Posting again & the Sideways Pinot Noir

Well, it's been eight months now since my last post. I simply haven't had the time to dedicate to posting, what with being in school and all. But now I'm settled in to life this summer, which I'm spending in Michigan's greater Detroit area working for GE. One of the goals I had for this blog was to branch off from its theme of mediocrity. And that's just what this post will do.

I enjoy a good Pinot says Paul Giamatti's character Miles from Sideways. Throughout the movie, he returns to this theme of the Pinot Noir grape - how it's such a difficult, finicky grape to grow, but its captivating but subtle flavors truly shine when the winemaker puts in his knowledge and attention. The Pinot Noir truly is a difficult grape to grow, but that doesn't mean every bottle you find will be expensive.

You'd be hard pressed to find another subject that can vary so widely from über snobbish to simply humble. When too many people think of wine, unless it's a box of Franzia, it's a venture into pretentious territorry. In movies and TV, I see it constantly. The affluent flaunt their wealth by buying the most expensive bottles of wine simply because they are told it is the best - wine spectator gives it a 98 or something. In my opinion they enjoy throwing around their money more than they do drinking the wine. They are flaunting their ignorance. It is because of many snobs that I take crap for talking about wine the way I do. I truly enjoy drinking, and for that reason I enjoy raving about it, just like Miles. Yes, maybe he gets snobbish at times, admittedly it's difficult to avoid altogether, but I do recognize his sincere enjoyment of wine. 

In my opinion it is not acceptable to buy a $300 bottle of wine unless you can explain why it is better than the $20 bottle. The price tag is not an answer. Yes, the more you pay the more likely you are to get a higher quality wine, but that does not mean that there are not very good inexpensive wines. The other issue I have is when people buy really cheap wine because they think that decent wine is expensive. Not true. It's not worth it in my opinion to buy a $5 bottle of something that's complete shit when you can buy a good bottle for only a couple dollars more. Good wine can be very accessible, you just have to know what to look for. 

This brings me to my recommendation. Mirassou Pinot noir is one of the best values on the market today. I have paid as little as $7 and at most $11 for it. It is a good red by any standard, even up against many top rated wines, and excellent for the price. 

I consult many a list on good wine deals. Not all are good, but many are. Some may surprise you. The Mirassou certainly did. As I continue blogging I will uncover more of these gems for you. 

The Iced Tea (synergistic principles don't always apply to drinks)

A common theme that I've noticed with this whole tasting mediocrity endeavor is that the initial mediocre taste has never made me want to stop consuming. In fact, it's always been a feeling of reluctance mixed with curiosity.

I had another experience recently at the Bahama Breeze restaurant at the Cherry Hill Mall in New Jersey. I usually prefer my iced tea unsweetened, although sometimes I decide to be adventurous. I saw this flavor: Pomegranate Green Tea, one of the most unusual blends I'd ever seen, but I liked pomegranate juice and I liked green tea, so why not? I remembered that I had the republic of Tea's Blackberry Sage before; the uniquely-shaped bottle isn't easy to forget. I enjoyed that tea quite a lot. It was also unusual, but the blend was very well done.

I screwed off the cap of this pom infusion and took a sip. I didn't know how to react. I set the bottle back down on the table and paused for a minute. Then, I took another sip. Its flavor was captivating, but not in a particularly enjoyable way.

It was like tasting a dry Gin. When the liquid splashes against your tongue it feels as though there's nothing there, but your senses still capture the aroma. Well, it was like that, except quite opposite. The liquid was there alright, but the aroma sure wasn't. In fact, the flavor was quite bland. You would think that pomegranate green tea would be incredibly complex, but it wasn't, and I have a theory that will blow your mind. It was too complex. Yes, TOO complex. Congrats, Republic of Tea. You just took two very complex flavors, and I am sure a helluva lot of artificial, produced-in-a-lab flavors and created something that was just overly complex. The plethora of flavors combined into one robust scent of superb benignity. Yet, continuing with the theme of the blog, it was not terrible.

Maybe it was the slight sympathy I felt for the Replublic of Tea for trying so hard to make something wonderful (and failing miserably) that has prevented this drink from falling below mediocre on my scale. Maybe it's the never-before-experienced flavor, albeit not that good of one, that has me at the back of the crowd giving a golf clap for this bizarre concoction. So I say, give this drink a try. It will amaze you, but it sure won't leave you begging for more.

The Cookie

Never before had I experienced a snack food that truly reveled in its mediocrity. The cookie was a Pepperidge Farm Soft Baked Captiva. Although I believe Pepperidge Farm intended the cookie to captivate me in a whirl of dark chocolate brownie bliss, the only thing that captivated me was its mediocrity. When I took the first bite I was a little surprised that it didn't taste as good as the other Pepperidge Farm cookies, but it didn't taste bad either. I couldn't describe any more and so I took another bite. Now at this point if it had been a bad cookie, anyone with any sense of taste or smell would have thrown the cookie away (yes I do have an excellent palate). But it wasn't a bad cookie. It certainly wasn't any good though. I'm not sure what it was, but the cookie began to grow on me. It's possible that deep down I actually liked the cookie, but I think it's more likely that it was such a curious feeling that I wanted to experience it some more. And so, I downed the cookie, relishing the mediocre flavor.

Now, I should probably give a little more background to this story. The cookies had actually been sitting in the back of my friend's Volvo for quite a while. Maybe it was the magic of the leather, early springtime sun and Swedish engineering, but I doubt Pepperidge Farm is capable of making the quintessential mediocre cookie. I mean, they're good, but they're not that good.

More about the blog

While I already gave a bit of a background on how I came with the title, I should probably describe a little bit better what's going to go into the blog, that is, before I actually write. I have had several experiences, mainly with food, that have left me feeling, well, mediocre. But you can't feel mediocre, can you? "Mediocre" is used to describe something else. Well, that's what I'm blogging about: that feeling, or at least that's my starting subject. Hopefully, after I get this started I will come up with some other things to include in the blog as well and the title will come to serve partly as an identity.

Introductions

Have you ever experienced something that gave you a feeling nearly perfectly in-between dissatisfaction and pleasure, but with a slight sway negative? I'm referring to something profoundly intermediate, something that you cannot say has quality and yet that you cannot say is significantly inferior? This, I call mediocrity. While these first few words might seem rather moving, I have no intention of pursuing mediocrity; I try to set my standards slightly higher than that. However, this blog now exists because I have truly experienced mediocrity and thus desire to write about it. You would not expect something that we would consider just OK, to have a strong feeling associated with it, and yet, I will occasionally have such experiences, ones that leave with you neither a sense of discontent nor gratification. Mediocrity can be a difficult word to define, because it refers to quality that is in-between or so-so, but maybe pitched slightly to the lower end, which makes it such a difficult feeling to pinpoint. It comes to this, then, that I decide to describe a couple of these experiences by example: quintessential examples, at that, of mediocrity.