Chili?!

This weekend, April and I packed her car full of chocolate and drove down to the outskirts of Salem for a Pinot Noir and chocolate tasting at a local vineyard. I was excited to get out of the cafe and away from the onslought of morons that has recently plagued my life there. It's not that I thought that there wouldn't be morons in Salem, but at least they wouldn't be asking me to make them peanut butter milkshakes.
The main building at the vineyard resembled a Catholic church rectory office. Other than that, the property was quite unoffensive, beautiful even. "I love grapevines. They are so organic looking," April said as we pulled up to the property. There once was a time when organic existed as a concept by itself. It meant something living and natural--a preservation of the original form as it emerged from the earth. Today organic exists in opposition to the adulterated and generic products we find in the grocery store. It means something other than the norm. Pretentious and expensive.
After unloading the chocolate, we entered the building and descended the stairs to the wine cellar. The musty smell of oak and wine invaded the dank space. I was instantly cold, a sensation that accompanied me for the rest of the day.
People slowly began to creep up to our table before we were finished setting up the display. Most of them had heard of our chocolate and were eager to take small, sophisticated bites of it between swishes of wine. They swirled the deep red liquid around in their complementary glasses between index finger and thumb, systematically drawing the glass towards their nose every couple of rotations.
There is something about seeing an action repeated that I find unsettling to the point of despair. As I watched hand after hand reach for the samples laid out on the table before me, I felt my own stomach swell. April had packed a cooler of healthy food for us, but I found that my attempts to eat throughout the day were confused by the overstimulation of the aromas and voices, the mass consumption taking place all around me.
What I witnessed I did not perceive as gluttony, rather it was the vanity of the affair that had my stomach churning. There is a fine line betweening tasting fine wine and chocolate for their own sake and tasting them for the sake of one's own image. Maybe I am jaded from my life in Portland--which has introduced me to some self-proclaimed connoiseurs of everything--but, sometimes I wonder whether the majority of people want to truly know something or just be perceived as knowing it.
The guests at the tasting were not the only ones comitting the same act repeatedly. According to my calculations, I said, "This is a sample of our solid dark chocolate with a chile blend" up to 1,200 times in the two-day event. I would not have dreaded the line so much had I not possessed the dreadful anticipation of the the alarmed expression that lurked behind the face of each suppliant. "Chile?!" they would exclaim in disbelief.
I forced out a desperate "uh huh" while feigning patience.
"Who on earth thought of that?"
Somewhere around 2,000 years ago, the ancient Mayan civilizations began mixing cacao beans with their blend of chili spices and consuming it in liquid form. True, a significant portion of my young life has passed without knowledge of this piece of trivia. This fact lends me a certain obligation to be sympathetic towards others as they face the harsh, bright light of chocolate's true history. Unfortunately, that sympathy wears off around person number five hundred.
"The Mayans," April would curtly reply to those affronted by our inappropriate ingredients. I thought that maybe we might sway people if we mentioned that this particular aspect of chocolate's biography traced back to circa the birth of Christ. Maybe it was not so much the combination of chocolate and spice, but the idea that it was consumed by a savage race in South America that people found so disturbing.
In truth, not everyone twisted their faces at the notion of spicy chocolate. Many were quite amused and open to trying new things, as that was the name of the game that day. Still, there is something about two days of dodging strange looks that eventually leads you to question yourself and what it is that you stand for. I started to understand the plight of Renaissance philosophers. Perhaps I should have amended my spiel. "Here is a sample of our dark chocolate with chili. And did you know that the Earth is round?"