Joel Stein on wine

In the LA Times last week, Joel Stein had an article about wine that attempts to pump up the populist mob against wine snobbery. While I am all in favor of demystifying wine, this article is the wrong way to do it. The attempt here is to make fun of wine writers, especially in how they describe wines by giving "a long list of obscure smells."
I agree that wine writers and commentators should concentrate more on the structure and balance of wine and less on their nuances. The real problem is that wine writers are attempting to do the impossible and so they are always failing and always going to fail. Describing flavors and taste sensations shows nothing so much as the limits of language, as does describing music or art.
So a writer fishes around to give ever more detail in an effort make a complete picture. In their attempt they describe a potential, not unlike a connect the dots picture. The drinkers job is to fill in the dots. The writer often tries, perhaps too hard, to make as many dots as possible.
Mr. Stein has found a writer in Gary Vaynerchuk who he likes. I congratulate both of them for finding each other. Everybody should try and find a writer who's explanations and descriptions seem to speak to them. Like wines themselves the question is often not one of quality but of taste. Find a writer who is to your taste, and find wines that are to your taste, and every once in a while try something unusual (in writers and wines) and widen your horizons.
It is easy to make fun of Robert Parker, and he can handle it, but there was a time when he was breaking the mold. Back then wines were described in terms of women, by the old british wine press. Everyone made fun of them when Parker came around, just as people make fun of Parker now.
Since we have no real wine culture in this country, there is always extra hand holding involved in wine writing. Where there is more common experience, there is short hand that everyone understands. The real task at hand is for people to drink more wine and more interesting wine. The real job of a wine writer is to encourage people to do this. Mr. Stein fails at this.
By the way Roald Dahl, who Stein quotes as dismissing the wine writer snobs, has a blurb on the back of Parker's book that seems to me to be quite favorable.