Wine Is Classy

As long as you're painting a self-portrait, you may as well make yourself look classy.

Frasier: The wine shop is down to their last two cases of the '82 Chambolle-Musigny. Why don't you dash right down before someone snaps them up?
Niles: You know very well that in 1982 there was a drought in Bourgogne. The locals dubbed it the Year of the Raisin. ^note  Truth in Television, but the few Burgundys that were good, were very very good, including the Chambolle-Musigny.

— Frasier

Whenever a character is shown drinking wine, it's usually a good sign that person is high class or sophisticated (or trying to come off as such), especially if the wine comes from their special private stock. The connotations of this can vary depending on the person. For heroes, wine knowledge can show that the character is an Officer and a Gentleman or a Gentleman and a Scholar, and serves to make the character look more worldly and refined. For villains, wine features prominently in introducing a Man of Wealth and Taste, often sporting A Glass of Chianti. Either way, wine drinkers will almost always be Blue Bloods or obsessive snobs who take it way too seriously. They'll consider it a blasphemy to drink white wine with beef or red wine with fish, pork, or poultry (a "true" wine connoisseur knows it's the other way around).^note There are actually plenty of red wines that go well with fish and white wines with meat, but don't expect the writers to know that. Expect to hear pretentious Sommelier Speak about rare vintages and the soil the grapes were grown in.

This trope varies widely by culture. In most of Western and Southern Europe, particularly in countries with a strong wine-making tradition like France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, wine is viewed as a fairly mundane and commonplace beverage (to the point where wine is served in some McDonald's restaurants), though prestigious vintages and appellations still fit this trope and tend to be expensive (resulting in Conspicuous Consumption in fiction). It's also (in France) almost only drunk during meals, not between, and binge drinking is met with more social disapproval than with beer cultures. This may be an artifact of Roman times when drinking full-strength wine was considered barbaric and it was thus often watered down.

In the New World, wine-making is a relatively recent phenomenon, and its association with the Old World gave it some elitist connotations. While this has lessened, beer and spirits are still viewed as the primary "pedestrian", Lower-Class Lout drinks in the Anglosphere, while wine is still associated with the upper classes, whether it be old money Socialites or Bourgeois Bohemians, and people trying to be like them. Of course, when a hipster orders a $10 organic craft beer, this shows that beer too can be fancy.

Wine has yet to gain the same degree of popularity as beer and sake in the East, but red wine is becoming increasingly popular among the middle class in China due to this trope. China is one of the top ten largest wine-producing countries in the world, though nearly all of it is produced for domestic consumption, and so has yet to gain the same sort of international reputation as major producers like France and Italy. That said, Chinese wine-drinkers have some... odd... ideas about what to do with their wine.

A Sub-Trope of Drink-Based Characterization and Snobby Hobbies. Compare Food Porn, Frothy Mugs of Water (when substituted with "grape juice" for the kids), Expensive Glass of Crap (for when someone tries to pass off cheap wine as the good stuff), French Cuisine Is Haughty (if the wine is French), Smoking Is Glamorous.

A Sister Trope to A Glass of Chianti, wherein a villainous character is putting on airs of being classy, either as part of their persona or for a disguise, by drinking wine. How well this works depends on what they're having, what food accompanies it, and how well other characters know wine and food. Also to Luxurious Liquor, where expensive spirits are used as shorthand for wealth and taste. And Tea Is Classy, where tea is used as a sign of wealth and prestige rather than wine.

This trope can also be inverted by "bum wines", which are the wine counterpart to A Tankard of Moose Urine, but these are much rarer in fiction (despite their ubiquity on store shelves the world over).

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Examples:

Advertising

• Deconstructed in a PSA about drunk driving. One man (dressed in a white shirt and tie) is shown driving around in a Prius filled with wine. Another man (dressed like a "good ol' boy") is shown driving around in a pick-up truck with a cab filled with beer. Both get pulled over by the cops and asked "Sir, have you been drinking?" even as their beverage of choice spills out the window.

