I’ve always disliked the word gourmet. When I was a kid, into my teens, our next-door neighbors were rather well-off. Mr Neighbor was a surgeon and Mrs Neighbor was what the Chinese call a tai-tai, which is to say a housewife with things of her own to do. They drove a Mercedes, travelled to places like the USSR (back in the day) and Japan, ate dark chocolate, and had a few Siamese cats. My parents, having worked their way up from grottier backgrounds, were a bit terrified of them. One time, after cat-sitting on one of their trips, I brought home a culinary gift from Mrs Neighbor. She was preparing stuffed jalapeño peppers.
She explained: “You just take off the outer layer. That’s the spicy part. Then you can stuff them with ground beef, minced onion, whatever…”
Intrigued, I brought them back to my mother and told her what Mrs Neighbor had said about preparation. My mother’s upper lip curled, but she said nothing. She didn’t try preparing them for dinner that night (bear in mind, this was about 15 years before the Internet became semi-ubiquitous), nor the next night. Those peppers withered in the fridge, in a Tuppe®wa®e container, for several days before disappearing.
“Why didn’t you cook those peppers?” I asked my mother. On some level, I suppose I was relieved. Jalapeño peppers sounded scary. Spicy. If you ate them, they’d burn every hole on the way out, hence the nickname I made up for them and never shared with anyone for fear it was too vulgar: hollow penis peppers. At the same time, I was curious. My mother’s gifts in the kitchen extended little further than canned vegetables, baked pork chops, and over-boiled white rice.
That night, she was preparing what she called a “throw it all out” supper, which was a way of repurposing all the leftovers as sandwiches and finger food.
Sticking a tasseled toothpick into a cube of canned pineapple to make it more festive, she said, “They’re gourmets.”
The note of scorn in her voice told me at least as much as her attempt at definition did. Whatever she said next, something about people who eat fancy food in order to show off, was moot. Her moue of lower-social-class contempt for the more-affluent and my ensuing mix of emotions — that I’d gotten lucky to have escaped such pretension, but that I was also somehow missing out on something that might in fact be quite tasty — left me confused.
Now let’s jump ahead a couple of decades. I’m living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’m not an IT-startup zillionaire, but I’m doing all right and can afford to shop at Whole Foods. I’m learning about wine, cooking things I wasn’t brave enough to try when I lived on the East Coast (believe it or not, I think I might have never had salmon until I was almost 30), and generally branching out. With a better disposable income than either of my parents — long divorced, and acrimoniously — had enjoyed, I sometimes ate at restaurants far more expensive than any my family had visited when I was growing up. The word gourmet sometimes bounced around in my head, seeming silly now, a deflating balloon or a used condom, devoid of whatever purpose it had once had.
I used to be a freelance sign language interpreter. One day, I arrived at an assignment. The colleague I was working with that day told me there was a Whole Foods-like supermarket nearby. One of those upscale Northern California places with parquet floors, Vivaldi on the sound system, and prices to match. During our lunch break, I ought to go there and pick up a sandwich from the deli, she advised.
“Because they have such gourmet food,” she burbled.
I think I was still young enough then not to have yet realized what kind of looks I give people when they say something too stupid for me to deal with.
Such gourmet food? Did a pack of trained seals flop out on a special catwalk and tickle your ass with peacock feathers they held in their mouths as you sucked black sturgeon caviar through a platinum straw off a slice of toast made by blind midgets in Manchuria? I wasn’t rich or anything. In fact, being the last of a long line of poor white trash had left me singularly unimpressed with the price tags on the expensive shit at Whole Foods. If I hadn’t been born with a number of complicated digestive disorders and intolerances, I wouldn’t have shopped there. But I did, and I paid what I had to pay, because I needed alternatives to all the dairy shit I couldn’t digest. My only other options were asceticism or diarrhea.
Such gourmet food? What was that, anyway? Anything other than canned pineapple cubes and Vienna sausages with multicolor toothpicks in them?
Today, I’m amused by pretension. It’s a bad word. Probably 97% of the people who use it don’t fully understand what it means. It’s really part of a little-discussed class struggle: the less-gilded despise those with more money (I don’t pretend I don’t resent my rich friends; I just don’t tell them so) and mock them because of the things they can afford. The ones who are financially better off blithely post pictures of their feet at beach-side resorts in places like the Maldives, apparently unaware that their less-affluent friends secretly want them to die. They can afford things other than canned pineapple and Vienna sausages while the rest of the world spends the second half of every month in deep paranoia about running out of money before the next payday.
