The world is full of them.

A friend was visiting the other day and, once that most important of hours came to pass, namely the Cocktail Hour, I did the dutiful thing and prepared a couple of martinis. My avocation is for the gin martini, having come of age in Britain, but my friend preferred one made with vodka. No problem.

Well, once the magic libation began to take effect, he complimented me grandly on the magnificent drink and enquired of the name of the vodka maker.

“Why, Belvedere, of course” quoth I, “Is there anything else?”. This stuff sells for megabucks, by the way.

“But of course”, responded my guest, “I can always tell the great vodkas”.

Suffice it to say that what he was drinking was bottom shelf Gordon’s, ($10 the bottle), the vermouth made by Gallo ($2.99).

My friend, you see, is a Label Drinker.

They are everywhere.

In the sound reproduction world fortunes have been made by peddling ordinary copper wire advertised as ‘Oxygen free with all molecules aligned’ at twenty times the price of the stuff at Home Depot. The Label Drinker can hear the difference, you see, between HD speaker cable and the $50 a foot exotic which, he knows, at that price has to be good. Put a blindfold on him and things don’t look so good of course.

In wine, the Label Drinker is everywhere. Here in the States, John Q Public has wisened up and is buying Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s, realising that he gets 95% of the flavor and 100% of the alcohol that the $30 variety sells for. The grapes from my vineyard go into a $38 a bottle wine, if you must know, and I wouldn’t be caught dead paying that sort of amount for a bottle of Zinfandel, pride of authorship notwithstanding. Mercifully, TBC is rarely available in Zinfandel.

Cars specialize in LDs. The Ferrari must be better at four times the price of the Corvette. Even if the latter is faster, stops better, uses less fuel, is dirt cheap to maintain, and on and on.

And in better sushi bars in America what do you see the Japanese ordering? Why, Coors of course. None of that mass market Kirin garbage when you are abroad.

In photography, the Label Drinker has several sub-species.

The most comical, of course, is the Leica fetishist. He thinks nothing of paying a $150 premium for a Leica DLux-2, which is nothing more than a Panasonic Lumix LX1 with a red Leica logo. $150 for a logo. A fool and his money are easily parted. Go Leica!

A more modern manifestation is the film Luddite. Like the guy who will tell you that LPs sound far better than CDs (he can usually pass the blind test as all the clicks, pops and scratches readily distinguish vinyl from CDs), this type of Label Drinker will swear up and down that nothing, but nothing, matches the tonal range, depth, emotion, blah, blah, blah, of film. But of course.

Which brings me to another recent LD episode. I was showing a bunch of 13″ x 19″ prints to another friend the other day. I like to keep a collection lying around to try them on viewers. Only snag was, this viewer was also a photographer. Of the Old School. You know what that means. “So what did you take these on?” he asked, trying to appear as cool and disinterested as possible. “Why, on 4″ x 5″ film of course”, I replied. “Can you even imagine using anything else for landscapes”. “Absolutely not”, he agreed, a flush coming to his cheeks, as he warmed to his subject. “I use it myself. Nothing beats the tonal range, does it?” Don’t even think of getting this fellow onto the subject of the superiority of monochrome over color. Life’s too short, bores too long.

A bunch of prints….

I have yet to summon up the courage to admit to my lie and tell this Label Drinker that everyone of the dozen or so pictures was taken on the Canon 5D. Not a piece of film in sight. And even had they been on film, they would have been digitised at some point though scanning. How else to print them?

But let’s not be too harsh on Label Drinkers. They can make us a lot of money while providing much innocent fun along the way. My exhibition prints, you understand, are always taken on film.

Postscript: For confirmation from no less august a source than the Wall Street Journal, download their piece on the same topic – which addresses the topic of fake expertise when it comes to wine – by clicking here.