Is wine just a beverage?

• Nestor Ruiz
• Is it time we stopped romanticizing wine?

Oenophiles can get carried away pretty quickly, and wine gets elevated to something beyond fermented grapes in a glass. That’s how you end up talking about stinky diapers and spitting out perfectly good wine into a bucket. But leave it to the good folks at Costco to keep us all grounded.

Eater recapped a CNBC special where Annette Alvarez-Peters, the lead wine buyer for the mega retailer, gave her bottom line on wine. Alvarez-Peters suggested that wine is not really different from tinfoil or toilet paper. Her explanation? “It’s a beverage.”

With coffee and beer in the midst of a craft explosion, should we stop placing such a premium on wine? Is it time we just considered it one of the beverage options that awaits us?