For The Love Of Port

From today's Times in the UK...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_a ... 030802.ece

court in Carcassonne yesterday sentenced 12 local executives who were caught by the investigators passing off inferior wine as pinot noir and selling 18 million bottles of it to Gallo, the biggest family-owned wine firm in the US.

That's a lot of fake Pinot Noir and I am glad they got caught. Even if no one detected, it's still fraud and should not be tolerated.

At that price level there are two issues: truth in labeling and whether the wine was any good in a PQR sense. It evidently satisfied the corporate and end-user buyers, so no harm there.

The real crime is for individuals who see a profit to be made by degrading a "brand", to wit, the French region and varietals that were mislabeled. I applaud the French system that pursued this, and sneer at the French courts that levied a trivial punishment for the crime. A fitting punishment would have taken all the profits, and destroyed the perpetrators for as long as the reputation of the "brand" will be damaged.

BTW: interesting parallel to the port industry. 10, 20, 30, and Over 40 tawnys are not necessarily really that age or average age. It is enough to deliver a "taste" that suitably reflects a wine of that average age. How is that different?

True , it is an interesting parallel .
But it would be quite a leap to charge the port industry with fraud for an accepted practice .

Luc Gauthier wrote:True , it is an interesting parallel .
But it would be quite a leap to charge the port industry with fraud for an accepted practice .

Who knows? Maybe substituting wine blends that "taste" like another varietal is also an accepted practice, but we just haven't been told yet. These guys got caught by selling more PN than they grew or bought.

... the latest in a long history of French wine swindles...

...In their defence the pinot fiddlers argued that wine definitions were a grey area. The judges were not convinced by their argument that pinot noir could be “considered to be a brand, expressing a taste and given qualities and not a particular variety”....

Sounds like they expected/hoped to convince the judge that if it tasted close enough to PN, then it was OK to sell it as PN.

Now the age of port is the comparison I suggested. No testing I can think of would tell the age or average age of a sample of port. Maybe the rules are written that way because there is no way to test or enforce anything else besides "must taste like" a 10, 20, 30, over 40 tawny port.

However, DNA testing of the wine would establish exactly what varietals are in it, and anything else would be fraud. It's enforceable, so maybe it should be rigorously enforced (with testing and certification) or else rewrite the laws to allow anything that tastes like a varietal to be sold as such.

Unenforced laws encourage lawless behavior and, in addition, contempt for the law in other areas not related to the unenforced laws. This is the pernicious effect of bad laws that people will not obey. The US was taught a lesson about this by Prohibition; it not only failed to enforce the (bad) law banning alcohol, but this also encouraged people to admire the organized crime figures who supplied the alcohol (and also engaged in other activities, like murder, on the side.) It seems the lesson didn't stick: we are trying the same bone-headed approach to drugs just a few decades later. Politicians have short memories; fortunately for them, so do the voters.

Peter , since your mention of Prohibition in the U.S , I thaught about the effect in Québec .
Funny , in 1898 all alcool was banned in Canada , except ............... Québec
Regretfully , in 1921 , the SAQ was created .
Unfortunately It still has an archaic view of wine sales .
The result is the emergeance of a handfull of private importers whose sole purpose is to circumvent the SAQ .

Peter W. Meek wrote:Now the age of port is the comparison I suggested. No testing I can think of would tell the age or average age of a sample of port.

For wines up to about 60 years of age there are pretty good age tests based on different radioactive elements found in the wine as a result of atmospheric nuclear testing. C14 dating of tooth enamel can give someone's age within a year or two. I think there are other tests based different elements and isotopes. This is discussed a bit in The Billionaire's Vinegar.

Atmospheric radiation ratios -- never thought of that. It should work, if they care to test tawnys that way.