Anime & Manga

• Case Closed: A number of episodes, movies, and Original Video Animations have significant plot points concerning the tasting of fine wines:
  • One of the characters in the second Non-Serial Movie, The Fourteenth Target, is an expert sommelier who is able to identify the exact vintage of wine by its sight, smell, and taste. It turns out the sommelier is the culprit, and is in part taking revenge for an accident that robbed him of his sense of taste.
  • Inspector Shiratori, coming from a wealthy family background, is a wine enthusiast himself. The second OAV, "Sixteen Suspects?!", is set at his villa, which has an extensive wine cellar. A bottle of extremely rare wine is broken by one of the guests, and Conan and Hattori have to figure out who did it.
  • At least two of the television episodes involve crimes that take place in or around wine cellars. In one, the murder uses a clothesline to deposit the body of the victim in the middle of the cellar without actually entering himself. In another, an assault victim at a wine-tasting ruins a bottle of fine wine by heating and shaking it up as a message that his attempted murderer has imprisoned him in the cellar.
  • Subverted in that Mouri Kogoro is a heavy drinker, who professes to enjoy fine wine but is completely unskilled in the handling and drinking of it, and (as is revealed when Ran switches bottles on him) is incapable of distinguishing fine wine from cheap wine. He frequently gets drunk on wine, sake, or beer, and ends up with his necktie around his head.
• The ever-classy Big Bad and Bad Boss Frieza from Dragon Ball Z often had a glass of wine with him in flashbacks.
• The manga The Drops of God revolves around the wine community. One story arc features a pair of brothers with dueling wine stores, one fully embraces this trope and stocks mainly high-class French wines, while the other mainly looks for bargain-price everyday wines. The manga is pretty much singlehandedly responsible for creating a renewed surge of interest in wine in Japan. Thanks to the miracle of internet wine ordering, thousands of Japanese people are treated to a charismatic character's opinion of a specific wine and can then go and order those very wines and taste them for themselves. Some winemakers found their orders from Japan doubling or even tripling.
• In Fate/Zero, both Tokiomi Tohsaka, distinguished mage and head of the Tohsaka family who always wears a sharp suit and a form of bow tie, and Gilgamesh, King of Heroes, are prone to doing this. At one point, Gilgamesh starts comparing Tokiomi's and Kirei's taste, stating that Tokiomi has more quantity but Kirei's is better quality. In the Banquet of Kings, Saber, Archer, and Rider drink wine from Gilgamesh's personal treasury out of gold cups as Gilly Boy didn't deem the cask of wine Rider brought as not good enough for kings to drink.
• In Great Pretender, the show's band of noble con men like to drink wine and champagne when they're relaxing on their private island, or hanging out in luxury suites. Protagonist Makoto even gets teased by his teammates at one point for offering them cheap beer.
• France of Hetalia: Axis Powers got one wine-drinking scene in the anime.
• In Hoshin Engi, Chokomei is often seen carrying a glass of red wine, fitting with his sophisticated attitude. When he isn't, he is drinking tea.
• Will A. Zeppeli from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is pretty much never seen without wine. Justified, since wine acts as his weapon of choice.
• In K, the First and Silver King, Adolf K. Weismann, has a glass of wine in his hand in the flashback at the beginning of episode 12, which goes with his sophisticated attire and surroundings to produce this effect.
• Kiddy Grade: Such "grape juice" is a favorite drink of Lumiere's.
• Lupin III: Part II: "The Sleight Before Christmas" has a centuries-old bottle of wine, which is a gift from France to the President of the United States. Lupin declares the president too low-brow to appreciate the wine and replaced it with cheap wine. The joke's on Lupin, though, because the real wine wasn't preserved well, and had become vinegar!
• In Mirumo de Pon!, Murumo is occasionally seen ruminating in a tiny armchair with a wine glass full of juice.
• One Piece:
  • Dracule Mihawk, the world's greatest swordsman, when not out slaughtering pirates, can be seen relaxing at his mansion with a book and a nice glass of red wine.
  • Actually this Trope was parodied early on in the series where a Navy officer tried to impress his date by rhapsodizing about the wine. Since his waiter was Sanji, it naturally didn't end well for him.
  • Crocodile, A Man of Wealth and Taste, was also seen enjoying a nice glass of red wine while the Strawhats and Princess Vivi were his captives.
• Parodied in Yo-kai Watch when Puppiccino inspirits two fifth graders into putting on airs in an attempt at being "mature". While Nate drinks his milk from a juice box, Eddie and Bear drink theirs from wine glasses. They even rate it like it's wine.
• Voltes V: Prince Heinel is the heir to the throne of The Boazanian Empire^note Which is a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of France, and is frequently seen drinking a red/pink liquid in a wine glass.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Pegasus was almost always shown with a glass of red wine, but in the English dub, they changed it to "the world's finest fruit juices".
  • It's called wine in the movie, however. Specifically, he drinks wine spritzers.
  • Rex Godwin drank red wine, but not as often as Pegasus. (Being one of the bigwigs of the Neo Domino city government, he was certainly "classy".)

