Whining Winemakers!

Last night I watched "Dispatches: What's in Your Wine?" on Channel 4. What indeed.! It seems that the wine industry is allowed to get away with stuffing anything up to fifty additives and "flavourings" into wine. There was a ghastly expose into the murky world of champagne making. The top brands blithely said it was OK to drink their expensive stuff even with pesticide residue floating up with the bubbles. It was all legal and passed by the EU bureaucrats. What these prize plonkers don't get is that they are no better that Arthur Daley and Del Boy together. Surely they would want to sell a product that is made exclusively from grapes and not from a cocktail of pesticides, E numbers, bags of added sugar, and grown on a rubbish dump of rusting razor blades and the dubious contents of Paris dustbins!

The big question was - why don't you label your ingredients? The answer is that their bogus business would be held up to ridicule if the labels were giving such information. A suave gent from the Wine and Spirits Federation made some disingenuous remarks about wine coming from different vineyards so it would be impossible to give the proper information. Basically, he didn't care. He had a pretty poor response. If food manufacturers can say their produce is from more than one country, why not his lot?

Oh, and the champagne producers said they had reduced added sugar. It would seem they had used masses of it previously. Added sugar in £100 champagne bottles? Are we being conned or not?

The programme is on 7 days repeat. Do watch it. We should all be demanding proper wine, not a confection, as Malcom Gluck so rightly called it.

Suggesting a serving suggestion?

It amuses me that all grocery items with a picture on the packaging have to have the words "Serving Suggestion" stuck on as well, close to the picture. This seems to serve (no pun intended!) two purposes. One is to protect the retailer/producer from unscrupulous customers who complain at the drop of a hat. "I thought a TV came with this pizza" and such. The second is that it is a lot shorter than putting "This is what it could look like if you take it out of the tub, spread it on a piece of bread and top it with a spidery-looking lettuce leaf, the sort you can't buy in the store!".

Serving Suggestion is a lot shorter. However, tagging every picture with this euphemism is not without stupidity. Sainsbury's has a pate which has a neat serving suggestion. A pile of spice and some celery leaves. Looks nice but the pate is not in the picture. Somebody just went ahead as usual and stuck it on.

It never occurred to Cerebos to put "Serving Suggestion" on their tins!