In vino veritas.......

... and sometimes a lot of other stuff that shouldn't be there!
It's always been the case. Wine is held by some people in a sort of "snob" value, mainly by those who know very little about it.
The Japanes and the Chinese are now catching up with the Europeans and Americans, both on drinking the stuff and being taken for a ride by unscrupulous dealers.
The latest one attracts attention again to the higher priced (and over priced) wines from the Bordeaux region of France. All of these bottles......are fakes, and expensive fakes to boot!
This doesn't really bother me too much, I am not a consumer of Bordeaux wines, the real ones are prohibited, firstly because of their price, and secondly because of their (for me) extremely high content in "tannin" - or "uric acid" . This is produced naturally in most Bordeaux wines, particularly high in the red variety, and it serves for prolonging the "ageing" process....the higher the "tannin/uric acid" content, basically means the longer one can lay the wines down, over many, many years.
Of course, this leads to "trickery" - home wine makers can buy the stuff ready for use, the problem is that most home wine makers don't know just how much is already contained in their home made wine.
Not important you think.....WRONG!
You see - uric acid naturally or artificially created, is responsable for something other than the storage period of wine.
It's responsable for a nasty little condition - most painful - that little illnes called........Arthritis or Arthrosis! Commonly called GOUT, and generally associated with aristocratic gentlemen with their feet heavily bandaged and up high on a footstool...it's a source of amusement, but, beleive me - if you've got it.....it is not at all amusing,  and can be highly dangerous as well.
 Yes, these images are of extreme cases, but each individual reacts differently ..but is it really worthwhile paying expensively priced wines to get here...?
The Japanese and Chinese are slowly making their own discoveries - particularly with "doctored" Bordeaux wines. Of course not all Bordeaux wines are "doctored" but more and more are becoming so. Cheap imitations - mixes of rough and ready wines from all over the world are taken, synthetic products (such as the same "coolant" you put into your car radiators) are added to alter the taste and sweetness and all kinds of other products that do this and that, until you could almost beleive you WERE drinking high class vintage stuff - and the price is appropriate!
Highly dangerous cocktails of chemicals totally unnatural and totally dangerous.
One of the ways to be sure, or almost, that you're drinking what you paid for, is to look very carefully at any labels on the bottles. The intelligent wine cheats are - thankfully - not so intelligent when it comes to labelling their lethal products! Not always quite as directly as this one..... but generally there is something to be discovered - somewhere....now and then in the restaurant itself..after all - somebody has to refill- somewhere!
As a last illustration, I recall in the 70's/80's a scandal breaking concerning Austrian wines, so "pansched" (German word meaning mixed up) with the famous car coolant that the authorities actually used it on Austrian and Swiss motorways in winter as a replacement for salt - to melt the ice and snow....
From here..........       ........to here....

.................passing later to here......

........all in the name of "Gastronomy".........

Bonne Appétit    -    A Votre Santé! 


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iwmpop (mr le marquis).    -   Vauvert, France    -     Juillet 2011