$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ ALL THE RUMOURS, MYTHS, & WEIRD WINE $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ AND FOOD STORIES YOU CAN HANDLE.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$SS "NO MATTER HOW CYNICAL I GET, I CAN NEVER KEEP UP" (Lily Tomlin)

******************************* WINNER OF THREE MAJOR SPIFFY AWARDS FOR WINE SATIRE !!

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Car crashes into LCBO store, CIC wine section wiped out

[I really cannot make up something like this…well, maybe not all of it…]

April 23, 2010 -- OTTAWA — An 89-year-old man drove his car into a liquor store in Ottawa on Friday.

The driver was shaken, but not injured, when his Honda Accord jumped the curb, crossed the sidewalk and crashed through the glass storefront. The vehicle skidded for about 10 metres, coming to rest in a small lake of wine and spirits.

No customers or staff were hurt. The bouquet of fruity red wine wafted through the sunny afternoon as hundreds of onlookers gaped at the wreckage.

More than one remarked, "I didn't know this was a drive through," and dozens recorded the action on their cellphones as a tow-truck extricated the sedan.

The senior drove to the LCBO to pick up some beer. He was pulling into a parking spot when he accidentally hit the accelerator instead of the brake. He said he plans to keep driving. "I don't know why not."

A Liberal Control of Beverages in Ontario (LCBO), A Clown, er, Crown Corporation, spokesperson said that the entire CellaredinCanada(TM) section (at the front of the store, by the cash register) was wiped out, and that the larger wineries would be making substantial insurance claims for the loss. He added, "I don't know what value they will put on the stretch water component -- that's anybody's guess. Thank God that Freggie(TM), our largest selling fruit-vegetable wine, was not involved."

When asked about other Ontario wines in the store, he said: "Well, the VQA section is too small to matter -- it's at the back of the store anyway. And fruit wines? Well, they don't count...never did, never will. But don't you dare quote me on that!"

More on this story as the cleanup continues....

 
 

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Book Launch Invite: The Cellared in Canada Affair, April 31, 2010.

REAL NEWS: "And, finally," (said Presenter Mansbridge) "that Canadian wine you've been drinking might just not have been made or even cellared in Canada….Brett Grimsby of GOSH Wine News Services has this story with all of the details…."

TRAWNA – (GOSH Wine Entertainment News Services) –

Please join us in the launch of Brett Grimsby's new book, "THE CELLARED IN CANADA™ AFFAIR; the inside scoops and stories behind what went wrong." (published by Pandemic Press, 2010, 789 pages, hard cover, $39.95 plus tax, or $3.46 on Amazon.Ca). The author will give a reading, sign books, pour wines (your choice), AND do an update on events that have transpired since the book was printed.

Some advance praise for the book:

"Remarkable…it is the work of our greatest forensic journalist, at the top of his game. And it's essential reading" (Vanity Fare)….

"If you read only one book about the causes of the recent vinous crisis, let it be Brett Grimsby's "The Cellared in Canada™ Affair". The truest picture yet of what went wrong in Vineland – and why." (Washington Postal)…

"I literally could not put "The Cellared in Canada™ Affair" down…It's Brett Grimsby doing what he does best, illuminating the idiocy, madness and greed of modern winemaking…Devastating." (Salon.Ca)

"An assiduously reported and beautifully written book…A peerless guide to exactly what went so very wrong" (Rueters)

At the launch, Grimsby will address the issue of transparency, uncovering new information from new sources who now have gone on the record. One such source said it was never his company's intention to deceive anyone or confuse consumers.

Another source said "Please don't question our intention to be totally transparent and honest."

Yet a third source said the now-controversial labels have been in place since 1996 when they were approved by a national standards board. "We pointed out to the government, 'We can't say these wines are a product of Canada because they're not a 100-per cent product of Canada'" he recalled. He said the board then told them to go with "Cellared in Canada."

In other words, "The board made me do it !"

Pandemic Books, the publisher, has said: "In terms of finger pointing at this time, that's why these investigations are so important to make sure that we are able to determine exactly what happened."

 

The record speaks for itself.

 

The launch is at the world international headquarters of the Wine Flacks and Hacks of Canada (CN Tower Podium) in charitable support for those wine writers who have lost their jobs defending the public's right to know about quality wines.

