"Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine."--Fran Lebowitz
Monday, September 3, 2018
Freddie Perjury, Director of Greenwashing
Prick Family Vineyards owner Rich Prick has announced the hiring of Freddie Perjury as Director of Greenwashing. “I’ve given Freddie the assignment of communicating to the wine buying public our commitment to the environment, to the health and welfare of our employees, and to the Almighty… Dollar.”
“There was a Golden Age of wine,” Rich Prick reminisces, “when a new vineyard and winery owner could simply bulldoze a bunch of land, plant a vineyard, spray it with every herbicide, pesticide and fungicide known to man, hire and exploit illegal immigrants, and people would buy his wines and speak his name in admiring tones. Those days are dwindling down to a precious few. It will be Freddie Perjury’s job as Director of Greenwashing to extend those glorious days into the foreseeable future.”
It's heartening to see the concern for the environment expressed by consumers as they head to the Natural Wine aisle to purchase cases of wine to load into their Ford F-150's and SUVs. Naturally, then, marketing departments at wineries have turned their focus to greenwashing, the art of applying Estee Lauder lipstick to a pasture-raised porker. It's a fulltime job. And no one is better at showing contempt for the public than Rich Prick of Prick Family Vineyards. His hiring of Freddie Perjury as Director of Greenwashing is all the buzz in the biz right now, and you can read about it over at Tim Atkin's award-winning site.
As always, feel free to leave your witticisms and recyclables at Tim's place, or return here for our usual compost festival.
TIM ATKIN MW
Outstanding. I was belly laughing from the first paragraph. Steve Pinzon
ReplyDeleteThanks, Steve,
ReplyDeleteGreenwashing is completely out of control in the wine biz. These days, you can't be "green" enough, so you may as well lie about it. It's like internet dating. People create imaginary selves that seem more attractive and talented than the truth. Wineries create imaginary categories to prove they're environmentally aware, or lie about how natural their wines really are. And people, they still tend to believe whatever they read on the internet.
That's what makes me belly laugh.
I can't fully express the feeling of satisfaction I get from this piece. I thought I was just being anti-pop.
ReplyDeleteAnother classic. Thank you Ron.
ReplyDeleteUnknown,
ReplyDelete"Anti-pop" was a phrase with which I was unfamiliar. I thought it meant you hated Bill Cosby. But I looked it up. Wait, now I'm that guy who believes everything he reads on the internet. Drat!
I'm glad the piece left you feeling satisfied. It was inspired, in great part, by Pam Strayer's post of a few weeks ago, which you can find here:
https://winecountrygeographic.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-dark-side-of-sonomas-sustainability.html
I just had more fun with it than Pam.
Robert,
Thank you. Some days the wine biz just makes it easy.
Nicely put Ron. It's amazing that Prick Vineyards sounds like it should be planted next to the White House???
ReplyDeleteCan I put these in our newsletter ? Full attribution of course.
ReplyDeletePaul Vandenberg
Paradisos del Sol
Wine-One-One,
ReplyDeleteWell, yes, there's a rich prick vineyard in Virginia, anyway. But there are Rich Pricks in every wine region. He's a character I'm sort of proud to have created.
Paul,
Yes, of course you may. Thank you for asking, though, and for attributing. And for reading!
Great post Ron, many laugh out loud lines.
ReplyDeleteThanks, David,
ReplyDeleteAlways great to see you here! I'm a big fan of your Soos Creek wines, which are laugh out loud delicious.
I'm not exactly sure where you were going with this one, although Green billionaire winemakers are a pretty ripe target, but Gawd I wanted to puke when the Nose got all those reviews about his third doorstopper on the history of Napa and how the end is nigh.. blah blah... no the end is not nigh, go hug a tree or a vineyard or whatever, things are only getting better and it's a bunch of shit and scaremongering and whatever to keep saying it was better 30 years ago..
ReplyDeletePolitical correctness has always been awash in hypocrisy. Take Al Gore and his cris-crossing the globe in a private jet and his ‘monument’ to global warming mansion on the oceanfront....
ReplyDeleteDavid,
ReplyDeleteI almost never have any idea where I'm going when I sit down to write. I have some vague idea of a subject, in this case the disingenuousness of so much of the Green movement in wine these days, as perpetrated by marketing departments everywhere, and then I just take a flying leap at it. Rich Prick is a recurring character, so I used him, but the fact that he's rich isn't of any importance to the point--if there were a point. It's a scattershot approach to satire, but it's fun for me, and that I have no idea where the piece is going to go makes it that much more interesting to me.
I have no idea why I keep writing.
Dwight,
It isn't so much hypocrisy that I was after, but the intentional misleading of the unwashed public. The wine industry sees the direction the Millennials are headed--natural, low chemical use, organic--and reacts by creating bogus categories (Sorta Sustainable). It will eventually backfire on them.
I'm surprised The Emperor of Wine did not hire Freddy.
ReplyDeleteWhat a Team that would make.
Ziggy,
ReplyDeleteHell, even Freddie Perjury has some standards.