Olivia Pope is drinking wine all wrong

Olivia Pope may be Washington's best (and most fashionable) fixer, but there's one thing she doesn't have handled: how to drink wine properly.

As Vulture points out, The New York Times' Eric Asimov has a bone to pick with Scandal's Olivia, who claims to be a wine expert, but actually swigs like a college freshman with a bottle of Barefoot:
Olivia treats even the finest wine as if it were a can of beer. She habitually grabs goblets by the bulb rather than the stem, as a wine lover would. She never swirls and sniffs, the ritual that non-wine drinkers alternately find amusing, affected or annoying. She guzzles rather than sips.
An astute observation or yet another dig at creator Shonda Rhimes from the Times?

You can judge for yourself:



The Good Wife's Alicia Florrick is a better model of drinking habits on TV, Asimov says. Although she also guzzles her vino, she "makes no claim to care about the nuances as a connoisseur would."
She drinks wine simply for its alcoholic effect. But Olivia? It can’t be mere carelessness that blinds writers to her lack of technique. There are wine lovers even in Hollywood who would note such behavioral inconsistencies. It must be a matter of choice by the writers.
Don't know about you guys, but all this talk of wine is making us thirsty.