 

Date: Saturday April 31, 2010, 6PM – 8PM

 

Be there…

 
 
 

Sunday, April 11, 2010

CELLAREDINCANADA(tm) Wines to Change Focus

REAL NEWS: From the Times (London) –

 

TALIBAN OVERHAUL IMAGE TO WIN ALLIES

– The Taliban have embarked on a sophisticated information war, using modern media tools as well as some old-fashioned ones, to soften their image.

 

 

(GOSH Wine News Services: MEDIA RELEASE – Embargoed until April 15, 2010) –

 

Isn't it time you took another look at…the wines of CellaredinCanada™ ?

 

Not your father's CellaredinCanada™. The New CellaredinCanada™. The 2010 CellaredinCanada™.  CellaredinCanadaLite™: More water, Less wine.

 

We know what you're thinking: "CellaredinCanada™? Aren't they the ones who put stretch water into their wines? Don't they blend cheap offshore wines from Latin America with Good Old Decent (GOD) Ontario, A Have-Not Province, wines?"

 

LOL! You're thinking of the old CellaredinCanada™.

 

How do we know what you're thinking?

 

Focus groups.

 

You're, like, "Focus groups? Since when do CellaredinCanada™ wines do focus groups?"

 

We're, like, "Since Pizza Pizza started doing them."

 

You told Pizza Pizza that their crust tasted like cardboard and their sauce tasted like ketchup. But your criticism only made their pizza much tastier. At the New CellaredinCanada™, we want to be the Pizza Pizza of wine lovers.

 

We've done focus groups through CROP and Sopexa, and we've listened. You've told us everything you liked and hated about CellaredinCanada™ wines.

 

We're out to displace the fruit-vegetable wine Freggie™ as the number one blended wine in Canada! We've been cast as losers for too long. It's do or die time, baby. No more shooting blanks.

 

CellaredinCanada™ has come roaring back: no more stretch water (we'll call it something else, maybe "organic glacier material"), an increase in the Canadian wine component (and better Canadian wine too!!), free podcasts on how to appreciate CellaredinCanada™ wines, CellaredinCanada™ wine and food matching notes – we are so much more than just Pizza Pizza for wine lovers!!

 

Got an iPhone? Then you'll want to download our smokin' new app, CellaredinCanadaChoices™ which show you the exact location of your fave CellaredinCanada™ wines – the LCBO and winery stores that carry stock, with up to the minute price changes.

 

And log on to our new social networking site, CellaredInYourFacebook™  where you can talk with other CellaredinCanada™ fans, and play interactive games (warning: you must be over 19 in Ontario, A Have-Not Province, and prove it!).

 

You know you love us.

 

Follow us, won't you?

 

We're on Twitter.

 

(With apologies to the King (Andy Borowitz) and to the Winery and Grower Allianz in and of Ontario, A Have-Not Province)

 

Monday, April 5, 2010

The Mother of All Wine Apps

TRAWNA – (GOSH Wine News Services) – GOSH reveals that the world-renowned Wine Writers' Circle of Canada has been developing a new wine app for mobiles.

 

To be called, simply, The Mother Of All Wine Apps (MOAWA), it features drop-down menus galore and a patented winnowing process via a simple question-and-answer processed routine. Suggestions can be saved and printed out.

 

It'll be extremely useful for spur of the moment recommendations, for scanning store shelves, for restaurant suggestions, and for wine snobs.

 

Version 0.9 is in beta, and will cover the following –

 

-detailed information on all the wine basics, including every one of the 17,000-plus wine regions of the world, every single vintage note since the 11th century for each of these regions, all of the 24,578 grape varieties grown, and terroir microclimate notes (with accompanying Google maps and Google historical maps for every 12-hour period in the history of the earth). There is also a long detailed history (with artwork) of winemaking, beginning with the Sumerians.

 

-detailed travel notes to each one of these 17,000-plus regions, with new regions being added daily. Notes include the usual (accommodations, food, points of interest, local wines)

 

-detailed descriptions of viticulture, including life in the vineyard, the cycle of the grapevine (from grape to basket), organic and biodynamic techniques, with a selection of horns.

 

-detailed descriptions on how to taste and appreciate wine, with material about red, white and rose wines, sparkling wines, dessert wines, fortified wines – even fruit wines! There are literally scores of millions of wine choices by taste and style (when associated with a region or a country or a meal or food choices).