Arts

• Drinking Bacchus: Very much averted here. When the god of wine himself is depicted drinking wine in such an undignified manner, the viewer isn't supposed to covet wine in the same way. Even worse, the image draws parallels between wine and urine.

Comic Books

• In Grant Morrison's run on Justice League of America, immortal supervillain Vandal Savage is challenged at one point to identify a wine from its taste. He identifies it from the sound of it being poured.

Fan Works

• In The History Boys' fanfic "take my hand, take my whole life too," Posner and Scripps briefly pretend to date. When they decide to figure out a story for how they started dating, Scripps suggested that he probably ordered wine because he wanted to impress Posner even though he hates it and that Posner would have seen through it and made him order a lager instead.
• In two Persona 5 fanfics written by the same author, The Evil Queen and The AFR Universe, Igor can be seeing sipping either red or white wine depending on his mood. What's notable is that he drinks his wine from the Holy Grail that had once been his enemy Yaldobaoth.

Films — Animation

• Anton Ego from Ratatouille is a famous businessman and food critic who enjoys red wine, even holding up a glass in a self-portrait and stopping himself in the middle of a Spit Take. (That's a real wine he's drinking, and indeed way too good to waste like that.)

Films — Live-Action

• Lawrence Jamieson from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels has a very extensive wine cellar — which he never drinks from, as he considers his collection too valuable.
• Dracula (1931): Dracula never drinks... wine. Of course, as an old-world nobleman, he still offers it to his guests.
• In From Russia with Love, Bond is able to identify that the villain Grant is a fraud because he orders red wine with fish.
• So much so in Sideways, almost to the point where there's more about wine than the people. Considering most of the story involves wine lovers touring the wine country, this is to be expected.
• In the "Black Cat" segment of Roger Corman's Tales of Terror, Vincent Price plays a cultured oenophile who gets into an identifying contest with slobbish drunkard Peter Lorre. Price swirls, smells, swishes a taste in his mouth while inhaling - Lorre guzzles back the entire glass, and matches Price glass by glass.
• Wine Country mines a lot of humor from this. The ladies are taking a wine tour throughout Napa Valley but none of them really have the patience for the spiffy Sommelier Speak.

