From The New Yorker, another volley against the anti-pleasure elite

My own critiques although I enjoyed the article - thank you for the link. I might tone down the elitist tone of the article - which suggests this is a battle of one view of wine elitism versus another form. (Well, maybe it is.). And I don’t find “challenging, that its appeal is more cerebral and gastronomic than carnal and epicurean” to be much different than the false dichotomy that Parker advanced between hedonism and intellectualism. There is also no suggestion here that there is a middle ground. Which there is. Then, there is the choice to cite Lettie Teague....

BUT it’s good to see his points being made by someone who can write well and is mainstream. Personally, given the pricing trends in the wine market, I’m happy to see a (fanatic) generation of wine drinkers gravitate toward a category that has little interest to me.
 
I'm more than willing to believe the wines the author tried were lousy wines. I'll even grant him that their lousiness was connected with their being natural. But what's with his antipathy to orange winex, which really do come in a lot of styles. The writing was cute, but nothing to write home about, as they say.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
I'm more than willing to believe the wines the author tried were lousy wines. I'll even grant him that their lousiness was connected with their being natural. But what's with his antipathy to orange winex, which really do come in a lot of styles. The writing was cute, but nothing to write home about, as they say.

Completely agree. And excellent writing is altogether another thing. Decent magazine journalistic writing, maybe. But singling out any one wine style because you didn't like the few wines you had is ludicrous.
 
originally posted by mark e:
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
From The New Yorker, another volley against the anti-pleasure eliteBut well written, and it's hard to disagree with much.

Sure you don't mean that is hard to agree with much? And, yes, agree with Jayson that any article that cites Lettie Teague casts doubt on the author of the article. But writing well and being right are two very different things.

Lettie Teague is no doubt a handicap, though he doesn't cite her admiringly. I think the writer makes a fundamental point about the esthetic appeal of ugliness to a rebelling generation. Young hipsters loving VA and bret as a sign of non-conventionality, etc. A friend of mine's daughter asked him to bring back from New York a pair of Nike or Adidas shoes. He asked her which pair to choose. She said "pick the ugliest one you can find and bring me that." That mode of thinking resonates across media, from Siouxsie all the way to Basquiat. Passing through Lucy Margaux.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
originally posted by mark e:
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
From The New Yorker, another volley against the anti-pleasure eliteBut well written, and it's hard to disagree with much.

Sure you don't mean that is hard to agree with much? And, yes, agree with Jayson that any article that cites Lettie Teague casts doubt on the author of the article. But writing well and being right are two very different things.

Lettie Teague is no doubt a handicap, though he doesn't cite her admiringly. I think the writer makes a fundamental point about the esthetic appeal of ugliness to a rebelling generation. Young hipsters loving VA and bret as a sign of non-conventionality, etc. A friend of mine's daughter asked him to bring back from New York a pair of Nike or Adidas shoes. He asked her which pair to choose. She said "pick the ugliest one you can find and bring me that." That mode of thinking resonates across media, from Siouxsie all the way to Basquiat. Passing through Lucy Margaux.

YO! Wuttup? Aright. Yeah!
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
originally posted by mark e:
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
From The New Yorker, another volley against the anti-pleasure eliteBut well written, and it's hard to disagree with much.

Sure you don't mean that is hard to agree with much? And, yes, agree with Jayson that any article that cites Lettie Teague casts doubt on the author of the article. But writing well and being right are two very different things.

Lettie Teague is no doubt a handicap, though he doesn't cite her admiringly. I think the writer makes a fundamental point about the esthetic appeal of ugliness to a rebelling generation. Young hipsters loving VA and bret as a sign of non-conventionality, etc. A friend of mine's daughter asked him to bring back from New York a pair of Nike or Adidas shoes. He asked her which pair to choose. She said "pick the ugliest one you can find and bring me that." That mode of thinking resonateses are yet across media, from Siouxsie all the way to Basquiat. Passing through Lucy Margaux.

One persons ugliness is another’s beauty, O., as you should well understand. You single out Basquiat, but it as easily could be Mapplethorpe, Duchamp, Schwitters, Manet or Picasso... or, departing the visual arts, Joyce, Roth or Rushdie. When any form of creative expression loses the power to shock or offend it runs the risk of becoming pedestrian. Orange wines are yet another form of creative expression.

