Wine Eliteism Continues to Annoy Me

I think one of my first posts on here was a rant about wine industry members or critics lambasting the wine choices of a majority of American consumers. I believe I was spurred on by a posting on a blog called Vinography. And they are at it again, I think about the same topic as last time: the top wines sold on-premise (i.e., in restaurants).

Here's the blog: http://www.vinography.com/archives/2009/09/who_is_the_average_wine_consum.html

I tried to comment there but I kept getting an error message. So this is what I would have said, were I able to say it:

Isn't this almost the exact same thing you said the last time this list came out? And I have the exact same reaction: I wholeheartedly reject the attitude that the popularity of these wines is "sobering" and that "serious wine lovers... wouldn't be caught dead" drinking these brands.

Maybe it's that sort of elitist element that intimidates these enthusiastic wine consumers from pursuing other brands/varietals or increasing consumption. They are afraid of making mistakes and having "serious wine fans" tell them they are wrong and making hideous choices that they "wouldn't be caught dead" drinking. Or they just don't want to be associated with people who snidely give them backhanded compliments.

It constantly mystifies me how the wine industry wants to grow their base while undercutting the opinion and tastes of the consumers they need to attract. It's like a condescending pat on a child's head, sending them off to bed and then laughing at them after they leave the room.

"Aww, how cute. They like Ecco Domani! Ha ha ha ha ha. Maybe someday they'll learn!"

The wine-intimidated American consumers are never going to embrace a product whose most ardent fanatics are insulting and laughing at them. And until these fanatics and critics and writers can admit that any wine consumption is good wine consumption, regardless of the "status" of that wine, AMerican consumers will be intimidated.

This reminds me of a literature class I took in college. Modern Literature, specifically. One day the discussion centered around whether people reading pop-fiction written at around a fifth-grade level (such as Stephen King) is good or bad for "serious" writers and "acclaimed" novels. I had the same position there as I do now: any consumption is good. There's only so much of one thing a person can find, if they're truly interested, and eventually they will want to try something new. And when they do, there's a whole world for them to explore. And if they happen to find something else they like, their tastes will expand.

It's important to note that their tastes EXPAND, not follow someone else's notion of what's "better." If someone can't stand a wine or a novel, it doesn't matter if it's the most highly regarded wine or novel ever created. They can't stand it and will likely come away from the experience thinking that the critics are jerks who dictate from on high about something ridiculously bad.

I encourage people to enjoy what they like, and to keep on enjoying it regardless of what some "more educated" or "more discerning" critics might sneer at them. And with that, I am off to a third-rate rugby match, which I will likely enjoy as much as I would have if it were a full International squad.

The Rest of Golden Bay

When I wasn't busy being highly creeped out by sheep (see below), I did have a fun-filled day of Golden Bay adventure. Well, not so much adventure as sightseeing, but I wouldn't want to make it sound boring.

I started off by going to a place called Pupu Springs, or Waikoropupu, if you want to get technical. It's the largest spring in Australasia! Enthralling, I know. But, it also has some of the clearest, cleanest water you will see in the world. According to the sign at the place, the only place with clearer water is under an ice shelf on Antarctica or something. I haven't uploaded my pictures, but here's a good idea of what it looks like:

Pretty, isn't it? Apparently people used to be able to snorkel and/or dive at the springs, but there's a really invasive algae that can be transported by not-perfectly-cleaned anything and they've banned it. You can't even put your hand in the water now.

After Pupu Springs, I just sort of drove around. I considered picking up a likely stinky, skinny hippie chick hitchhiker and her groceries, but drove right on past. Then I turned around because she was a skinny hippie chick with groceries standing on the side of a road in the middle of nowhere on a hot day. She was harmless. I took her a few miles to her bike hidden in the bushes up the road. She was, for the record, stinky.

Then I took a wrong turn trying to get to Farewell Spit and ended up near the "Historic Salisbury Swing Bridge." I thought I'd check it out. It was certainly historic. It was built during the gold rush era (1880s), fell into disrepair, fixed, fell into disrepair again, fixed, used after a flood washed out the car bridge in the 80s, fell into disrepair again and supposedly restored in 2004.

