The Case for Wine Porn

Lately I've found myself sitting alone and obsessing over lurid wine photos. Is that wrong? Or should Wine Porn be normalized?

Over the past few days, I’ve found myself sitting alone, the glare of computer light washing over me, as I obsess over Wine Porn. I’m not proud. But indulging in this particular fetish does provide an escape from my own, somewhat vanilla, wine life. Moreover, a person’s ongoing dalliance with wine porn should not, I argue, be held against them or used to suggest they are bad people

As with the more common form of pornography, Wine Porn has become easily accessible today via the Internet. Pre-Internet, if you wanted to obsess over images of the rarest, most expensive, most coveted wines you had to find those specialty publications that acted as the gatekeepers of salacious renderings of Petrus, PIngus, Grange, and Romanee Conti.

The Wine Spectator, Decanter, Wine Enthusiast, and other specialty magazines provided usually highly stylized presentations of these bottlings for those of us that read the magazines “for the articles.” These publications were the Playboys of wine porn. Occasionally the Wine Spectator would give us a picture of L’Ermitage all uncorked and open, but for the most part, the wine porn was respectably rendered.

If, in the pre-Internet days, you wanted to saturate yourself with these images you had to seek out the Hustlers and Penthouses of wine porn: Auction catalogs. Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Butterfield & Butterfield were the best sources. When you ordered these catalogs from the Auction houses they would come in a non-descript envelope. What you sought was usually right there on the cover and filtered liberally throughout the glossy pages: in-your-face images of unattainable beauties and renderings of exotic bottlings sitting lazily on their boxes or shot close up for one to covet and fantasize over. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise…the “estimated value” of each wine pictured was part of the appeal.

This has all changed with the Internet. Today, wine porn is user-generated, abundant, comes in numerous categories, and is as salacious and raunchy as you desire.

My go-to wine porn site is the “Cult and Fine Wine Drinkers & Appreciators” private Facebook group. You can find it all here. Whatever you want. The group consists of roughly 1,500 obsessives. The members are, to no one’s surprise, roughly 90% male. The thing that originally attracted me to this group was its title: “…Wine Drinkers and Appreciators”. I like the acknowledgment right there in the title that not everyone is in a position to indulge in the lurid acts often depicted in photo after photo, but rather count themselves as merely “appreciators”. Let’s face it, most of us are just voyeurs and aren’t in a position to participate in the lifestyle.

The range of wine porn styles has expanded significantly since the Internet tore down the gates and let ordinary wine perverts get in on the action of publishing. As you scroll through photo after photo at the “Cult and Fine Wine Drinkers & Appreciators” private Facebook group you’ll find wine exposed in all manner of undress and positions.

There is “the undressing” where group members snap photos of wine just emerging from the brown boxes in which they came. There are “The Coupling” shots where usually two similarly unattainable wines are pushed up against one another, juxtaposing various different aspects of their character and appearance. “The Caress” is a genre of wine porn in which a participant lays hands on a particularly rare bottle, usually exposing only their hand gingerly embracing the bottle with label on full display. “The Orgy” is also a common category. Here the object is to show the aftermath of an evening of vinous carnality that includes perhaps a dozen or more of the most expensive, rare, and coveted wines on the planet. There is a bit of the “look-what-I-did” character to these garish photos. But they draw you in despite the mess that has been made.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of the categories of images that have developed in the wake of ordinary wine geeks taking over the wine porn trade.

There is a commonality to all wine porn that makes it wine porn, that makes it different from food porn, and makes it similar to traditional pornography. The subject, the bottles…they must be unobtainable to the average wine perv.

I’ve never participated in the generation of wine porn meant for members of my private Facebook group. But were I to, I think I might create a salacious image of Barefoot Merlot and Josh Cabernet, both completely uncorked, sitting on a candlelit table just a bit too close to each other with a wine glass in the background and a drip of red wine running down each label. I like satire and this image, though composed in traditional wine porn style, would be completely antithetical to the genre. You can’t create wine porn out of a bottle that can be found in any grocery store, let alone a 7-11.

There is not much value in wine porn. It is created primarily for the purposes of titillating like-minded geeks who share similar desires and proclivities and therefore not widely indulged in. For this reason, it needs to be shared in a semi-private venue where those who don’t understand the attraction or won’t admit to the same attraction can’t disrupt the party by dismissively assigning judgments like “label sniffers”, “point chasers” or worse. And there is worse. More than ever before there is a contingent within the wine community and among wine lovers that aren’t just dismissive of those that celebrate the most famous wines, barely obtainable wines, but insist the folks that do are the worst kind of snobs and dilettantes that give wine lovers a bad reputation.

No one, especially me, will attempt to argue that sharing lurid, sloppy wine porn among fellow aficionados, ought to be mainstreamed. It is a habit that, if indulged in too frequently, creates the possibility of making appreciation of normal wine difficult and this isn’t beneficial to anyone. However, taken in smaller doses and for purposes of momentarily scratching an itch, indulging in Wine Porn should be seen as a perfectly normal and healthy part of a wine life.