Literature

• In Nineteen Eighty-Four, not only that the members of the Inner Party (the political elite of the totalitarian state) are assigned much better dwellings, clothes, food, coffee, chocolate and tobacco than the members of the Outer Party (i.e. the mere White Collar Workers), but also while the members of the Outer Party drink gin (and the blue-collar proles drink beer!), the members of the Inner Party drink... wine, what else?! When two Outer Party members are invited to share some wine with an Inner Party member, the narration notes that they don't enjoy it much, mainly because they can barely taste it after the stronger drink they're normally accustomed to.
• The Alice Network: René, a Man of Wealth and Taste, shares fine wines with his waitress “Marguerite” as a sign of favoritism, making her deeply uncomfortable. Since Marguerite is supposed to be uncultured, he has to tell her about each wine and its different flavors. This plays into Marguerite’s general sense of Evil Tastes Good.
• The 1861 Book of Household Management explains that the quintessential function of a butler is to curate, maintain, and serve his master's wines, because "Nothing spreads more rapidly in society than the reputation of a good wine-cellar..."
• Discworld:
  • Played with in Carpe Jugulum, where the human subculture of vampires are considered freaks because they file down their teeth, wear bright colors, stay up past noon, and drink... wine.
  • Also played with by Lord Vetinari, who normally drinks water, except in Unseen Academicals where he gets drunk on beer with the footballers. He's mentioned in the same book to not drink wine, and Glenda asks "Do you mean he does not drink wine, or he does not drink... wine?" Also in that book, Glenda comments that she thought only "nobby people" drank champagne, and Pepe corrects her "No. Just people with money, love. Sometimes it's the same thing."
• In one short story of The Dresden Files a servant of Dionysus cites the rise of this trope as a reason why she chose to enchant a batch of MacAnally's beer instead of wine.
• Dzur: Vlad has a meal at a particular restaurant, known for the quality of its meals. Part of the description is trusting the waiters to know which wine goes with which dish. Also:
  To give credit where it is due, my father did know a great deal about wine; certainly more than I know. He once explained to me that anyone can find good wine — all you have to do is pay a lot of money. The reason for learning about wine is so you can find a wine you like without paying a lot of money.
• Gilgamesh in Fate/Zero, being the arrogant king he is, is often shown drinking wine to highlight this fact. His Gate of Babylon also contains a high-class wine cellar with wine vinted by the gods themselves, which he takes out during the "Banquet of Kings" scene because he disdains the modern-day wine that Rider brought.
• Hannibal: The title character is a Man of Wealth and Taste from an aristocratic background with both the education and the nose to appreciate rare wines. His sense of smell is acute enough that he can savor a wine's notes just by pouring a glass and leaving it nearby.
• Honor Harrington's William Alexander is a real connoisseur of the fine vintages and explicitly calls other drinks uncultured and low-class. Played with in that it is his older brother, Hamish, who holds the family title, and he doesn't drink anything except beer. Ham even hangs a lampshade over his brother's love of wine in one of their frequent after-dinner banters.
• In The Irregular at Magic High School, Yuuka both subverts and invokes the trope. She doesn't drink wine (she gets bad hangovers), but when she wants to comfort herself, she pours pinkish rosehip tea into a glass and swirls it around while contemplating stuff, because it makes her look cool.
• Letters to His Son: British statesman Lord Chesterfield wrote his son the one or other time to send him some bottles of hundred-year-old wine, and paid with gold for them.
• Shan from the Liaden Universe walks around with a glass of red wine all the time. Does he even drink from it?
• Lord Peter Wimsey: Wimsey himself exaggerates the trope as a Oenophile^note "wine lover". References come up periodically, such as his asking Harriet Vane to wear a wine-coloured dress and specifying the shade by specifying a vintage in Have His Carcase. It's a major plot point in the short story "The Bibulous Business of a Matter of Taste", in which Wimsey goes undercover as Death Bredon and has his palate tested at a blind tasting; he has to name the producer and vintage (year of production) for a series of wines, some of them quite obscure.
• Nightfall (Series): Prince Vladimir often has a glass of red wine in his hand. He also talks about it and analyses it’s properties.
• Vizzini, in The Princess Bride, sets out goblets of wine and a plate of high-quality cheeses as he waits to confront the Man in Black. Downplayed, though, because Vizzini is both clever and a bit classy - but neither as much as he'd like to believe.
• Rivers of London: It is a running joke in the series that while upper class, posh DCI Nightingale knows a lot about wine and appreciates it, his subordinate PC Grant, born on a council estate, can distinguish red from white and prefers beer.

• In The Wheel of Time, wine is the preferred evening drink for the nobility; poorer classes drink ale.
• Parodied in Who Moved My Soap when the narrator speculates that corporate big-wigs like showing off their sommelier chops more than they like wine itself before suggesting that the reader can be just as snobbish about pruno (or pruneaux).
• X-Wing Series: In Isard's Revenge, Wedge Antilles nearly blows his cover when playing an Imperial officer by asking for the 'green' wine rather than the 'Emerald' as proper classy Imperials would call it. He plays off as having been served by alien 'wait-beasts' for too long and laments that they would try to serve an Emerald with a fish course.

