Hypes and Suckers

 

Pardon me; I often make sweeping statements and draw sweeping conclusions!

Tupai King

I read that, because of bumper harvests and reduced imports from China, durian prices had plunged to less than RM10 a kilo. There were also many TikTok clips talking about the disaster facing durian growers.

I love durian and thought I still had time to enjoy the season when I flew back from Melbourne last Friday. I lost no time in driving to visit my regular vendor, Donald, at his stall between Petaling Jaya’s SS2 and Section 17.

Donald says his durians come from his own farm, and his Musang King is usually great. Because I am marginally diabetic, Saw Hwa (my wife) allows me only two seeds at a time. I therefore always ask Donald for the best he can offer.

He packed the three remaining Raja Kunyits on his shelf for me and said he would charge me only RM42 a kilo. I thought the price was stiff, but I did not feel good bargaining with him.

He also offered me Tupai King, saying it was the best durian one could ever taste. The regular price, he said, was about RM100 a kilo; he offered it to me at RM80. And the usual sucker in me could not resist his persuasion. I promptly bought one.

They were vacuum-packed, and I kept them in the freezer.

Upon my return from Phnom Penh on Thursday, I had the box of Tupai King thawed. I tasted it.

I was furious with Donald’s recommendation. It was one of the worst durians I had ever tasted. The seeds were big and the taste rather flat.

I heard that Tupai King is a Penang variety. It has apparently been around for several years but has only more recently become widely sought after.

Then I remembered that Donald had earlier also recommended that I try Black Thorn. Both Saw Hwa and I thought it was nothing great either. Same thing: the seeds were big and the taste so-so.

I telephoned him to complain. He was a little sheepish.

Maybe he himself had been caught up in what I call the “accomplice syndrome.” You don’t really believe the claim, but for fear of being branded as someone with “no taste,” you go along with it — as many of us do from time to time.

To me, Tupai King and Black Thorn are like emperors who do not realise they have no clothes on!

But maybe it was just Donald’s fruits that did not taste right. Perhaps other Tupai Kings and Black Thorns are not like that.

Should I give these two varieties the benefit of the doubt?

Char-wong

In restaurants, I was often offered char-wong to start with. Char-wong simply means “King of Tea” in Cantonese. You have Pu-er, Oolong, Longjing, etc. But is there really a variety called char-wong? Where is it grown? Come on! Its advocates must think we are idiots.

This reminds me also of Pu-er.

Some connoisseurs claim that they can distinguish Pu-er plucked from trees that are 300 or even 400 years old. I think much of it is BS. I read somewhere about a so-called expert who made a terrible call and was caught out.

Yet many people will pay thousands — sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a kati — for such “vintages.”

Many may simply be drinking fermented rubbish while convincing themselves that it is good for their health!

And next... Wines

And remember a certain Rudy Kurniawan, an Indonesian who became perhaps the world’s most notorious wine counterfeiter?

Kurniawan entered the elite American wine-collecting world in the 2000s and became known as “Dr. Conti” because of his apparent expertise in Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. He had an extraordinary palate and an ability to blend lesser wines so that they resembled extremely rare and expensive vintages.

His operation was ingenious. He obtained genuine empty bottles of prestigious wines and refilled them with blends of cheaper wines, then used counterfeit labels, corks and other materials to make them appear authentic. Some were sold for enormous sums to wealthy collectors.

When the FBI searched his California home in 2012, agents found what amounted to a wine-counterfeiting workshop — old bottles, corks, labels and blending formulas.

One mistake helped expose him. He offered bottles purporting to be Domaine Ponsot Clos Saint-Denis from 1945 and other early vintages.

Laurent Ponsot (the proprietor), pointed out that his domaine did not begin producing that particular wine until 1982!

Kurniawan was convicted in the US in December 2013 and later sentenced to 10 years in prison for selling millions of dollars’ worth of counterfeit wine and related fraud. He was eventually released and deported to Indonesia in 2021.

After returning to Asia, Kurniawan reportedly began demonstrating his blending skills openly at private tastings, where his imitation blends were compared with genuine prestigious wines — and, reportedly, were sometimes even preferred by the guests.

All these examples expose something interesting about human psychology: how reputation, expectation and group opinion can influence what even supposedly expert palates believe they are tasting.

Perhaps nobody wants to be the fool who admits: “I can’t taste the difference.”

And many of us, from time to time, are just suckers!

End