 

-wine and music choices. MOAWA has a database of every single piece of music created since 20,000 BCE, all nicely reconciled with the wine database. There are mood and spirit relationships with the wines and the notes. You are only three touch screens away from millions of wine and music recommendations, custom tailored to your musical preferences and to the preferences of all of your friends via Facebook, MySpace, etc. Make your own "wine ringtones" from any number of eight-bar samples that are created from every single tune ever written.

 

-wine and literature. References are indexed to every single piece of literature, play and cinema, all cross-referenced for your convenience. Wines are listed in context of the prose so that you can begin to spout words at two touches of the screen.

 

-a directory to some 12.5 million wineries on this planet, complete with names and addresses, websites, capacity, grape varieties used, rated-ranking notes, names of top employees and winemakers, full tasting notes on every single commercially available wine (plus any experimental wines), tasting notes on library and earlier vintages, and tax filings. The system also has the capacity to add notes for every single vine growing in the winery's vineyard; this will be offered with MOAWA 2.0! Everything here is cross-referenced and itemized, accessible with only three screen touches!!!

 

-a directory of every single wine store and branch location in the world, with complete names and addresses, websites, labels and wines for sale (plus how much stock for each), rated-ranking notes, names of top employees and wine advisers, and full tasting notes on every single commercially available wine -- exclusively written by that store's staff.

[NB: For proprietary legal reasons, the Liberal Control of Beverages in Ontario (LCBO) directory is not available to the Good People of Ontario, A Have-Not Province. One member of the WWCC suggested that you could purchase MOAWA through the offshore grey market]

 

-a Google directory (with full analysis) to every single wine collector in the world (minimum range: 800 bottles or $15,000 appraised value), complete with a GPS location finder and a security camera to determine the whereabouts of the owner at every moment of the day.

 

-a directory to every single one of the 42 million hotels, restaurants, bistros and cafés in the world that sell wine, with names, addresses, websites, employees, wine cards, stocks, etc. It is updated every time a bottle of wine is sold or taken from inventory. There is also a sorting capability by selling price, enabling you to see at a glance what the current restaurant price is for the wine plus local taxes and local tips (in either Canadian or US dollars plus Euros if needed). Every single wine card on the planet has been analyzed and cross-referenced to find you the best wine value in terms of what food you want to eat – no matter where you are in the world!

 

-a directory and finding aid for each of the 12,000 wine auction houses in the world. This will enable you to constantly check on the current status of the value of your wine collection. Prices can be sorted by 78 different parameters, including the upper limits that taxation agencies will accept for charitable donations. There is also a subset for every single charity in the world that will issue a tax receipt for a donated bottle of wine. The MOAWA has the ability to run the wine-auction database against the wine store database, your personal cellar database, and against the charity database (with reported wine donation tax receipts) in order to find you the BEST deal for your donated wine, automatically factoring in cost of shipping from your home cellar.

 

-suggested wine and food pairings for every single food, wine, cooking method, spicing component, and the like, that has ever been developed by mankind. You can pick through wines with meals or wines with foods, wines for every occasion in any of the 15,000 religious and government statutory (and non-statutory) holiday calendars of the entire world.

There is also a reverse lookup function via food pairings for your wine. Each food-wine match is rated on how close it comes to Nirvana; a rating of 90 means that it is 90% close, as in Perfection Salad.

 

-there is also a spectacular wine and cheese matching subset that is so involved and detailed that we have no space here to cover it, except to mention that every single molecule of wine and every single molecule of cheese is covered,

 

 

-a word-by-word Boolean index to every single PRINTED wine tasting note in all the major AND the minor books and periodicals ever published as regards wine. We estimate this database to contain titles of some 5,400,260 unique newsletters and magazines (not to mention the frequency of them all) and 400,000 books – guaranteed at least 4,775,000,000 (and counting) notes. This includes Parker Junior who fought the WWCC at every turn. Join us with the "creative writing bot™": write your own wine reviews of wines you have tasted, based on our suggestions for phrases used by other reviewers! A boon to budding wine writers!!

 

-a detailed and comprehensive, cross-referenced word-by-word Boolean index to the 7.5 billion wine blogs on the Internet, and to email versions of wine newsletters – a resource worth the price of the app by itself.

 

-notes on how to build any one of 10,000 different wine cellars from scratch, with at least 1 million different wine recommendations (updated). There are also several scores of cellar management software programs to pick and choose from, including manuals and simulations.

