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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34397 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Do wine connoisseurs enjoy The Rings of Power?

AKA, is wearing skin suits actually a virtue?

The question is prompted from the Scott article, as well as the discussion of said article here. Not to call out any user, but I find some of these responses illustrative:

From FiveHourMarathon

But even more on point, to a wine aficionado, saying you don't appreciate good wine is just like saying to me that you would sooner buy a Lay-z-Boy recliner than an Eames lounger. If you don't see the difference, you just aren't one of our sort, which is a small subset of people but it's one to which I belong. I recall an argument here before where an interlocutor (since departed) told me that he saw no difference between consuming LibsOfTikTok and reading Marx's Kapital, I remember thinking this is just such a disconnect there's no way to even explain it.

A more Motte-ish analogy to the different studies Scott cites here: take three authors, Scott Alexander, Stephanie Meyer, and Honoree Jeffers. Scott cites studies where mass consumers are given different wines, if you gave mass book consumers passages from the works of each of those three authors most would prefer Meyer. Scott cites studies in which experts were given wines, if you gave literary experts passages from each they'd pick Jeffers every time. Yet I'd pick Scott every time, and there's a subset of people who would pick Scott who I align with, and to call literary skill "fake" is an absurd (repugnant?) conclusion.

I'd argue that wine is no more fake than literature.

From Paracelsus

I'm with you, and in fact this is the thread that finally got me to stop lurking on the new site and set up an account (under a different name, not that I posted a lot or was well-known on the sub beforehand).

I think what a lot of people here, Scott included, are missing is that wine is not just about the taste. In the same way that literature is not just about the plot. The style of the prose, which gives the book structure, usually matters much more than the story itself. And the background behind the work--the circumstances in which it was written, and when and where and why the author wrote it--also contribute to the importance of a work. Sum up Moby Dick in a sentence or two and it doesn't sound very interesting. But actually reading it is an entirely different experience.

Wine is basically the same way. The taste matters, of course. Nobody wants to drink a bad wine. But for a wine lover, it's just as important to explore WHY it tastes that way... what the winemaker chose to do, how that year's vintage compared to the year before, where the vineyards are, how the climate at the vineyards affects the growing conditions, whether the winery has been around for 30 years or 500.

Not everybody needs to care about these things... there's nothing wrong with buying an $8 wine, or a $30 or $70 big-brand wine without much character to it. There's nothing wrong with reading Dean Koontz or John Grisham or James Patterson novels either! But there's so much more depth out there, for those who are interested, and that transcends far beyond just the actual flavors in the wine.

Both these arguments, to me, seem to argue in favor of The Rings of Power. It does not matter that anyone who watched the show and read the books could identify that they are not related in any way aside from labeling. Labeling, and what it implies is POWERFUL and should affect your experience. Shut up and drink the $2000 wine, its good because the label says it is. Just like ROP is good because it has the LOTR label. We should ignore the actual show, its writing, CGI, etc deficiencies because it has the label, and that label has history and work behind it.

But, from my POV, I find I prefer the opposite. I only wish to give prestigious labels to things I consider prestigious. Marvel studios has lost the right to call its outputs Marvel. Star Wars is not. ROP is not Tolkien. They are all inferior products wearing skin suits of better brands that they happened to have the money for. Why wouldn't wine be the same? Surely I acknowledge that is the truth in my libation of choice: Beer. Goose Island is dead to me as a brand despite being one of my favorites earlier in life. They simply have gone the Rings of Power path. I can taste it. I don't know when it happened, but it has, most of their beers are now gross. Why couldn't the same have happened to a French winery founded in 1273?

Goose Island is dead to me as a brand despite being one of my favorites earlier in life. They simply have gone the Rings of Power path. I can taste it. I don't know when it happened, but it has, most of their beers are now gross.

I know what happened: they got purchased by AB-Inbev, their beer production got scaled up, and their supply chain probably also got reworked. The reason why places like Goose Island or Elysian agree to be purchased by AB-Inbev is usually so they don't have to brew their most popular beers, but can outsource it to the machinery of the multinational conglomerate. Supposedly that means they can experiment and try new things in their existing brewery.

they got purchased by AB-Inbev

Ahh. Of course.

The reason why places like Goose Island or Elysian agree to be purchased by AB-Inbev is usually so they don't have to brew their most popular beers

The reason people sell their companies to multinational conglomerates is money, any other reason is a post-hoc justification to save face.

