Pretentious About the Subjective

After searching for a new job, I think I've come across the perfect low-stress job that perfectly plays into my skills as a professional shoveler of nonsense and smug superiority, a sommelier. For those who don't know, a sommelier is a person who snobbishly proclaims to know which wines from what year taste the best and what wine pairs with what food. In other words they take something subjective, like taste, and try to attribute an empirical knowledge to it. Or to simplify it even more, they're well-paid winos. 

The only real skill is to master the language. "Oh an '87 Pinot from the Rhone region of France with earthy tones and notes of cocoa will unlock the savory smokiness of the filet while preparing your palette for an onslaught of flavor the likes of which elude the greatest of this world's poets, transporting you through the ethereal miasma unto a new plane of understanding. Please, sniff the glass first. We taste with all our senses."

Saying it like that sounds a lot better than, "I dunno, the meat is red, go with a red one." 

Not to de-mistify the profession, but there have been studies where they put leading wine "experts" and had a taste test, asking them to choose blindly which tasted better. When they knew the price, they chose the more expensive kind, but without any knowledge, going into it blind, they chose the cheap stuff, but even more telling, there was no overlap in their ranking. 

It's like asking a group of Feng Shui experts to decide the singular source of your home's chi. Or like asking a group of porn stars the optimum sexual position for pleasure.

Sometimes, because you do something a lot, you are better at it than the average person (like blogging, uh thank you), but you certainly can't tell someone else how to best enjoy themselves. There are some things we can't know. How other people experience things is one of them. 

Sommeliers and Cigar Aficionados have a lot in common. Both are smugly superior about cancer-inducing habits that are purely subjective. Perhaps if I was more interested in spending my time cultivating fake "knowledge" of something that's completely non-quantifiable, perhaps I too could be a "foodie" or movie aficionado. 

Yeah, he's fun to hang out with. I bet his porn is Food and Wine magazine. Source

You know what's missing, the void I can fill? Chip sommelier (Crisp aficionado if you're in the UK).
I mean, that's the life. You can be called an expert without really having to prove it with empirical evidence. 

"To best take the oral journey of that ham sandwich I recommend the sea salt and vinegar ruffled potato chip from the Milwaukee region preferably made from the potatoes harvested in May as the rain which fell in March and April helped grow a blend organically baked with spices that were cross-pollinated during that time and the master bakers were all suffering from massive depression which caused them to infuse the chips with their beer burps giving it a malty flavor and bringing out the honey notes of the ham blending it effortlessly with the Swiss cheese and deli mustard."

If you'll excuse me, I need to now go eat a ham sandwich and cram fist fulls of chips in my word hole, you know, for practice.