Not to rock your philosophico-linguistic world, but the dubiousness of the concept of acquired taste has just begun to dawn on me. Given the personal subjectivity, not to mention cultural relativity, of taste—as the ancients put it, de gustibus non est disputandum—it seems rather presumptuous to speak of its acquisition as a matter of fact. I mean, looking at it from a literal &/or facetious angle, isn't everything beyond breast milk an acquired taste? Looking at it from a PC (and I use that acronym without irony here) global angle, who's to say what's acquired by whom & when, where or how? If my daddy were a Wellfleet trawler, oyster liquor might well have been virtual mother's milk. If my momma in China'd dotted my infant gums with 3-penis wine to lull me to sleep, the mere thought of it might not jar me sleepless today. As it is I grew up in big bad Oklahoma, where chicken-fried steak with country gravy is quite enough to turn a young, impressionable stomach hard, bitter & old before its time, believe you me. Especially after 1 too many viewings of the remake of The Fly, namely those scenes of Jeff Goldblum yanking off his face parts with a thwap! in front of the mirror.
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By a similar token, when someone from one ethnocultural background uses the term to refer to an item he/she grew up with in a culinary conversation with someone from a different background, it conceivably amounts to a challenge. When the waitress at Pete's Central One (whose kind intentions I don't, mind you, doubt for a second) warned the Director that retsina was an acquired taste, the fact that I myself had long ago acquired it and was urging him to do the same was, however potentially reassuring, irrelevant; it was the insinuation that he as a Scots-blooded cornfed Iowan might not get it that, I think, compelled him to agree to a whole bottle. Especially since the price was no object—20 bucks for this here:
Retsina is a white or rosé wine treated with pine resin, following an ancient Greek tradition whereby amphorae were sealed with sap—which, of course, slightly infused the stored wine. While it can smack of household cleaning products, this particular bottle was relatively mellow—simply, smoothly herbal rather than window-crackingly ammoniac.
Which isn't to say I get it, at least not the way Greeks get it. Likes and dislikes alike are colored by one's own experiences; drinking it, I can never help but think of a song my own daddy, a Russian-history professor of Ashkenazi descent, used to sing to me when I was little, simply because the word "retsina" sounds like it belongs in there somewhere:
A personal friend of the czar was I
A personal friend of the great Nicolai
We practically slept in the same double bed,
He at the foot and I at the head
Now all that seems distant and all that seems far
From those wonderful nights at the palace of the czar:
When I went shootin' with Rasputin
Ate farina with czarina
Blintzes with the princess and the czar (hey! hey! hey!)
We were sharing split bananas...
That's all I remember, but now I'm moving the location to Greece & adding
washed our mouths out with retsina
on the beaches of Aegina,
spit up sand & clams & pine-tree tar (hey, hey, hey)!
See, it's all relative. Relative & stupid.
