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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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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.