Transparency can be big business in the kitchen – people like to see what their food is up to. The big and much overdue news recently was that boffins have invented see-through toasters, a remarkable oversight when you really think about it.
Honesty is a trickier concept in the world of wine – where counterfeit bottles are said to be working their way into the market. A large court case is currently under way on this very matter, and it’s one that raises some interesting ideas, especially when you consider the experiments currently taking place in a Dutch restaurant. Every reaction to food there is monitored – producing one gigabyte of data every minute, although with multiple cameras running one shouldn’t imagine that is too much of a stretch – and when the milk supply was changed to organic without fanfare, nobody’s tastebuds batted an eyelid.
This lasted for months, but as soon as a label stating ‘organic’ was slapped on the dispenser, people started complaining that the milk tasted strange. Some people would argue that milk always tastes strange, but one wonders how many of these reactions are down to knee-jerk impressions rather than any level of critical thinking. Our senses are a necessarily immediate business.
If one is to assume that a significant portion of wine is counterfeit, and that not very many people have noticed, does this mean that what you are actually buying is the thought, and the pleasure of expensive wine rather than what sloshes around in the bottle itself? Blind taste tests would be interesting here. Presumably, some people really know what they are talking about, and can tell – but so many must simply buy it for the prestige, or the sense of collection. Bottles sit undisturbed in cellars, building value like an unopened Luke Skywalker figure from 1982.
Given this, could other areas of the luxury market fall victim to the same problems? Will Arabian and Russian billionaires find themselves on the receiving end of a bedsit in Rhyl when they purchased a £5 million pad in London’s swanky Knightsbridge?
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 