Coprolite Newsletter, May 2008

First it was wine, then beer, now coffee and even water. Just about all the liquids that pass our lips are getting way too complicated.

Things used to be so much simpler when I was a kid. If my folks decided to celebrate a holiday with a small glass of wine at dinner, there were only two choices: Manischevits and Temple Kosher. And we weren’t even Jewish. Back in the 1940s and 50s, our neighborhood liquor stores in Minnesota didn’t carry any other brands. Both of those sweet red wines came from New York State.

Later, folks on the West Coast began to dominate the growing of wine grapes. All of a sudden, there were a lot more choices of wine in our local stores. With the expanded interest, imported wines also became commonly available. Soon, a lot of people began to work hard at developing – and talking about – an immense knowledge of how the subtle differences in wine affected their discriminating palates. You started hearing about bouquets and nuances and hints of various kinds of foliage. It was a whole new language.

Now, I’ve always enjoyed a glass of wine as much as anybody, but I’ve sure never considered myself a wine expert. In fact, I thought some of the more snobbish aspects of their obsession were really pretty funny. That was why, back in the early 80s, I decided to do a parody of their elaborate wine tasting parties.

Our family was out in Colorado on a camping trip. There was this beer out there called Coors that was reputed to be very good but which wasn’t available at that time in Minnesota. I decided to bring home a case of it, plus a few other somewhat exotic brews. (The micro-brewery movement was just in the process of being reborn out West, and their products were not yet available to us either.) I planned to have a beer tasting party. It was supposed to be a sendup of those snobbish wine tasting soirees. The whole point was that nobody in those days had ever heard of a beer tasting party. It should have been hilarious.

Well, we never did get around to having the party, because the beer I brought back from Colorado was somewhat the worse for wear after a thousand miles in our car trunk in 100-degree weather.

But lo and behold, not long after that people actually did start to have beer tasting parties. Again, there was talk about bouquet and aroma and hints of this and that. I was astounded. Somebody had picked up on my joke and turned it into a serious thing.

The next drink to be adopted by snobs was coffee. Now, I thought I knew about coffee. I had been drinking it since I was in grade school, when I spent part of each summer on my grandparents’ farm. While there, I copied the example of my uncle, who was just a year and a half older than me. He hated milk, since there was no refrigeration on the farm in those days and therefore milk came warm and fresh out of the cow. He preferred coffee, so that’s what I drank too.

Now, my grandmother’s coffee was just a standard store-bought grind. She brewed it early in the morning, and it sat simmering (and strengthening) on the wood stove until you got around to drinking it. Although it had a great deal of authority, I don’t think it had any particularly subtle nuances even if I had been capable of noticing them.

In fact, none of that sort of thing really happened to coffee until after Seattle-based Starbucks began promoting the idea in the 1970s that coffee was worth a higher price if it was sufficiently special. Now coffee connoisseurs expound on fragrance, aroma, flavor, aftertaste, and body. And like wine, specialty coffees now come with suggested food pairings. Pul-eez!

It’s even happening to water. People argue about which brand of fancy bottled water is best. Again, this seems to have started out West where it first became fashionable to walk around with a supply of water attached to your belt.

Do you begin to see a trend here? We had wine, beer, coffee, and water in the East and Midwest all along, but none of those things had snob appeal until that was imported from the West Coast.

If you doubt my theory, look at tea. The British and Bostonians have enjoyed tea for ages, and even know the difference between Darjeeling, Assam, Oolong, and Earl Gray. But their enjoyment didn’t graduate into obsession. I haven’t seen any newspaper columns on tea, or tea tasting clubs conducting elaborate tests, or a Tea Spectator magazine publishing crucial ratings. I think it’s because the West Coast hasn’t really gotten into tea as yet.

How about ice cream? My choices as a kid were pretty much limited to vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Ben and Jerry’s popularized the notion that you could have hundreds of flavors. And yet, being from the East Coast, their product never became the obsession of overly-serious gourmet groups.

Why are people from out West so much more concerned about these things? Maybe it’s something they inherited from their ancestors. Traveling in a covered wagon, you had to be able to tell whether a spring or stream was potable or poisonous. If you were good at it, you were more likely to survive and contribute to the gene pool.

All well and good. But my Minnesota-based gene pool is a little different. Our Scandinavian and German pioneers had allowed railroad companies and other big real estate operators to sell them farms in a land covered by snow most of the year. That experience led them to teach their children to distrust and resist any idea that was presented to them by slick outsiders. The lesson has served their descendants pretty well. Today, we tend to apply that attitude to self-proclaimed experts trying to impose their hoity-toity ideas on us.

I don’t know how this conflict will end. But just to stand up for my heritage, I’m now going to have some cheap coffee made with ordinary tap water, followed by a dinner accompanied by a glass of box-wine that is tasty but totally without pedigree. A votre sante!

––Wayne Adams
wayne@coprolites.com

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