THE BHC JULY 2013 PAGE 15
Looking at the big business of music and wine
Uniek.
Pop music is big business. Literally. And this is an article on wine. Seriously. I know it’s hard to grasp the full extent, but do you realize the major corporations that own big brand clothing stores, magazines, movie production studios… own record labels, and even some of the huge liquor and wine companies as well? Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but honestly, for an artist to get major spins on a ClearChannel radio station, their management team has to rake out the bucks... Thousands of dollars, literally. There’s a bonus as well if they can get a celeb to make a “featuring” on their single. Long gone are the days that you could ring up your local DJ (on the rotary phone, by the way) and request a cool new song your friends are talking about, or a band you just heard over the weekend. Now it’s a machine… Bruno mars, Bruno mars, Maroon 5, FUN, P!nk, Katy Perry, Bruno Mars, Bruno Mars, Bruno Mars... it gets nauseating. Now don’t hear what I’m not saying; I’ve had my moments of driving to the beach with friends, and jamming out to some of the above (actually Bruno Mars has a killer drummer (side note)). But it seems the more people are brainwashed by this insincere, homogenous, manipulated nonsense, the more bang the big boys can get out of their buck. Your buck. You buy the music. You buy the clothes. You sell it to your friends. Repeat. (Wasn’t there something like this on the movie Fight Club?) Anyway, the cheap, bottom-of-the-shelf wine you find in the grocery stores, is the same thing. All the Kendal Jackson, Sutter Home, Beringer, Woodbridge, Barefoot, Yellow Tail etc. etc. etc.… the list can go on forever… is being fed to us just like turning on the radio. I’m being very serious when I say, these “wineries” (if you want to call them that), or production warehouses, manipulate very generic and non-organic grapes with chemicals that homogenize the final product to taste the same year after year. I wonder, why do they even bother to put a vintage showing when the grapes were grown? It’s ridiculous and absurd. Oh, and here’s another thing… did you know to be able to harvest such a huge crop, they have these tractors that straddle the rows, whacking the vines with their mechanical arms, until the grapes, and bugs, and sometimes rotten fruit, fall off. Talk about quality control. Look, I’m not some wine snob trying to get you to spend your hard earned money on a bottle of wine… but honestly, people spend their money the way they want, right? How much does a trip to the movie theatre cost these days? I’m guessing for two people to see a new release, and concessions, it’s going to run around the 40-50 dollar mark. People do this all the time. So why is it that some people freak out about “splurging” for a $20 bottle? $30? I know quite a lot of people that would rather stay home and share a $50 bottle around a firepit and good conversation. I guess what I’m getting at is this: quality. Creativity. Responsible agriculture – because that’s what growing grapes in a vineyard is really - farming. There are a ton of producers out there that practice sustainable and organic farming, hand pick the grapes in cool of the night to retain the freshness in the juice, and don’t manipulate the wine in the winery with excessive chemicals. Here you go, ask your local wine merchant to find you some wine from “Banshee”. It’s some killer wine made by young, passionate people, who really care about quality… not quantity.
Find them at: www.bansheewines.com