I don't see where in those quoted passages you're getting a message like "Shut up and drink the $2000 wine, its good because the label says it is." It's more like "I personally am one of those people who will shut up and drink the $2,000 wine and think it's good because the label says it is. Other people might feel differently, but that doesn't make my experience of enjoying the goodness of that wine any less real." So for Rings of Power, the analogous message to me would be something like:

I personally will ignore the actual show, its writing, CGI, etc deficiencies because it has the label (and the Objectively Correct Moral Message), and that label (and Message) has history and work behind it. This doesn't mean that anyone else has to see it this way, just that my view of this show's goodness is genuine and not fake.

FWIW, I'm one of those people whose palette thinks that the quality of wine caps out at around $20/bottle.

That's more charitable than OP, but I think the message of my comment is more like: "Some groups of people enjoy certain things. They're allowed to do that, just like I'm allowed to enjoy things that I like. If the reasons I like the things I like are unintelligible to you, that doesn't indicate that I'm wrong or my taste is fake or I'm a bad person or the producer of the things I like is a bad person; it merely indicates that we don't share tastes or possibly other affiliations that likely correlate with taste." If someone is experiencing joy at engaging with something, who is anyone else to tell them that they are not enjoying it? People are allowed to have fun. If you don't enjoy it, shrug and move on. De gustibus non est disputandum. Some people prefer the cucumber pickled.

There are definitely cases in which provenance of a piece of literature matters to me. I'm more interested to read Homer than I ever would be to read an AI pastiche of Homeric poetry, for a million reasons that if I have to explain them aren't worth the effort.

I haven't watched RoP, or The Hobbit movies, or any of the Marvel films; I'm fairly certain I wouldn't enjoy them from what I've heard of them so I avoid them. If other people enjoy them, that's their business, not mine; but it might indicate we won't get along. I can't imagine being stuck dating a Disney Adult. If someone else liked the Silmarillion, we'll probably get along.

@anti_dan if you're going to quote me unfavorably have the decency to tag me.

Yeah, how does one do that?

I have heard of Stephanie Myers. I had not heard of Honorée Jeffers. What does that tell us, if anything? My tastes are indubitably low-brow? But I haven't read any of her books or seen the movies, I know of her by all the publicity and advertising around her works.

There's a very old proverb: "Good wine needs no bush". If the wine is good, then yeah you want to know "how did this wine turn out good rather than that wine, what went into its creation?" But that's something that the owner of vineyards who grows the grapes and the winemaker who turns those grapes into wine wants and needs to know, not the drinker of the wine. "Exploring what the winemaker chose to do, how that year's vintage compared to the year before, where the vineyards are, how the climate at the vineyards affects the growing conditions, whether the winery has been around for 30 years or 500" is just snobbery if taken to extremes. "Mmmm I never drink any vintage if the winery is not a minimum of two hundred years old" may be a decent rule of thumb - or it may be a stuck-up snob who really couldn't tell the difference if you switched the labels. The same experiment on cheaper wines can tell you as much as the best ones. In the end, it really is the taste that matters, and not if the owner wore his lucky socks that spring morning when he went out to look at the east slope where he intended to plant the new vines in the misty sunrise.

The main fault of the "Rings of Power" is that it is bargain-shelf wine with a grand cru appellation slapped on. The budget went on designing showy labels and getting fancy bottles for the cheap and needs to be drunk fast contents. The outside looked great, but when you started drinking it, somehow the taste was all wrong. Being told "but it's so faithful to the spirit of the books! but Tolkien's work needs to be brought into the modern world!" doesn't and can't hide that this stuff is better used in cooking than enjoyed on its own.

The main fault of the "Rings of Power" is that it is bargain-shelf wine with a grand cru appellation slapped on. The budget went on designing showy labels and getting fancy bottles for the cheap and needs to be drunk fast contents.

Bingo.

Further more I'd suggest that this is especially galling for a lot the older (pre-Peter Jackson film) fans as Tolkien's work itself was if anything the opposite. Outwardly cheap simple and unassuming, but with a lot going on under the surface that rewarded repeat visits and those who took their time.

Well, brad is brand because of the history of success. If someone claims “I’m brand X” but you know really they are “Brand Y” that it doesn’t matter how much they spend trying to appear to be “Brand X.”