Gourmet, my ass. I don’t like the word because it’s a stupid word used by marketing people to make middlebrow food with MSG-laden sauces and weird additives seem more upscale than it is (luxury products are rarely if ever branded as such). It’s also a word used by the proles in their verbal arsenal of resentment against people who can afford not to eat Soylent Green — or be turned into it — after retirement. It’s a nothing word. All it gives us is a hint of carb-heavy sauces developed in laboratories, cooking shows whose fat hosts earn seven or eight figures, and frozen food with curly fonts meant to hint at nibbly, dainty European elegance. Fuck gourmet everything.
Which is why I really kind of hate Apothic White. I had already tried the red variant and found it sugary and disgusting, kind of like a good Zinfandel with a couple of cups of Welch’s grape juice poured in. I’d seen it in the supermarket and was intrigued: the label and the branding are brilliant. It’s cheap, too, something like HK$99 or so per bottle. And here in HK, you can’t get that much American wine, which is a shame: wine, like entertainment and IT, is one of my native country’s few worthwhile exports (they can keep the guns, war-mongering, and crazy religious extremism, thanks). So I had to try it. The red version is a blend of Zinfandel, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Syrah. Apart from the Zin, this is basically a Rhône Ranger, and Zin goes with everything. What’s not to like? Oh, wait… the sugar content.
Which brings us to the white, 2012 this time (but who cares, really?). Same price point. Different experience of syrupy horror. This time, it’s Chardonnay + Pinot Grigio + Riesling. That combination in itself ought to raise an eyebrow. (Apparently earlier vintages included Moscato instead of the Pinot.) But I had a WTF moment in the supermarket. Why not try it? I was having adventurous friends over for dinner that night, and I had several bottles of decent plonk at the ready in case this one tasted like ass (in a bad way).
We set out our Thai takeaway, moved the cat a safe distance away, and opened the bottle.
My friend C was game but a little dubious. His boyfriend L was in the landing smoking a cigarette. I poured. We didn’t wait.
It was shocking: kind of a mix of lemonade, peanut butter, honeydew, pancake syrup, and Head & Shoulders dandruff shampoo. The mouthfeel was syrupy. I could swallow it, and indeed I have swallowed much worse. It was alcopop, the Jägermeister of wine, Boone’s Farm on better real estate. C sipped after I did, and his face registered the same shock I had felt.
“It’s…” Being a polite Italian, he didn’t want to say anything unkind. He groped for the words. “Umm…”
“Vile,” I said.
He looked relieved.
L returned from his cigarette break, and I poured him a glass.
“We waited for you,” C said.
“No we didn’t,” I said. “Here, try this and tell us what you think. It’s very interesting.”
His reaction was much like ours: curious optimism in anticipation of enjoyment, giving way to a sort of wide-eyed WTF.
“Yeah, that was our reaction too,” I said. “It’s okay, we don’t have to finish it.” I picked up the bottle, carried it to the kitchen, and poured the rest down the sink. “I’ve got a good Aussie Semillon – Sauvignon Blanc.”
Not crap.
Before writing this, I did some googling and learned several things:
1. Apothic is a brand created by Gallo, best known as producers of jug wine. That’s not to say they don’t employ winemakers who actually know what they’re doing, but it’s also not an endorsement. In high school, my first-ever experience with wine was with a horrible white that they sold as Chablis, not one molecule of which actually originated in northern Burgundy. I spent the night puking myself inside out.
2. Apothic wines are sweetened during the winemaking process. My remark about pouring grape juice in? That didn’t just come from nowhere. And it turns out that the US version of these wines is even more sugary than the Canadian version.
3. The Apothic website, should you care to look, credits the wine as having been conceived of by a “Master Winemaker,” who is unnamed. Sorry, but I want to know who actually made my wine. (Randal Grahm from Bonny Doon actually replied to a tweet of mine this afternoon. I’m still tingling from the excitement.)
For all this bile, I do want to say one or two things in Apothic’s defense. Other reviews by more knowledgeable people have pointed out that it’s actually not bad for what it is: it’s balanced, it’s accessible, and it’s popular because it’s the kind of thing people like — accessible, identifiable, and visually interesting. It’s easy. All of which I agree with: as a branded product, it’s brilliant. I also think that it’s a good thing if it introduces people to wine that tastes like something other than the bastard love child of Mountain Dew and Absolut Citron. When I look back on the wines I started out with… they weren’t much different. So if people enjoy this, awesome, and perhaps they’ll try and enjoy wines less closely related to Kool-Aid.
A quick word on the one that saved us that night: a 2013 Tatachilla Semillon – Sauvignon Blanc. HK$99 at Park ‘n Shop. Light, easy, and refreshing. Delightful citrus-y goodness (perhaps more lemon than lime), the acid from the Sauv.blanc offset by the milder Semillon. Very food-friendly and — dare I say — unpretentious. This is a great cheap wine to grab if you want to choose one that will make you look like you know what you’re talking about.
PlonkTastic! 