The team behind thousands of cases of fake Yellow Tail wine have been blackballed from the Chinese Guild of Wine Forgers.
The fraudsters saw their memberships revoked when they were found to be responsible for a vast number of hooky bottles that surfaced in the UK earlier this week.
Buy high, sell cheap
Chinese authorities believe that the ‘Yellow Tail’ might actually have been put together from unsold bottles of Penfolds – a situation that would be profoundly embarrassing for the country’s forgery industry.
‘The whole point of our business is to sell cheap crap at an unfeasibly high price,’ said Wine Forgers’ secretary Hoo Ki Red. ‘By passing off half decent wine as gaudy supermarket roo-juice they have brought dishonour on our proud, lucrative and officially tiny profession.’
Huge sums
UK Wine Police put the street value of the 5,000 cases of Yellow Tail at literally tens of pounds.
‘Some of these wines go for six or seven quid a bottle, while the bubbles can fetch as much as eight,’ said Inspector Uri Nicked. ‘These unscrupulous villains could have been making upwards of five or even ten pence on each sale.
‘The numbers just don’t bear thinking about.’
Bad taste
Watt Isset from the consumer group WTF said the whole affair would leave a bad taste in the mouth of duped customers. Literally.
‘Wine drinkers need to know that when they buy a bottle of Yellow Tail they’re getting a vastly over-sweetened bottle of filth,’ he told Fake Booze.
‘We can’t have them accidentally drinking something that might taste like wine.’
Sweet solution
Police are advising anyone whose Yellow Tail tastes ‘more winey than usual’ to report it to the authorities.
‘Or they could try adding half a bag of sugar and giving it a shake,’ said Inspector Nicked. ‘That should do the trick.’
If you want to read Franz Kafka’s analysis of the Yellow Tail range, click here
