A French winery says its launch of the world’s first 100% plutonium-free wine range is tapping into a ‘huge unspoken demand’.
The Domaine Proton range – slogan, ‘Where fission is never in fashion’ – is due to go on sale on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop site later this month.
Shameful silence
The brand’s head of marketing Isa Tope says the wines are certified entirely in accordance with the 1969 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which gives them ‘real credibility’.
‘People might think there’s zero chance of their wine having plutonium in,’ he said, ‘but frankly it’s only marginally less likely than it containing gluten – and that’s a thing now apparently.’
Tope described the wine industry’s silence on whether their wines were dangerously radioactive as ‘shameful’.
‘The very fact that nobody ever talks about it just proves what a huge problem it is,’ he told Fake Booze.
‘That’s basic logic.’
Fissile-free
According to Tope, the Proton range are made to strict standards, with all their grape growers asked to sign a declaration that they have not used any stocks of highly fissile material in the vineyards or winery.
Nor are they part of an international plutonium smuggling cartel.
Thus far, he said that all of Proton’s suppliers had signed up ‘bar one or two in the Languedoc who like to put a small amount of polonium in their Clairette to give it some flavour.’
Fuel rods
‘There are a huge number of incredibly harmful chemicals and elements in wine,’ said a spokesman for Goop. ‘From sulphatives and additides to dehydra-narcisscants, plus loads of other stuff that we haven’t made up yet.’
According to Goop, wineries regularly use spent nuclear fuel rods as part of the production process, meaning that a regular glass of wine could contain up to 250 micro-fictions of synthetic isotopes.
‘By contrast, our fun, 100% clean, off-dry rosé is guaranteed not to cause nausea, vomiting and fever,’ says Isa Tope.
‘At least, not unless you taste it.’
Half-life
The wider wine trade, however, were sceptical about Proton’s plutonium-free claims.
‘We can guarantee there’s nothing toxic and incendiary in Bordeaux,’ said Roland Certan of the Bordeaux Aristocratic Chateau Owners Fraternity (BACOF). ‘Apart from our bickering over the classification levels in St Emilion every ten years, that is.’
Producers in Barolo, meanwhile, pointed out that since the half-life of Plutonium is 24,000 years ‘any toxic effects will be long gone by the time our tannins are approachable.’
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