 

-how to keep track of your own wine notes, backed up continuously. This edition allows you to tag and snag a label image for your personal tasting records, in addition to finding wine-food pairing notes for the table.

 

-a social networking feature that lets you post wine notes to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yuwie, Ning, MySpace, Google Buzz, Flickr, Orkut, LinkedIn, Ustream and others as necessary. In addition, you'll be able to retrieve any of the 8 billion wine notes posted by others to Facebook, etc., in any sequence of retrieval by 84 different parameters. Also, you'll be able to communicate continuously with your other MOAWA purchaser buddies and complain about deficiencies and bugs in the special MOAWA forum. This will lead nicely to MOAWA 2.0.

 

The DeLuxe version of MOAWA (available for just a few dollars more) will include "Sensurama"™, the technique developed by the WWCC for smelling aromas and bouquets at a distance through your mobile. In addition, there will be full capability for photographing a wine bottle or label, at which point you can receive just about everything ever written on that particular wine within nano-seconds. Be informed!! There is also a translation function that will allow you to recall any text ever written about wine in any of some 25,000 languages and dialects, including Tagalog and Esperanto. An optional pull-out corkscrew is also available for those who are convinced that the corkscrew will not go away.

 

 

AND, of course, there is a continual stream of massive updates every second of the day, with major updates being announced by a gong. For example, every time a bottle of any wine is sold or comes off a bottling line, the winery and wine store databases are updated. Current vintage releases from every winery in the world will be available to you as it happens. Your personal preferences will also be reconciled.

 

 

And the best part of it is this: YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET for the basic flash drive module! That's right – all of this data resides in flash memory inside your mobile device. You pay just once for the basic setup data ($1.99 or $4.99 for the DeLuxe model featuring Sensuroma™, TagALabel™, TranslateWine(TM) and Corkscrew™).

 

Updates, though, will cost you some money – and for these updates you must be connected to the Internet.

 

While The Mother of All Wine Apps is still in beta testing mode, the WWCC plans to offer the service at a flat rate of $1.99 for the basic app (as outlined above), $4.99 for the Deluxe version, and $17 a year for the continual updates.

 

How is all this accomplished? Two words:  CCTV and RFID. Little Fat Wino is watching out for all of us!!

 

The Treasurer of the WWCC has gone on the record as saying that the Circle expects to rake in billions of dollars this year.

 

The WWCC has hired master huckster Dan Aykroyd who has his own winery in Ontario to handle the sales….so, come on down!!!

 

More on this story as the MOAWA passes beta…

 
 
 

Thursday, April 1, 2010

BREAKING WIND, er, NEWS: High Administrative Changes at the LCBO

 

TRAWNA – (GOSH Wine News Services) – GOSH has learned that the Government of Ontario, A Have-Not Province, will change the reporting structure of the LCBO, A Crown Corporation. The Grate McGinty is scheduled to make an announcement later on the afternoon of April 1, but we have advance notice of some of the initial details.

 

Allegedly, the LCBO will now report to the Ministry of Agriculture, since the Crown Corporation deals largely with a food product, particularly a safe, pasteurized food product.

 

Apparently, the new incoming Chair of the LCBO is to be Larry Paterson, of Peterborough, a former top employee of the Crown Corporation. He will be crowned later in the week. There are those who will say that he has been bought by the Ontario government, to be forever silenced.

 

The new CEO who will actually run the LCBO will be Michael Pinkus, currently Head Writer for the Ontario Wine Review. He too has been bought by the Ontario government, to be forever silenced.

 

The restructuring will have only three divisions: Wines, Beers, and Spirits. Dean Tudor, currently running FauxVoixVinCuisine, will head up the wines sector. He is expected to step down as Head Satirist; he has also been bought by the LCBO, to be forever silenced.

 

Readers are cautioned that some of the statements contained in this release may be forward-looking statements, such as expectations, estimates and statements that describe the Ontario (A Have-Not Province) Government's future plans, objectives or goals, including words to the effect that the Liberal Control of Beverages in Ontario (LCBO) or management expects a stated condition to exist or occur. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of terminology such as "outlook", "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect", "intend", "should", and similar weasel expressions. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature, they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results in each case could differ from those currently anticipated in such statements by reason of factors such as, but not limited to, changes in general economic and market conditions. The GOSH Wine News Service disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results, or otherwise.

 

More on these administrative changes later, but before some will say that we are forever bought out and silenced. Long live Ontario!!