Live-Action TV

• The Columbo episode "Any Old Port in a Storm" stars Donald Pleasence as wine connoisseur Adrian Carsini, who is driven to murder when his playboy half-brother Ric threatens to sell off the family vineyard to a cheap wine-maker. He attempts to keep Columbo off his trail by teaching the detective how to appreciate a fine wine. Adrian's sensitive palate proves to be his undoing: Columbo traps him by serving him a bottle from his own cellar, which he had inadvertently destroyed when he concealed Ric's body down there and turned off the air conditioning, not counting on there being an unseasonably warm day while he was away establishing an alibi.
• Frasier does this. He and Niles were even part of a wine club. In "Cheerful Goodbyes", Niles complains that while Frasier reunites with all his Cheers friends, he's stuck drinking ... "Oh, dear God. It's just labelled 'wine'."
• In Game of Thrones, the wealthy Lannisters are constantly shown sipping wine while discussing their various plots. Due to the medieval setting, however, they don't have a lot of beverage options; everyone drinks wine, except when they're drinking ale. In the original books, they aren't limited to just wine and ale: they have strong spirits. Seamen have rum, and the Night's Watchers have some unspecified strong spirit to keep them warm. But the Lannisters, still, prefer wine, and so do the equally classy Tyrells.
• Inventing Anna: One of Anna Delvey's entourage describes how she was obviously Old Money from her wine orders, always selecting exceptional vintages rather than just ordering the most expensive stuff like Nouveau Riche. Ironically, Anna was a con artist all along.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power:
  • There is no episode without Elrond sipping wine.
  • Kemen tries to convince Eärien to taste the wine his father commanded right from the vineyard near the Meneltarma.
• Subverted by Zoe Lyons in one episode of Mock the Week, where she describes taking a box of wine to a party, and drinking so much of it that she ripped the box open to extract the foil pouch "to play what I like to call the alcoholic bagpipes" (mimes armpit-squeezing the last drops into her glass).
• The animated intro to Mystery!, the sister series of Masterpiece Theatre, featured a widow drinking wine at someone's grave.
• Red Dwarf:
  • Discussed on an episode where Lister complains about "total smegheads" who always drink wine. "What'll you have on your cornflakes, darling? Oh, I'll have some WINE!"
  • Another episode has him recounting his lowest point when he wandered into a wine bar and came close to becoming middle class.
  • And in "Rimmerworld:"
    Head Rimmer: Enough of this heresy. At the stroke of dawn take them out and kill them. And when you've killed them burn the bodies, then bring me the cold ashes on a silver plate with a glass of chilled sancerre.
    Cat: This guy's an animal! Doesn't he know it's red wine with cold ashes?^note There is such a thing as red sancerre, though...
• Zig-zagged in Root into Europe: Mr. Root, a eurosceptic Englishman who judges other countries against the United Kingdom's gold standard, peruses the extensive wine list of a fancy continental restaurant,^note (Truth in Television: the scene is set at La Tour d'Argent in Paris, which at the time had three Michelin stars and a 400-page wine list) but then asks the sommelier for his favourite bottom-shelf table wine.
• Star Trek:
  • On Star Trek: The Next Generation, the ever-classy Captain Picard comes from a family of winemakers and breaks out a bottle of his family's good stuff when he wants to impress a visiting alien dignitary.
  • Inverted with the Klingons, an entire species of boisterous drinkers and brawlers who are rather fond of bloodwine. It is served by the barrel, and is described as twice as strong as whiskey. Worf prefers "young, sweet" bloodwine (which Federation replicators apparently can't do properly; thus his famous preference for prune juice). On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it is shown that bloodwine even has vintages, with General Martok being particularly fond of 2309, which is an even better vintage that what his wife had on hand.
• On White Collar, forger, art thief, and all-around Con Man Neal Caffrey loves wine, as does his millionaire hostess. In fact, he went out of his way to buy a bottle of expensive wine - just the bottle, without the actual wine - which he would then fill with whatever wine he could actually afford at the time for date nights with his wife, just to add a visual touch of class^note - this is very like an actual con that some restaurants and wine dealers have been caught using, re-filling and re-corking bottles from expensive vintages with wine that is, generally speaking, good enough to pass muster but not what the customer thought they were getting. Working stiff FBI agent Peter Burke is a beer man. This comes to a head in an episode when Peter needs to pose as a wealthy wine connoisseur and Neal, horrified that they'll be exposed, tries to step in. Peter rallies, Magnificent Bastard style, and completely snows everyone.