"Depth" is just what people call it when they don't understand bad writing. "Character" and arguing over why your wine tastes like cat piss is likewise an exercise for the middlebrow strivers trying to look sophisticated. Most (not all) of both literature and wine (and whiskey, and film, and painting etc.) is bullshit marketing and nobody really enjoys most of the work. They claim enjoyment to gain supposed status, and entrance to those "elitist" groups of middlebrow, midwit, middle class schlubs aping a cartoon of old-timey rich people.

On the contrary, "depth" is a quality of good writing. What happens is that bad writers try to emulate the the motions of good writers without understanding the mechanisms behind them and thus mistake obscurantism and "shocking plot twists" for depth.

See the old copy/pasta about Sherlock vs Anton Chigurh

Why is Sherlock so bad? Because it's a show about smart people written by idiots.

Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men is a smartly written character. When Chigurh kills three people in a hotel room he books the room next door so he can examine it, finding which walls he can shoot through, where the light switch is, what sort of cover is available, etc... This is a smart thing to do because Chigurh is a smart person who is written by another smart person who understands how smart people think.

Were Sherlock Holmes to kill a hotel room full of three people. He'd enter using a secret door in the hotel that he read about in a book ten years ago. He'd throw peanuts at one guy causing him to go into anaphylactic shock, as he had deduced from a dartboard with a picture of George Washington carver on it pinned to the wall that the man had a severe peanut allergy. The second man would then kill himself just according to plan as Sherlock had earlier deduced that him and the first man were homosexual lovers who couldn't live without each other due to a faint scent of penis on each man's breath and a slight dilation of their pupils whenever they looked at each other. As for the third man, why Sherlock doesn't kill him at all. The third man removes his sunglasses and wig to reveal he actually WAS Sherlock the entire time. But Sherlock just entered through the Secret door and killed two people, how can there be two of him? The first Sherlock removes his mask to reveal he's actually Moriarty attempting to frame Sherlock for two murders. Sherlock however anticipated this, the two dead men stand up, they're undercover police officers, it was all a ruse. "But Sherlock!" Moriarty cries "That police officer blew his own head off, look at it, there's skull fragments on the wall, how is he fine now? How did you fake that?". Sherlock just winks at the screen, the end.

This is retarded because Sherlock is a smart person written by a stupid person to whom smart people are indistinguishable from wizards.

Most (not all)

Good wine, bad wine, fancy wine, cheap wine - as long as we're talking about red wines, more than one glass will inevitably give me a headache (like an instant headache, not hangover headache) anyway. Beer for me, too.

I don't see the connection you make between the wineposting and RoP as going in the direction you posit. Indeed, this section;

But for a wine lover, it's just as important to explore WHY it tastes that way... what the winemaker chose to do, how that year's vintage compared to the year before, where the vineyards are, how the climate at the vineyards affects the growing conditions, whether the winery has been around for 30 years or 500.

Makes me think that if one of these such labels were bought by some mass-production soulless conglomerate, and as a consequence massively declined in quality, high status wine connoisseurs would be slating it left and right for (to them) easily detectable differences. Whereas all the people who only buy it because the name carries status would carry on none the wiser. This seems more in line with the nerd-vs-consumer distinction that I recognise.

Shut up and drink the $2000 wine, its good because the label says it is.

OP never says anything like this. They say that there's nothing wrong with generic wine, but that there is a world of wine minutiae to explore if you're willing to get into it.

It does not matter that anyone who watched the show and read the books could identify that they are not related in any way aside from labeling. Labeling, and what it implies is POWERFUL and should affect your experience.

The impression I got was that they are willing to spend a lot on certain vineyards because the wine they produce has qualities the OP finds worthwhile, not that the vineyards are worthwhile because of their brand name.

I'm not a wine person; I don't tough alcohol at all due to a familial history/predisposition to substance addiction. But I do have hobbies, and I understand that with any hobby there are vast differences in the understanding of a layman, intermediate hobbyist, and high-level hobbyist. The same goes for entry-level versus high-end equipment. I'm not an audiophile or photographer, but I can accept that when they drop thousands on top-of-the-line equipment, they're doing it because it makes a difference to them.

That doesn't mean you can't get enjoyment out of things at a laymen or entry level. To be honest, the effort to reward ratio of many hobbies seems better at the entry level, when you know enough to enjoy yourself but not enough to know what you're missing. But I can believe someone when they say the 2000 dollar camera has qualities the 200 dollar one doesn't. Same goes for this subject for me. I don't think this makes someone a slave to brands or whatever you're saying.

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