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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
From Paracelsus
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?
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.
Ahh. Of course.
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The reason people sell their companies to multinational conglomerates is money, any other reason is a post-hoc justification to save face.
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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:
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?
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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.
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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.”
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"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.
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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.
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I don't see the connection you make between the wineposting and RoP as going in the direction you posit. Indeed, this section;
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.
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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.
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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