Blogs : Wine and Drinks
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Going Beyond the Bottle
Running out the door, on my way to this little coastal resort—I needed a quiet place to write, meet a deadline—I grabbed the new Food & Wine, the October issue. After dinner, as I was falling asleep in my room, I was flipping through the pages and came to rest on a piece titled “The Healing Power of Grapes.” The subtitle says it all: “Recent medical studies suggest that wine can prevent illness and promote longevity; new grape-based vinotherapy treatments promise to help you live out your years more beautifully.”
The idea is basically to put a vinous spin on your luxury spa treatments: red wine extract in your facial mud mask; grapeseed body scrub and grapeseed-oil massage. Seems to me a sure sign of late-empire decadence, and of the utterly unhinged nature of our culture’s craving for status and luxury. As if drinking wine, and tasting dozens of different wines, and learning to pair wine with food, and flying around the world to taste wine at various wineries weren’t enough. Now we’ve got to smear it all over ourselves, and somehow leave our flawed humanity behind as we become utterly at one with the exalted purity of the grape.
Posted by
| Tuesday, September 25, 2007 at 5:15pm
| 1 comment
Tagged with: wine, luxury, decadence, spa treatments, food and wine, grapes, tasting notes, media, wine and drinks
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> the utterly unhinged nature of our culture’s craving for status and luxury.
Look on the bright side -- it's easy money, and a lot broader market than writing about surfing or big walls.
A friend of mine gave up meat because he calculated it at 5x as inefficient as vegetable matter. Not because he didn't like how it tasted. I couldn't.
Let's face it, most of us fall short of our ideals.