(note, not my feet, nor my pictures. Thanks, Flickr!)

Yeah, that didn't seem so "restored" to me. It seemed like two aging planks of wood on a very swingy swing bridge.

I was a bit daunted by the multiple "WARNING: 2 PERSON LOAD LIMIT" signs posted before you got onto the bridge, but I thought it couldn't be that bad. I mean, I was well under the weight limit for skydiving, so surely I wouldn't break a bridge, right? Then I stepped on to the bridge. I've been on swing bridges here in New Zealand before. They are constructed of modern materials, like metal. And they don't swing as much as slightly sway if you move around a lot. This thing started rolling and rocking like that horrible 1940s-era video of that bridge breaking apart in the wind.

I actually got scared. Like, my heart started pounding and and my adrenaline kicked in. Trying to walk over that thing (I would not be defeated by a swing bridge!) was scarier than anything else I've done in New Zealand.

When I was a kid, we used to go to J's Amusements in Guerneville, California every summer. It had a great go-kart track, sometimes had bumper cars, always had a Scrambler and a Tilt-a-Whirl. And they had a roller coaster. The Devil's Coach. The Devil's Coach was a wooden-frame roller coaster that I am almost certain was built in 1923 and left to rot on the grounds of J's Amusements. One of the problems with J's was that it frequently flooded in winter. It seems to me that wood submerged for weeks at a time under water might lose some structural integrity. Yet, every winter, the Devil's Coach sat.

Of course, the owners of J's couldn't just let a big revenue-earning coaster go quiet, so they sold tickets to unsuspecting (and suspecting) children for decades. It wasn't the Devil's Coach, it was the Defying Death Coach. Here's a picture from the top of the sub-par replacement coaster, Mad Mouse (taken years after J's had closed down), which had more or less the same layout:

Each turn at the top of the Devil's Coach shifted the entire structure. The little car felt like it was going to tip over and throw us all to our deaths. It was terrifying, yet thrilling. And dozens of times per summer, I paid $2.50 - $3 for the privilege of possibly hurtling to my death. Maybe this was a snapshot of things to come. The prices got higher and the hurtling to my death options more varied. Like, I guess, jumping out of a plane. I think I've figured out the source of my adventure seeking.

Anyway, the bridge was scary. I moved on quickly. Not so quickly as to test the limits of the rotting, aging planks of wood, but quickly enough. Seriously, though, I don't want to go to that swing bridge again. Maybe I have wood structure-related fears. I'd rather jump out of a plane at 15,000 feet.

After that I went to Wharariki Beach, which was gorgeous and windy. I'll post my own photos of that on facebook in a few days, I guess. Nothing particularly eventful happened that day until I started wandering through paddocks of creepy, terrified sheep.

The Sheepening

Sheep are creepy. Really, they are.

I realize that sounds ridiculous to anyone who has spent longer than three minutes on a farm, or anyone who has seen a sheep, but they are. Especially if you are walking, at dusk, through paddock after paddock after paddock filled with hundreds and thousands of sheep and lambs, all baa-ing at you like crazed, uh... sheep.

I didn't realize sheep had different voices. Some sheep are deep-baa'ed. Some are squeaky baa'ed. Some stare you down like they are contemplating revenge for all the dastardly things done to them by a lonely farmer or lost, drunken tourist. Some run away, stop, stare at you, then run back to where they started, baa'ing like maniacs the whole way through. Some huff and puff like they are making an obscene phone baa'll. (I need pun-aholoics anonymous).

So, I'm in Golden Bay. It's the northwest part of the South Island. It's known for a unique feature called Farewell Spit, which is a really long strip of sand dunes between the bay and the Tasman Sea. It kind of looks like the beak of a kiwi bird sticking out from the land. I had been wandering/driving around Golden Bay all morning, seeing all sorts of things, none of which were Farewell Spit. So, I set off for that location.

