Wine Fraud - The Wandering Palate

Wine socialists will hardly feel any sympathy for the embarrassment of wealthy individuals obsessing with old and rare bottles of wine and being duped wholesale by a fraudulent pretender. However, there is some excellent intrigue in this article and the whole story, or debacle, has to be the perfect script for the ‘next’ wine movie; a worthy apologue full of dark irony and humour blacker than cabernet sauvignon. Ideally my first choice for directing the film would have been Stanley Kubrick (RIP), but perhaps it would be Woody Allen who would best portray the absurdity and peculiarities of New York/American avidity and heteromorphic social climbing. Read More >

Buying Wine | Related to: New York Magazine, Rudy Kurniawan, Wine Fraud |

From a lost play by Eubulos, (c.405 BC - c.335 BC)
‘For sensible men I prepare only three kraters (large vase used to mix wine): one for health (which they drink first), the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third one is drained, wise men go home.

The fourth krater is not mine any more - it belongs to bad behaviour; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness.’

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.

But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defence of the new.”

As uttered by the vitriolic restaurant critic Anton Ego, in the film “Ratatouille”, after his epiphany.