Sangria isn’t wine – it’s a very nice, refreshing summer drink that’s made with wine, plus fruit and (often) brandy. A good sangria would be made with an inexpensive, light young fruity wine as a base. It would not only be wasteful but actually hugely counterproductive to use what would normally be regarded as a high quality dinner wine in sangria, because such wines tend to be heavy in tannins which is the opposite of what you want in sangria, and is totally wrong for something that’s going to be served cold with ice and fruit.
Putting aside the fact that “local winery” is a relative term as it’s still quite a long drive just for lunch or dinner, I’d go broke if I ate there every day!
But man, the place is in a beautiful old stone building in a sort of multi-building campus surrounded by a vast expanse of vineyards, with a huge deck if you feel like sitting outside when the weather is nice. The food is always fantastic, and while all the wines are the winery’s own, many of the ones served with the prix fixe menu are limited-production gems that are not available on the general market, and some aren’t even available in the winery’s own store. So, yeah, every time I’m there, it’s like “Me like! Me want live like this all the time!”
I used to race motorcycles, and hung out with guys who would spend thousands of dollars to save a few ounces here and there on fancy exotic parts to replace the stock stuff.
And then hang around at night in the garage, drinking beer and eating Pizza while installing them.
I’m a fat bastard myself, and rode an old piece of shit, but because I grew up riding everyday, and just knew when to twist the right wrist and stomp the right foot, would smoke theses guys and their fancy light-weight masterpieces. Of course, this was strictly amateur shit. There are no fat F1 guys.
Agreed. I enjoy a good wine, but there comes a point where I can’t tell the difference, so I would not spend the extra. I usually aim for a decent medium-priced wine, the problem is that cheap wines can be - but not always are - one step away from drain cleaner. And I agree that blind tasting can have some surprising results.
GaryM and whisk(e)y
You can visit most of the Scottish distilleries and see your tipple being made. I have visited the Talisker distillery twice, mainly because on both occasions I was on the isle of Skye. And visited a couple of breweries. See one vat, you’ve seen them all. The bigger ones just have big stainless steel tanks.
That’s not a very good consultant. A good consultant shows management how everything they know is wrong because they are so far down on the “maturity model” compared to their competition that they are at risk of massive industry disruption. Then after running a long, complex “gap analysis” and presenting a “strategic road map”, they defer the blame to their internal staff, solutions providers and integration specialists (IT body shops like Cognizant and Wipro) so that we can bring in our own technical SMEs and strategic professional services partners.
To a business, though, good marketing is life or death. To me, a small businessman, that’s not bullshit at all. That could be the difference between me sleeping well and absolute terror. If some ace marketing firm could get me 2-3 new customers, that’s worth a ton of money to me.
Marketing may be bullshit to end users, but the end user is not the marketing professional’s customer.
Actually, the STP that was being touted in that era was an oil treatment. There was/is an STP fuel treatment, but the prominent product was for your crankcase, not your tank.
I’ve been reading the book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber and I share much of his opinion on the growing number of “bullshit” jobs and industries in our economy. From my own personal experience, I feel like the following industries consist of an extreme level of “bullshit”:
I suppose like all professions, there is a kernel of legitimacy. But from my six or so years of experience working at management consulting firms specializing in ediscovery for large law firms, regulatory agencies, compliance teams and corporate legal departments, the entire industry just felt like this self-perpetuating industry of overpaid paper pushers. Law firms would pay our firm millions to gather email and electronic documents so they could determine if it was worth paying tens of millions in order to avoid hundreds of millions in lawsuits.
Any sort of “efficiency expert” or consultant, I don’t know who’s at fault. The industry who pushes them to save companies or the managers who hire them, the proceed to never implement any of their advice.
In general much of corporate law, at least by in-house cousel, is answering questions like this from management:
How can we avoid complying with Regulation XYZ? If not, how close can we skate to just barely complying with the reg mostly on paper? Why do I ask? Silly wannabe do-gooder lawyer, it’s because only profits matter; corps & management get zero points for citizenship."
That’s not exactly bluff, but it sure highlights the bullfeathers in top managements’ spiels.
Those are basically “management consultants”. I don’t think they use the term “efficiency expert” anymore. We called it “performance improvement” in the Big-4 years ago. I don’t think companies do a lot of that sort of “efficiency expert” work anymore. Traditionally it’s stuff like “time and motion” studies, figuring out how long it takes people to perform certain tasks. Now those firms just push implementing ERP systems or other technology.
That’s in-house counsel. Then you have all these big corporate law firms whose lawyers bill at hundreds of dollars an hour.
No one has called out that people all over the world have a vast ability to survive regardless of whether their usual diet is high fat, high carbohydrate or high protein. The body is a remarkable thing.
Yet for decades, calling some product Snackwells and substituting all the fat for sugar or all the sugar for fat was seen, or at least advertised, as whole-grain progress.
