I think the easiest place to see it is in liquor. I was out to dinner the other night and I overheard a woman order a "blueberry Stoli and club soda" and I kind of laughed. Why? There's nothing behind my disdain for it. Her companion ordered a Grey Goose and tonic - and my basic thought was "I'm not sure if there's any vodka that you'll taste through the quinine, but go ahead add order something expensive."
The point I came back to was that I don't even like liquor - most of it tastes just god awful - but for whatever reason: I have an opinion about it, borne out of an imagined "expertise", from reading websites or magazine.
I put expertise in quotes because it isn't even expertise - it's just a set of someone else's preferences and opinions that I've chosen to remember.
At the root of it is two things (or really, about 1.5 things): authenticity and some kind of anti-corporate sentiment.
The quest for authenticity I've come to think of as a kind of insecurity - it is about anchoring yourself to something you feel is real. When people talk about authentic things, they frequently use this language of anchors - family and place.
Anti-corporate is related to authenticity, in that corporate things are not authentic and are rootless and soulless and anonymous. But I think it's also represents something quite different, too. There's this judgment - at some point, when authentic things become successful, the maker doesn't deserve my money anymore. It's this mix of jealousy/envy and charity.
It's hard not to see the Marxian alienation of labor in these feelings, but I don't want to talk about that.
I think this applies to a lot of areas, but I think it pretty much covers all alcohol. Beer is pretty bad about this - the microbrew/macrobrew dichotomy.
Wine is worse. People drink for different reasons. It can be chasing a particular feeling - whether that feeling is drunkenness or a sense of self/security. I look at my collection of wine - "the good stuff" is kept tucked away, and it is about 97% Washington (in about 100 bottles, I think there's 2 or 3 that are non-Washington). I like Washington wine for a variety of reasons - you can get similar level of wine for 1/2 the cost of Napa or France), but it is also about identity and a sense of self - "This stuff comes from the same soil as me."
I don't know where I was going with this. I guess it's that people choose or don't choose something for a variety of reasons, and a quick way to being a remarkably unhappy human being is feeling either upset or smugly superior at these really minor choices other people make.
