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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 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.
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.
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