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by Tristan Welles:
Excellent writing.

However I wish to ask: Which grains are local to Brooklyn?

I suspect this isn't a serious question, but June Russel's work with the GrowNYC Greenmarket Regional Grains Project is one of the most exciting revitalizations of regional grains economies in the country over the past several years. She's a real dynamo. Similar work happening in my area in NW Washington through the WA State Bread Lab and NW Grain Summit.
So Red Hook? No. But regional grains relevant and pretty local to NYC, you bet.
Regional grains project
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
originally posted by mark e:
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
From The New Yorker, another volley against the anti-pleasure eliteBut well written, and it's hard to disagree with much.

Sure you don't mean that is hard to agree with much? And, yes, agree with Jayson that any article that cites Lettie Teague casts doubt on the author of the article. But writing well and being right are two very different things.

Lettie Teague is no doubt a handicap, though he doesn't cite her admiringly. I think the writer makes a fundamental point about the esthetic appeal of ugliness to a rebelling generation. Young hipsters loving VA and bret as a sign of non-conventionality, etc. A friend of mine's daughter asked him to bring back from New York a pair of Nike or Adidas shoes. He asked her which pair to choose. She said "pick the ugliest one you can find and bring me that." That mode of thinking resonateses are yet across media, from Siouxsie all the way to Basquiat. Passing through Lucy Margaux.

One persons ugliness is another’s beauty, O., as you should well understand. You single out Basquiat, but it as easily could be Mapplethorpe, Duchamp, Schwitters, Manet or Picasso... or, departing the visual arts, Joyce, Roth or Rushdie. When any form of creative expression loses the power to shock or offend it runs the risk of becoming pedestrian. Orange wines are yet another form of creative expression.

Mark Lipton

No doubt. Ugliness is a highly transitory concept, but that does not negate how, in a specific place for a specific group at a specific time, it operates as if it were an absolute, and is harnessed to thumb the esthetic rebels' nose at some target. For a while, what the majority consider ugly becomes the exclusive beauty of those rebels. Only later, once coopted, might it become everyone's beauty. And so it goes.
 
As a social scientist it's often hard for me to read articles like this, as much as I appreciate smart people writing about food and wine.

We would criticize articles like this for 'selecting on the dependent variable'.

Sure, if you want to find evidence of pompous snobbism you can go to new-wave Brooklyn restaurants and pick out examples of all types. But what does that tell me about orange wine more broadly? I would want a better since of the overall landscape. Hard to take off the social science inference hat.

That said - riffing on Jayson's point about the false dichotomy between hedonism and intellectualism - I always found orange wine to be a fun sensuous experience, without the same detail as fine red or white wines, but a juicy deliciousness that had its place.
 
The article reminded me of hearing a table at a New York restaurant with a natural wine list ask their server for a barnyardy red.
 
Fun writing, yeah, but since when do "extra-ripe wines" have a "vinegar-ish bite"?

Rahsaan's criticism seems fundamentally on the mark. The article is social criticism with just enough knowledge about fine beverages that maybe he borrowed all his "knowledge" there from a modern, "AI"-powered version of Eliza. And he ties it all together with smoke and mirrors, dazzling you with bons mot in the hope that you won't notice that he's begged the fundamental question. The emporer's fine figure is flattered by his lack of clothes. The prose is very fine indeed, but still there is no raiment.
 
originally posted by Lee Short:
Fun writing, yeah, but since when do "extra-ripe wines" have a "vinegar-ish bite"?

Rahsaan's criticism seems fundamentally on the mark. The article is social criticism with just enough knowledge about fine beverages that maybe he borrowed all his "knowledge" there from a modern, "AI"-powered version of Eliza. And he ties it all together with smoke and mirrors, dazzling you with bons mot in the hope that you won't notice that he's begged the fundamental question. The emporer's fine figure is flattered by his lack of clothes. The prose is very fine indeed, but still there is no raiment.

Reminds me of something, as does Rahsaan’s strong points. In college I read numerous works by a famous, emphatic historian of the early modern period, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who IIRC wrote compellingly, persuasively, and well. But the rule of thumb we learned was he was always wrong. He had theories that almost never stood up to empirical rigour or deeper scrutiny because they were based on anecdotal cases/analysis.
 
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