Jake Kosseff is the company wine director for both Wild Gingers and the Triple Door. He is also one of Seattle’s best-known sommeliers, a household name among winos who pops up in publications both local and national.

Kosseff earned his reputation at now-defunct Cascadia restaurant, a restaurant mentioned far and wide for its excellent wine list. He’s also done time at Campagne and Blowfish Cafe, among other places.

Despite all this, Jake Kosseff is not in any way snotty.

Which is why I had no problem asking him this stupid (and—bonus!—vaguely insulting) question.

You can’t deny it, Jake: Wine people have the reputation for being more competitive and guarded about their knowledge—more so than cocktail and beer people for sure. What’s with the snotty attitude?

That’s easy: Wine people just know more than cocktail or beer people, so it’s harder for us to spit it all out in one quick meeting!

Seriously, I love wine and beer and cocktails, and there’s tons to know about all of them. I think that GOOD wine people, just like beer and liquor people, are very generous about their knowledge. Most of the sommeliers that I have worked with are smart, open, charming people who realize that the best way to get people excited about wine is to share as much information (and only as much information) as a guest wants.

Wine is such a big topic on its own, experts really don’t need to intimidate people, the amount of knowledge associated with it is intimidating even for us. The good thing is that you don’t need to know much to appreciate wine, but wine gets even better the more you know.

So wine folk haven’t earned their reputation for being snotty and exclusive?

There’s some basis to this reputation, though much less than there used to be. Fifteen to 20 years ago, it seemed like snootiness was a prerequisite to working in a fancy restaurant (think tuxedos, white gloves, and people with vaguely continental accents saying “buuut of course”), and the standard-bearer of fine dining was often the sommelier.

That isn’t so much the case nowadays. But, on occasion, there’s still a snooty sommelier to deal with. This is often because they don’t know what they are talking about, and think that they can hide this by being snooty. If you bump into one of these beasts, you should either make fun of him/her mercilessly or go to a different restaurant.