Georgia’s generic wine body has launched a bold new promotional campaign saying that they invented wine and that this makes them better than everybody else.
Critics have branded the strategy ‘exceptionalist’, ‘backward looking’ and ‘almost French in its arrogance.’
Kvevri cloud…
‘We’re not sure that we have mentioned this enough in the past,’ said Giorgi Silibili of the Wine and Kvevri Office of Fermention Furtherance (WAKOFF). ‘But we invented wine.
‘Not France. Not Italy. Not Spain. Us. Georgia.’
Historians, however, have pointed out that beyond being the first place to kick a few grapes around, the country’s impact since then has been ‘more or less negligible’ and it is ‘trading on past glories.’
Ancient history
Georgian media analysts have become increasingly concerned that occasionally several hours might go by without another magazine cut-and-pasting some half-arsed Google research outlining just how much the country’s wine history predates that of France.
In a statement WACKOFF said ‘The fact that we were making and drinking wine before anyone else means that the world owes us an enormous debt of gratitude.’
‘Basically, we’ve just let everyone else borrow wine for the last millennia and now we want it back,’ Silibili told Fake Booze.
‘After 8000 years of hurt, wine is coming home.’
Beautiful game
French and Italian producers, in particular, have reacted badly to the news.
‘The Georgians might have invented wine all those years ago,’ said Roberto Mankini, head of Italy’s Rule Avoidance Bureau. ‘But we added in all the elements that make it the beautiful product it is today.
‘Such as corruption and cheating.’
Georgian wine, he added, was ‘still stuck in the terracotta age’.
Nobby styles
Georgian marketers’ plans for a range of branded merchandise to accompany their campaign have had to be shelved, following a clerical error.
‘We wanted a symbol that captured our bold, heroic past,’ explained Silibili ‘so we settled on three lions.’
But an unfortunate misspelling of ‘lions’ on the requisitioning order led to several thousand shirts, mugs and baseball caps being printed with a trio of images that have been described as ‘obscene’ even ‘pornographic’.
‘We had to scrap them,’ said Silibili. ‘We decided that there are enough dicks in the world of wine without our adding any more.’
Click here to read about how dinosaurs invented sherry; or here to read about the failed plans for a breakaway European Super Cru
