Roll Over Guy de Muapassant

It's like a modern day retelling of, The Necklace, Guy's well known short story first published in 1884. Maybe we're seeing the beginnings of wine journalism's version of reality shows.
First the news of the faked review in Wine Spectator and now Food & Wine writer Lettie Teague pulls a fast one at a dinner party all in the name of a good story. I wonder if her name is a nom de plume, because it sounds suspiciously close to the name of Monk's assistant in the popular USA-TV series.

Wine Scams: A Counterfeiter Confesses

F&W’s Lettie Teague—feeling glee, then guilt—explores the growing problem of wine fraud by attempting to dupe her friends with a fake bottle of 100-point Bordeaux.

By Lettie Teague

Almost every woman I know (including myself) has knowingly purchased a fake designer handbag at one time or another. I know it’s wrong—that counterfeiting can cost legitimate companies a great deal of money, and that it can harm the unwitting purveyors of fakes as well. For example, eBay was recently ordered to pay $60 million to LVMH, owner of the Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior brands, for selling fakes on its site.

Of course, fancy handbags aren’t the only luxury goods considered worth copying these days; as the price of fine wine escalates, so, too, has the quantity of imposter bottles on the market. The number has reached into the hundreds of thousands, as in Tuscany, where Italian authorities found quite a few Brunello producers making their fancy wine with cheap, non-Brunello grapes. (The government’s fraud-fighting tactics are quintessentially Italian: They began training policemen as undercover sommeliers.)

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What To Do With Empty Wine Bottles

Gives new meaning to a "well balanced" wine. I've done this same trick with boxed wine!

Local German Beer - Oxymoron or Ompah in a Glass?

Believe it or blow foam on your friend standing next to you.... an adventurous brewing entrepreneur has launched an authentic German style brewery right here in SLO.

EINHORN BEER Founder, Douglas Martin, a Chicago native who spent nearly two decades in Germany studying the craft. The results are a new microbrewery that makes beer in the German tradition.
“Germans really believe they make the best beer in the world,” he said. “Americans brew good beer, too,” Martin granted, “but it’s an entirely different style.

”After working for a mineral water distributor in Germany, Martin attended Doemens Beverage Academy in Munich, one of three German colleges specializing in all aspects of the wine, mineral water, juice, and especially the beer industries.
After graduating from Doemens, Martin went to work for Scottish & Newcastle one of the top-ten macro-breweries in the world, responsible for such famous cold-ones as Fosters, Newcastle, Strong Bow, and Baltika.

All of our full-bodied brews are made with the best raw materials available, brewed just the way you might discover on your travels in and around Germany.

You will find them true to their heritage - yet unique the way one expects from a California craft beer. The century-old traditions behind these hand-crafted brews guided us in their creation, but we have chosen to remain free with our own interpretation of the Germanic beer culture. Prosit!
Try the best German style beers available on California's Central Coast - 2 great events are approaching fast!

Check out their brews at LEVEL 4 RESTAURANT & LOUNGE in Paso Robles for OCTOBERFEST on Friday October 3rd or at the MORRO BAY HARBOR FEST on Saturday & Sunday October 4-5 ! You won't regret it !

Podcast of Show from August 2, 2008

We are thrilled to welcome another Central coast wine pioneer to the show; Gary Eberle, founder/owner Eberle Winery in Paso Robles.
Gary is well known for his community involvement and on this show he tells us about the college scholarship fund that benefits from an event he and Toby Schumrick from Tobin James Winery concocted; The 10th Annual Winemakers Cook Off in Paso Robles. Probably one of the wildest of all the area's wine events!

Then Melanie Blankenship joins us to discuss local, sustainable and organic food products that she's featured for the past seven years' at her store, Nature's Touch in Templeton, CA.

Wine Nuked for Thomas Jefferson... a Job for the Pink Panther?

One of Britain's top rare wine merchants and nuclear scientists have jointly unveiled a 21st-century tool for unmasking counterfeit vintage wines.

The technique consists of zapping bottles with ion beams generated by a particle accelerator.

The beams are directed at the glass, not the wine, and can distinguish how old the bottles are and, roughly, where they originate.

"We compare the suspect bottles with those that we know come from the chateaux," explained Herve Guegan, a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Bordeaux.

"The chemical composition of glass used to make bottles changed over time and was different from place to place," he told AFP.

The Antique Wine Company in London, which asked Guegan's Centre for Nuclear Studies to develop the fraud-busting technology, handles more than 10,000 bottles of rare wines every year for thousands of customers around the world.

"We sell bottles every day for between $US2000 and $US10,000," said the company's managing director, Stephen Williams, noting that the exceptional grand cru can fetch up to $US100,000.

At these prices, "counterfeiting is something we have to be very diligent about," he said by phone.

France's most prestigious Burgundy and Bordeaux chateaux are notoriously reluctant to discuss fraud or its prevalence, but wine experts say it is a growing problem.

In a recent and spectacular case, American collector William Koch sued a German wine dealer, claiming four bottles - allegedly belonging to US President Thomas Jefferson - he had purchased for $US500,000 were fake. The case has yet to be settled.