Podcasts

• Cacophony from Jemjammer has to start each session by picking a "mood", and in the first session it drives her to crave classy wine. So she buys a bottle and four goblets for her and the party. And anyone else she can hand the wine off to.

Pro Wrestling

• When not scheduled to wrestle and not in the process of stalking anybody "The Precious One" Gilbert can be found wearing three-piece suits and pouring wine from multiple bottles into a single glass.

Tabletop Games

• In Traveller: Nobles, The Emperor is described as drinking a Hungarian vintage that is shipped all the way from Planet Terra in about a year's voyage. In a subversion, the Sword Worlders consider wine an unmanly drink. A proper Sword World aristocrat drinks Lambic Red beer from the planet of Gungnir, prepared by a special process that has made Sword Worlder beer well-famed.

Theatre

• In The Rose Tattoo, Serafina, proud of having married a baron though she was born a peasant, keeps a stock of Sicilian Spumanti bottles from the house of her late husband's family.

Video Games

• Ace Attorney:
  • In Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Phoenix drinks grape juice while playing poker in the seedy back of some bar, before murder happens. The grape juice bottles prove crucial to the case. And for the record, it was grape juice even in the Japanese version.
  • A variation with the Big Bad of Justice for All, Matt Engarde: when he switches from his breezy Surfer Dude persona to his sharp, arrogant true self, one of the cues is him whipping a glass of brandy out from Hammerspace.
• Inverted in Allods Online with the quest reward item "Three Axes Port", which is a reference to a Russian brand of bum wine. The only thing it does is intelligence drain.
• In Caesar III, only the Idle Rich (dwelling in villas or palaces) drink wine outside of Grand Festivals. Palace-dwellers demand multiple wine options in your city, at least one of which needs to be a foreign import.
• Dracula in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Until he throws the glass on the ground and starts fighting you.
• Civilization VI: Catherine de Medici of France, mistress of culture and espionage, is always seen with a tall glass of champagne. Even during formal declarations of war.
• In Crusader Kings II DLC The Republic, one of the upgrades for the Patrician's palace in a merchant republic is the Wine Cellar, which provides a small boost to your characters' fertility.
• Divinity: Original Sin II has expensive wine that's Better Off Sold (though its mechanical effects are superior to those of normal wine). Additionally, if the Red Prince's Romance Sidequest is completed, he shares an exquisite wine made from the imperial palace's own grapes:
  Red Prince: It's a drink sought after by emperors and artists and philosophers. One bottle such as this can ransom a king.
• Dragon Age:
  • In Dragon Age: Origins, Wine is the only alcoholic beverage that should be offered as a gift to the Cool Old Lady Wynne rather than to The Alcoholic Oghren.
  • Later, in Dragon Age: Inquisition, a minigame has the Player Character collecting more than twenty vintages of wine from across the continent to add to the majesty of their stronghold.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In the series mythology, the symbol of Stendarr, the Aedric Divine God of Justice, Mercy, and Compassion, is wine flowing from a goblet. Within Skyrim, homeland of the Nords, it is instead flowing from a drinking horn.
  • In Oblivion, the city of Skingrad produces especially high-quality and expensive wines. 3E 399 was a famously good year; a master Alchemist can only be bribed with a vintage bottle from each of the city's two best winemakers.
    Gaston Surilie: A once-in-a-lifetime experience... if you can find a bottle.
• Trip in Façade (2005) is kind of a dick on this subject. However, due to his lower-class upbringing, he has a tendency to sneak down to a dingy bar in the bad part of the city and drink beer. He does not like to discuss this.
• Hades features Dionysus, God of Wine, as a minor character. Being set during Classical Mythology, where wine was the main alcoholic drink of note, Dionysus averts this trope by being a hedonistic drunkard. Zagreus can even use Dionysus' wine as a weapon by dipping his weapons in it to give his enemies divinely-inflicted hangovers or throw explosive bottles of wine at enemies that leave behind clouds of alcohol that dizzies them.
• In Katawa Shoujo, Lilly Satou, an elegant and classy lady, takes a liking to wine after her older sister Akira brings some to her best friend Hanako's birthday party, and drinks it on two other occasions in her route. Akira, who is much less refined, says she is more of a beer person. As it is constantly repeated and shown that Lilly being born blind has allowed her other senses to develop far beyond the human average, it is likely that she can derive far more enjoyment from a complex drink like wine (being able to truly appreciate things like texture, temperature, smell, and subtle flavor) than her sister, for whom it's just another kind of alcohol. However, Lilly perhaps enjoys the wine a little too much, and Intoxication Ensues.
• Doctor Chakwas's personal side quest in Mass Effect 2 concerns acquiring a bottle of fancy brandy for her. She offers to share a glass or several with Shepard in gratitude and to honor the fallen.
• In Melody, the girls with the biggest tastes in wine are Isabella, Becca, and Amy, who are the most cultured and sophisticated. Melody drinks more wine as she matures throughout the story.
• Paradise Killer features Yuri Night, who goes to great lengths to act superior to everyone else. The island's bartender Sam Daybreak tells you that Yuri tries to invoke this trope by only ever ordering expensive wine, despite Sam being experienced enough to mix him a custom drink Yuri'd find far more enjoyable. Sam thinks Yuri does this in an attempt to be classy, but it instead makes him look pretentious.
• Zinyak in Saints Row IV has a glass of wine (or the Zin equivalent) when you confront him for the final boss battle.
• Story of Seasons:
  • With the exception of his favorite gift (bouillabaisse), the best presents to offer potential Love Interest Klaus in Story of Seasons (2014) are fruit wines from your personal winery. Not coincidentally, Klaus is the game's resident Gentleman and a Scholar.
  • This is mostly averted in Story of Seasons. Wine is a cheap beverage that the local bars usually serve. Beer and other alcoholic beverages are available in some games, but most characters prefer wine. Harvest Moon 64's Hard-Drinking Party Girl Karen's favorite drink is wine because her parents own a vineyard.
• WildStar's Malvolio Portius, the poster gentleman of the Dominion, has so far never been seen without a glass of "Something Expensive." Presumably, it's the only thing he drinks. Which he does a lot of.

