Sunday, September 9, 2012

Remy Martin VS

Remy Martin hinted that this bottle contained quality, but the VS should have tipped me off that this would be the worst brandy I'd ever have the misfortune of drinking.

Today I am departing from my usual themes again and delving into the area of sub-mediocrity, because I think this is an important enough subject that the world needs to know about. The world has been at least half-decent to me and so I think I owe it to the world to share my knowledge. Simply put, this post is about bad taste and where you'll find it.

AVOID REMY MARTIN VS PETITE CHAMPAGNE COGNAC. Seriously. Most appallingly overpriced bottle of disappointment. It burned on its way down. The nose gave me nothing, the flavor lacked complexity and its finish was long and painful.

It took the temporary throne on top of the toilet in my bathroom for the poor soul that hated himself enough to drink what was left.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Problems With Product Labels


Today, I stray away from my theme of wine to return to something that is closer to the mediocrity of our society.

One of my favorite snacks is Triscuits. They're crunchy, taste real and go great with cheese. My favorite variety is "fire-roasted tomato and olive oil." My weekly (or so) trip to the supermarket usually involves the purchase of a box, so naturally I felt my routine violated when Hannoford was out of my fire-roasted tomato the other week. I begrudgingly settled for a box of "roasted garlic."

Kraft gives an unhelpful description of ingredients.
These tasted pretty good, admittedly, but my true disappointment is with the product labeling. The eyes are first drawn to the brand name, "Triscuit," and then the variety "Roasted Garlic," but then below that, where we might expect to see some details about the roasted garlic, we instead see the rather vague, "natural flavor with other natural flavor." To me this sounds like the stupidest, most lawyer-generated label I've ever encountered. Correct my semantics if I'm wrong, but "natural flavor with other natural flavor" means the same thing as "natural flavors." Is it vitally important that we specify that there are two distinct natural flavors here without actually specifying what they are? Literally any small change would have made this better; even: "natural flavor with other natural flavors" sounds better than [this flavor with this other flavor]. Kraft might as well have said "two natural flavors."

What's even more confusing about this are the flavors themselves. The official flavor is roasted garlic, which I thought was one flavor, so where are these two distinct natural flavors coming from!? Kraft lies! It's not roasted garlic, it's roasted garlic and something else! Wait, maybe roasted is the flavor. Is that even possible? Who knows, maybe in this day and age, word-engineering, food-engineering and legal-engineering have created "roasted," a distinct natural flavor of Triscuit.