For a brief and ill-advised moment, I considered describing the luscious and outrageously good Chardonnays being crafted over in the Alexander Valley as phat rather than fat, mainly because pretty hot and tasty summarily describes the better ones, but also because I'm hopelessly ignorant when it comes to the etymology and demographic appropriateness of modern slang.
We've talked about Costco before, a conversation in which I argued that monolithic, small-business-destroying category killers still have a place in the kitchen, even proximal kitchens, if for no other reason than because saving money on staples allows us to allocate a larger share of our budget to the locally produced goods of premium quality (and, let's be honest, at a premium price), that we like to cook with. But what about buying locally produced goods at the Big C?
Google "ABC Anything But Chardonnay" and you'll get something on the order of 19,000 hits in the first few tenths of a second. The oldest reference I could be bothered to find dates to 1995 in a column by Frank Prial for the NY Times, but as recently as 2008, someone actually took the time to write a book with the same dated and misguided tag line, so
Rick Bayless' Mole Recipe
Tool front man Maynard James Keenan in Petaluma hawking wine
