Last month while attending an art opening with my wife, I was kindly offered a glass of Champagne. Now, Champagne is a liquid I never, ever refuse - while in Amsterdam scant weeks earlier, I had accepted glasses of the stuff on two consecutive days despite being ill with as-yet-undiagnosed gastro-enteritis. But one sniff of the glass I was handed was enough to let me know that this was not true Champagne. It was, in fact, quite the opposite - a sweet, golden liquid not entirely dissimilar to bubbly grape juice.
Fast forward to a beer seminar I presented to staff at a Toronto bar and restaurant. Seeking to explain to them the nature of an India pale ale, I related the story of how these ales were originally designed to benefit from the preservative value of extra alcohol and hops, both of which enabled the ales to survive the sea journey from England to India without turning sour. This led one bartender to raise the subject of the Labatt-brewed Alexander Keith's India Pale Ale.
Based upon my description, someone unfamiliar with Keith's might expect it to be a landmark Canadian brew, filled with hop aroma and bitterness plus a healthy dose of alcohol. Sadly, this is far from the case. Alexander Keith's India Pale Ale is no traditional IPA, but rather a sweet, bubbly brew almost indiscernible from its mainstream lager brand mates Blue and Kokanee. Put this stuff unpasteurized and in a wooden cask on a slow boat from London to Bombay and I suspect it would arrive at its destination significantly worse for the journey.
These are but two examples of the food and drink duplicity that attends our daily lives. There are many others. I grew up thinking that Kraft's inoffensive, shrink-wrapped blocks of 'muenster' represented the true taste of that Alsatian delight, little knowing that the real thing is one of the world's stinkiest and most flavourful cheeses. American wine-makers like Gallo have convinced millions that 'chablis' is simple, white jug wine rather than complex French chardonnay. And the good folks who make Wonder Bread have championed the idea that sandwich bread should be bland, 'enriched' and, when scrunched up into a ball, should remain that way.
My question is: Why do we stand for it?
Imagine for a second that you bought a sports car off the Internet. You knew the specifics of the car being offered and figured that it looked like a pretty good deal, so you laid out a down-payment and went to eyeball the vehicle. Except that instead of the two-door, two-seater stunner you expected, the car before you was an utterly unsexy, box-shaped family sedan. Then, when you complained to the salesman, he told you that the car really is a sports car, just a different kind of sports car than what you expected.
I guessing that you'd be more than a little pissed. Which is the way I feel every time I come across a food, wine, spirit or beer that is blatantly misidentified by the company which makes it. My annoyance is then aggravated rather than assuaged when I call the company on their fallacy and, instead of taking responsibility for their mislabelling, the kind, courteous sales rep blames my expectations for the confusion.
Granted, style constraints in food and drink are tricky animals, but my complaint is not with the pale ale that would be better described as an amber or the 'hot' salsa that has little bite. My problem is with the outrageous misrepresentations regularly foisted upon us, usually by companies with advertising budgets so massive that they could probably talk half the population into believing that black was white if they so desired.
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