Web Animation

• Inverted with Mori Calliope of hololive, who habitually enjoys red wine, but specifically goes for the cheapest ones and — despite having a proper glass with her avatar — is frequently implied to chug directly from the bottle. Calli insists she can't taste the difference between it and the more expensive stuff (and to boot, neither of them tastes good to her), and her consumption of it is more for her sake in keeping her relaxed.

Web Comics

• In Mandatory Roller Coaster two people on a date are shown to be incompatible because one knows/cares about wine while the other does not.

• Subverted in Rusty and Co. when an effete viscount visits a run-down Bad Guy Bar: he asks for the wine list, weathers a long Beat Panel, and orders a rum and coke instead.
• In Sidekicks Darkslug drinks expensive, classy-sounding wines all the time. We later learn it was to constantly keep his power levels down.
• The Whiteboard: subverted with the wine Cara and Miki bought to celebrate opening their coffee shop, "Epouvantable eaux d'egout, pairs well with microwave burritos and gas station corn dogs."

Web Videos

• The Literal Video version of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" mentions "drinking wine douchebags" as a bunch of preppies make a toast.
• Jacksfilms "Your Grammar Sucks" parodies this by speaking with a wine glass full of water when a commenter takes themselves too seriously (or, frequently, misspelled "college." The first time he does this is for a comment saying I'M IN COLLAGE.)

Western Animation

• Unlike the rest of the party in The Legend of Vox Machina, the sharp-dressed and reserved nobleman Percy only ever drinks wine when they go to taverns while the rest of the party happily chugs ale (and Boisterous Bruiser Grog is enamored with the stuff). He's given ale at one point during a celebration and pours it out as soon as no one's looking.

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