It was getting cold and sunset was about an hour away, but I know you can only get about 2.5 kilometers onto the spit before people are no longer allowed to walk on it (it's a marine/bird sanctuary or something). I am not good with kilometers-to-miles conversions, but I think that's about 1.5 miles. An easy walk along the sand and back, I thought. I should have known it wouldn't be easy when I passed the dead shark on the beach.

I can't say it was difficult, but anyone who knows me knows I can get lost going in a straight line. And it may seem nonsensical (equally so to that whole "sheep are creepy" thing) that I could get lost walking on a narrow strip of sand that starts on land and finishes in water, but I managed it.

I saw a sign (and it opened up my eyes, I saw the sign! okay, ending bad 80s tunes interlude). The sign said "Fossil Point" and had an arrow. I read a little about this -- it's a bunch of fossils stuck in rocks or something. It sounded more interesting than the bit I was walking along, which was a bunch of broken shells and occasional pools of water, dead sharks or a live bird or two.

I realized that I was walking from Inner Spit (bay side) to Outer Spit (sea side). Cool. I'd see more ocean, fossils and go home. I got to Outer Spit and it was equally uninteresting to inner spit (there weren't even birds on this side, just dunes. I like waves, but there are better beaches just over the rocky outcrop). I walked along the beach, sunset quickly approaching, hoping to see some sort of indication of where the path back to the carpark (or parking lot, in American) would be. There wasn't any. After about 45 minutes I noticed a tiny little red circle sign. Surely that was marking something. It was -- "BEWARE: THERE IS QUICKSAND ALONG THE ROCKS AT FOSSIL POINT."

So, I'd been walking for like 1.5 hours to see impressions of old dead things in rocks and I'd have to brave quicksand to do it? No thanks. I've seen old dead things in rocks before. And, for that matter, birds on sand. On a positive note, I guess, the gale-force winds blowing sand into my face did provide me with a really cheap exfoliation treatment? This was definitely not the highlight of Golden Bay.

So, after tramping a while through dunes and forest, I finally reached the "carpark -- 25 minutes" sign. Through the sheep farm. This is where sheep get creepy. At first it was cute, all the little lambs frolicking in the meadows. I took some pictures, thinking, "this is so stereotypical New Zealand!" Then the sheep started looking a little ragged, like they'd been handled by deranged sheep shearers (pictures available soon, when I can upload them). Patches of bald sheep, wool hanging off their haunches. Then they started baa'ing. I think they were warning each other, or forming an attack plan.

A few sheep baa'ing isn't scary, I know. But it starts getting weird when there are a dozen sheep baa'ing. Then really weird when it's like 50. When there are hundreds of sheep baa'ing at you from near and far, the sun has set and you're miles away from anyone, walking through acre upon acre of sheep paddock -- it's creepy.

I am not talking deathly, mortifying fear here, like if someone were holding a gun to my head or the Dodgers winning the World Series, but it wasn't comfortable. I felt like I'd stumbled upon the beginnings of a really bad kiwi horror movie (I later found out there is a NZ horror movie called "Black Sheep" about evil, human-attacking sheep).

The thing is, too, you're just sort of wandering through the paddock. There's not a trail or anything, just a guess as to where the next gate will be across the way. And the sheep don't really seem to like people randomly wandering through their home. Some of them were chill, but most of them were baa'ing like I was taking my pet wolf pack for a walk. Add in the weird bird noises and the hundreds of geese and ducks calling each other, it was just all a bit off.

I can't really say anything eventful happened. Mostly just walking through being creeped out and keeping my eye out for the heavy breathing sheep moms (they seemed a bit dicey). The only time I was in actual fear was when I got to the cattle paddock. There were about a dozen cows and calves. Unlike the sheep, who baa'ed manically and ran around randomly, the cow babies grouped themselves and seemed to be running toward me. I was afraid of a full-on calf stampede. They just sort of swarmed around me while I walked through, at this point in sight of the car. I reached the car, finally feeling safe, when I rounded a corner and nearly hit an escaped cow. It grunted and moved away.

I realize this is an anti-climatic ending, but I was talking about creepy sheep. What did you expect would happen?