天下制覇

Have… Have you ever been to an actual winery, guys?

Impressions:

And here we have the ultra melodramatic drinking show, minus the drinking. Also, minus any actual knowledge of wine, sommeliers, or honestly alcohol in general probably. This is absolutely one of those cases where you're expected to suspend an entire avalanche of disbelief. I've lived near wine country for most of my adult life, and am certainly not an expert, but have been on dozens of wine tours, so I know the bare minimum. This is like if you had a cooking show and the character's big dramatic flourish to display their expertise was adding a pinch of salt. To the scrambled eggs they're making in a blender. It's like they saw one of the puffed up marketing descriptions for a wine tasting and thought "what if someone had the super power to divine that description from the smell alone." He doesn't drink wine, which is crazy and absurd. Buddy. The only people drinking wine at tastings are the people there to get drunk. That's what spit buckets are for. Not a single one of which was in the episode. Bob's Burgers showed more knowledge of wine tastings than this episode did. You cannot smell the essence of a rock concert from a bottle. The very notion that not only would a rich jackass, but a professional wine sommelier be unfamiliar with decanting is baffling, as is all of them being blown away by his genius at… pouring. Which is accompanied by a tornado of roses to really drive home just how brilliant he is.

It thinks itself dramatic and compelling, but it is so astoundingly unthered from reality and ignorant of the subject matter it's trying to glorify that you'd be better served watching Ratatouille if you wanted a down to earth piece of media about fine cuisine appreciation. Maybe worse, it's the same as every other stupid thing. One sniff and he's transported to a parallel world. Instead of the exploding clothing or covering them in goo to show how syrupy that ketchup was you'd get in Food Wars or Yakitate, it's paintings. Or maybe honestly it's just the drawings of what's on the wine bottle labels. Is this just ads for wines? Ads that you couldn't even bother to go past reading the labels and reciting what's on them? You can't even say it's a celebration or appreciation of wine, because it's not. Wine can be pretty interesting! Especially all the weird-ass ways that grapes and fermentation work and have been done over the ages, and how for most of human history, it was a necessary part of keeping water from killing you. No. It's a fetishization of the marketing of wine, which is just… pathetic.