At Fake Booze we’re continuing our review of the last 12 months by looking at our Shocks of the Year. And yes, you’re right. It is certainly easier than having to write anything new. But, you know… Christmas shopping and all that.
These are the the stories that amazed even us. And we wrote them. So you guys had no chance, frankly.
Some of these articles were inspired by actual genuine stories – you might recognise the events that inspired them. But the unifying factor is that all of them should contain enough truth to really annoy someone, which is the important thing.
In case you missed it, our Launches of the Year are here. Warning: contains celebrities.
Now, gird your loins and onward to battle!
Shocks of the Year 2022
The year began with a bang when a supermarket revealed that it had taken the dramatic step of removing all bottles of a rosé from its shelves on the grounds that it ‘contained flavour’.
The shock of finding a bottle of pink that tasted of something could have killed people, they reasoned.
Over in China, the country’s Wine Police, the Ka Lim Na cracked an operation selling thousands of bottles of Penfolds that were not fake at all. A disgraceful state of affairs in a country where a label is a statement of the purchaser’s wealth rather than a guarantee of contents.
The first Cape Wine fair for several years caused the scales to fall from attendees’ eyes in a mass-conversion not seen since the days of Paul on the road to Damascus. The discovery that South Africa wasn’t crap after all in no way dependent on a week of expenses-paid air travel, accommodation, food and wine.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, a supine drinks world was rocked by news that a flight of natural wines had outscored more traditional bottles in the so-called Judgment of Shoreditch; though this destabilising revelation was somewhat countered by the decision to create a new appellation system based on medieval land boundaries. There is, after all, only so much change people can tolerate.
So lord only knows what the more conservative members of the drinks world made of the news that the whole ‘masculine wine vs feminine wine’ was to be settled by clearly stating a drink’s gender on the label.
Finally, we’re wondering whether the revelation that 20% of people who work in drinks eschew anything approaching a salary and are happy to be paid in free booze should be in here at all. Since nobody does it for the money, maybe the shock is that the figure wasn’t higher.
