth wines tend, alas, to be snobs who drop these names to impress us.

There are more food bores in the West than there are in India, but sadly their number is increasing here, as well. Some common types.

The Olive Oil Bore: In the West, the obsession with extra virgin oil began in foodie circles in the 1980s and spread to a wider audience in the 1990s. Now, it is winding down.

But because we came to the party late, Indian food snobs are still going on about olive oil a decade or so after their Western counterparts. There's not a lot you really need to know about olive oil.

The olive is a Mediterranean fruit so you find olive oil all over the middle east and southern Europe. The Arabs love their oil but are matter-of-fact about it.

The Greeks produce vast quantities of olive oil but were left out of the campaign to make it a snobby food. So Greek olive oil gets sent to France and Italy where unscrupulous traders repackage it as domestically-produced oil.

Much is made of the oil's virginity. In essence, this refers to the method by which the oil is extracted from an olive.

When you cold-press the fruit, you get extra virgin olive oil. After that, a variety of methods (many of them industrial) are used to extract even more oil from the same olive.

These account for the lesser varieties of oil. At first, olive oil bores were content to go on about the distinction between extra virgin and the rest.

Then, they moved to countries of origin (which is a dangerous exercise because of the bogus packaging). Next they moved to regions within these countries ("I love my oil because it comes from Tuscany").

And finally, they moved to estates. Olive oil from certain estates (plantations or orchards) began to be prized more highly and prices rose to astronomical levels.

I do not deny that a good olive oil can be vastly superior to a mediocre one. My only point is: does it really matter that much? Use a very good oil for cooking and you won't be able to taste it.

Use it in a salad and you'll dilute the flavour. The only way to really enjoy a very good olive oil is to have it by itself with a little bread.

But how many olive oil bores do that? And if they don't, is it worth spending so much money on estate-bottled oils? Is it worth boring the rest of us with tales of their expensive oils? The Michelin Bore: As a general rule, if a French restaurant has two or three Michelin stars, you will be guaranteed a good meal. If it has one star, then the quality of the food is less certain.

And if it serves Italian, Indian, Chinese, Thai or any other kind of cuisine, you can throw your guide away, Michelin knows nothing about those cuisines. But because a Michelin star is like Robert Parker's wine marking system (about which, more later), it offers ignorant and taste-dead people an easy way of deciding which restaurant to pick.

You can go to a Michelin starred restaurant in London (say, the over-priced Petrus which now, bizarrely, has two stars) and even if the food is only so-so, you can brag that you had a gourmet meal. After all, the quality of the food has been endorsed by Michelin.

One problem with this approach is that, outside of France, it is the sure sign of a tourist. In New York, for instance, they respect the New York Times more than Michelin.

Even though Gordon Ramsay's restaurant in that city got two stars from Michelin, it struggled because the Times said the food was mediocre and Ramsay had to sack his chef. The other problem is that it is the equivalent of wearing a pair of designer jeans.

You don't know that they fit well or look nice but because some designer has posted his name your bum, you think you will impress everyone. To brag about eating at Michelin starred restaurants (outside of France and especially if the food is not French) is a sign of gastronomic insecurity.

Yet the world is full of Michelin star bores who will tell you about all the two-star (or even three star) restaurants they ate at so that you take them seriously as gourmets. Rarely, if ever, will one of these people say "you know I've found this great little restaurant that nobody has heard of.

" They just don't have the confidence to make up their own minds. The Wine Bore: I have a problem with wine.

I love it. I drink large quantities of it with meals.

But I don't have much of a palate. I'm sure that I would fail any blind tasting and I rarely have the confidence to declare whether one vintage of a wine is better than another.

About all I can do is tell good wine from bad wine. Perhaps my own lack of ability in this area explains why I have such a deep and abiding contempt for wine snobs.

I've met under a dozen people in India who know very much about wine - and an even smaller number who understand how to pair wine with food - but I've also met hundreds of pretentious duffers who act as though they know everything. Go to any wine dinner and you'll see scores of people swilling the wine around their glasses, inhaling deeply and then saying whatever it is that they think they are expected to say.

The general rule: if it is expensive, it must be good. But that's not what wine is about.

If you order a first growth from a great year and the wine is not good then either the bottle has been stored badly or you know nothing about wine. Any fool can see that a great and expensive wine must be good - and many fools do.

Those drinking wines they have not heard of quickly fall back on Robert Parker. He's the world's most influential wine writer and he gives examination-style marks out of 100 for every wine.

So rich people will say things like "this is a 95 point wine," referring to Parker's marks. Once you play this game, you take the fun out of wine.

Most wine (in the Old World, at least) is meant to be drunk with food. Nor do people in wine producing countries only drink expensive wine.

(They'd go broke if they did, given that they drink it every day.) The point with wine is knowing what to drink with which food and in deciding what the best bottle in any given price range is.

It drives me mad when I see people ordering delicate French wines with spicy curries. The chilli will destroy the wine.

It's far better (and cheaper) to choose a lesser-known wine that will pair with the food. But such is the insecurity of wine snobs that they will always order expensive, well-known or Parker-favoured wines, no matter what the occasion or what food they are eating.

Worse still, they will then hold forth. They will brag about how many vintages of Romanee Conti they have drunk (with dhansaak or prawn curry, no doubt) and tell you how special the wine tastes - even though you know that they are only repeating what they've read.

The General Rule: If you love food and wine, you must love it all. If you like caviar, it does not follow that you cannot like bhelpuri.

If you like Chateau Margaux, you must still be able to find virtues in a good bottle of Grover La Reserve. If you like only the expensive stuff, you are a fraud.

Worse still, you are a bore.

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