Polished patois peddling droll taste: hair gunk, mop and franger floggers follow plonkers
by PHILIP WHITE
If you're in the drinks
business, or even faintly interested in it - which I presume you are, having
got this far - it might pay to keep an eye on the drinks fridge at your regular
petrol station as much as the contents of the local wine shop.
It'll help you work out
whether they're getting you or not. Or more accurately, how successfully
they've got you. How badly entrapped you've become.
Back when they still had corner
delis, the average non-alcoholic drinks fridge always contained a wider range
of flavours than an entire wine store. It wasn't a big fridge, usually: not
much bigger than the one at home in the kitchen. You knew things were rolling
when the store owner accepted a new free fridge from Pepsi to go beside the
Coke one, but this expansion never really seemed to come with a doubling of the
range of flavours stashed within.
We'll stick to white wine
for this exercise in cartel conduct: As the delis got fewer and bigger, down
the street the wine powers then operative got hard to work replacing the
interesting white wine flavours - Riesling, Frontignac, Semillon and the like -
with two flavours of Chardonnay: bad-to-awful Chardonnay with oak chips in it,
or bad-to-awful Chardonnay without any oak chips in it.
Unwooded,
those latter labels boasted, as if Chardonnay came already infested with the
lumberjack dust ... as if, at great expense, driven by some extreme pinnacle of
gastronomic sensitivity, the genius vinetard had thoughtfully removed this
contaminant, just for your health, well-being, and epicurean delight ... and
didn't even put the price up!
Since then, the Chardonnay
tsunami came, levelled everything off, including thousands of growers, and eventually subsided. Kiwi Sauvignon blanc replaced it and the deli
disappeared. You could almost hear the oak forests of Old Yurp and Missouri
breathing relief as the sawyers went back to their Monty Python re-runs 'round
the old pot belly.
Now we buy our non-alc
bevvies from the petrol station. Fill 'er up. The lolly-water fridge is thirty
metres long, ceiling to floor, and I doubt that it contains quite the expanse
of flavours that old deli Frigidaire afforded the thirsty punter.
Basically it'll offer white
drinks, black drinks, yellow drinks, red drinks, uncoloured [filtered or bleached]
drinks and blue ones, many of whose obscene sugar is bolstered with enough
caffeine to wire the Russian Army.
Such shelves may appear
impressive and shiny, from, say, outside on the apron, but the closer you get
you realise how terrifyingly repetitive they are. They offer a metre or two of every flavour in a bewildering array of labels.
Except soda water.
Go
looking for the clean water with the simple little beads of CO2 in it and if
you're lucky it'll be up the right hand end and down the bottom. At the back.
What they call still mineral
water, or even water, is everywhere, mind you. That's obviously got a better margin without the
huge expense of aeration and everything. I'm waiting for the slug Our water has 23% fewer cavities!
They'd say less cavities, probly.
In the wine shop, things
are pretty much the same. What we lack in ranges of flavour and recommended application
we see rectified by bedazzlement. If you have, say, only about three flavours in
your acre of floorspace of bottled white wine, what you do is hand the bottles
to the arthouse skunkworks out the back of somewhere and they'll make up some
nice new labels. Like hundreds of them. Punk labels, dimestore labels, money
labels, Coke labels, Pepsi labels, nice heritagey ones, labels jumping with
nowness, labels feigning provenance; others decrying it ... labels with stage
names like the Flying Cronkwaller or Henry The Horse. Labels with friggin'
cats and dogs on 'em!
.
.
Every one of them
skunkworks has a writing wing: a secret cadre of semi-literate sophists and
hipstercrites armed with words like premium,
unique, rare, oldest and geology.
Since the supermakets really took control of your precious drink dollar they
have picked up a wee lesson in polishing the rocket from the propagandists in this
ethanol-cum-liquor-cum-wine-cum-beer racket: everything now has to have a back
label like the bullshit that people seem to expect on wine bottles.
I reckon this fusion of
methods first made the genetic jump from wine to what they call hair care. Suddenly you couldn't buy
schlurp or shooshterizer for your quiff unless it has a stage name and a back
label guaranteeing to correct your dehydration; your lack.
Lemme grab one at random:
What's this cute little teardrop bottle? Stage name: Weightless Hydration. Variety: Coconut
Water. Indicator of when best consumed: Conditioner. This means the product is a
dessert item: you have it towards the end of the repast, hoping it polishes
them locks so good it gets you laid straight away.
So how do they put that in
the fine print? The back label:
Drench your dehydrated strands in this
ultra-lightweight, hydrating blend with coconut water, electrolytes and coconut
oil. This supercharged blend helps to transform dry, parched hair into silky,
shiny perfection.
See?
Tantalised by the notion
of coconut water being the puddle you find at the foot of each palm, I find
further interest due the fact that while they don't claim it to be your actual
coconut milk, this overwhelming coconut bouquet even smells a bit like American
oak chips: Quercus alba: the cheapest
in the woodlot.
This literary indulgence
soon moved from the hair care section through the pasta and sauces, straight
through the verjuice aisles and the oils to the lubricants and frangers. It
even infested the cleaning section: I bought a new mop head a few years back
and was utterly transfixed to read that it was a blend of specially-selected premium
fibres that should not be used in water with electricity going through it.
It's a bit like that
unoaked Chardonnay: this Director's Reserve
Bin mop deserves such high-quality water that even premium South Australian
solar-or-wind-generated electricity would be a contaminant.
So what's my point? Beware
good reader, more than ever before. Avoid those bleak acres in the middle. Go
right down the end; look high and low. Find a winemaker or a merchant who can
look you back in the eye while they pour you a taste, talking about the bloody
wine like it was a drink, and not bloody hair gunk or a premium mop or
something from the skunkworks.
While you're busy doing
that, I'll be deep in a fantasy about sending all those sophisticating scribes
off to dust the Mallee or weed the Northern Territory or something useful while
we assemble all the medical and lollywater scientists, the lumberjacks, horticulturers
and expert ethanol distillers to start working together on a sensible middle
ground.
Rather than squander
lives, communities and water on bottom-shelf plonk that needs those dimestore
images and nonsensical backlabels to attract the innocents, we should be
working on a better level of drink with a wider range of flavours.
Where does the rain fall?
The tropics. What does it grow? Lovely fruit and sugar cane. Use that for your
ethanol, and replace that acre stacked with droll white irrigated desert plonk with healthy,
delicious blends of fruits, minerals and vitamins, using natural plant terpenes
to tweak the mood, purpose and demeanour of the drinker, whether they want
soothing, stimulation or their peculiar dehydrated strand moisturised and
supercharged into silky perfection.
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