Can Wine Hacks and Flacks Association to offer MWW designation

TRAWNA – (GOSH Wine News Services) – The Foxy Wine News Network, enjoyed by up to 5,000 viewers every night, is pleased to offer, in conjunction with the Canadian Wine Hacks and Flacks Association, the beginning of a new online-television education relationship.

 

Beginning in Fall 2011, CWHFA (pronounced Kwee-Fah) will be offering through Foxy Wine News Network some new Master of Wine Writing courses leading to the M.W.W. degree (Master of Wine Writing). Kwee-Fah's Registrar said that these courses would not be similar to, nor lead to a Master of Wine or a Master Sommelier designation.

 

"Indeed", he said, "the MWW will be sitting over the MW and the MS. For one thing, it is one letter longer. For another, the MWW is concerned with writing about the same material that the MW and MS comprises, so the MWW has a more integrative construction of base materials.

 

"The MWW is a communication degree posited above the MW and the MS in interpretation. We will expound and expand on MW/MS materials and we will explain and demystify wine terms and concepts. The MWW will be able to fashion a credible, readable account of wines and wine tasting without resorting to a "sweaty saddles" or "kerosene" or "petrol" type of terminology. We'll lose such phrases as "Heavy-weight almost focused dessert wine. Whispers of cedar, structured blueberry and scant plum. Drink now through 2012."

 

"We'll also be looking into the type of hard-hitting investigative journalism-type stories that GOSH seems to find every day of the week – why aren't the big boy wine writers picking up these stories? Because there are actually TOO many stories..."

 

"We hope to have some of these investigative experiences fashioned in writing and on television before the October 6 election, so we can see what the Liberal Control of Beverages in Ontario, A Clown, er, Clone, er, Crown Corporation of A Have-Not Province Controlled by The Grate McGinty is really up to."

 

The Registrar of Kwee-Fah said: "We'll address this investigative issue when the time comes: it'll make a good textbook case for our students to write-up. Just watch us. We'll be everywhere."

 

Syllabi will go online September 1, while registration opens August 1 at the Foxy Wine News Network's website. More details will be posted later…

 

Chimo!  www.deantudor.com AND http://gothicepicures.blogspot.com

LCBO to generate new revenue strategy ahead of Oct 6 election

TRAWNA – (GOSH Wine News Services) – The Foxy Wine News Network, enjoyed by almost 5,000 happy wine drinkers every prime time hour, has just learned that the Liberal Control of Beverages in Ontario, A Clown, er, Clone, er, Crown Corporation of A Have-Not Province Controlled by The Grate McGinty, has decided on yet another revenue-generation strategy to justify its existence and to bring in new dollars to the Liberal Government coffers.

 

Top investigative wine reporter Brett Grimsby has been following this story for days now, and he files his report based on several interviews with Miffed Mole, the collective name for our sources who are familiar with the situation, and who spoke to him on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to divulge details while they were very close to the centre of discussions and while the matter under consideration had not yet been finalized nor announced to the public. While the decisions may or may not have been finalized internally, and while an announcement on the matter may or may not be imminent, possibly within the next week or two, that specific timeline is not really known. Sources should not be held responsible for the speculative and/or playful treatment of their research and/or disclosures.

 

Fresh intel suggests that the "still-to-be-verified-by-hacked-voicemail-messages" strategy will supposedly involve such things as:

 

-selling ANY wine made in the world in the Ontario marketplace, so long as it passes the stringent lab analysis for health safety. The fee for this could rise to $5,000 per analysis per shipment.

 

-increasing the number of Vintages offerings, both in wines and in frequency, to accommodate the new selling rules. What is now a bi-weekly release of some 120 wines will soon become a weekly release of some 1200 wines, followed by a DAILY release in 2012, probably offering 500 new wines each day. Importers will be expected to clear and sell out their wines within 14 days, to create space for newer incoming labels. Said a spokesperson, "This should appease those scores of thousands of wine lovers who have been begging for new wines."

 

-requesting that wine writers either pay a Friday Casual Day donation to the LCBO or wear a suit, with white shirt and tie. Ladies must wear cocktail dresses. Newer rules, to accommodate tasting 2500 new wines a week in 2012, will be promulgated later, and may involve overnight stays which will be billed to the wine writer.

 

-selling advertising on the brown liquor and wine bags.

 

-charging wine writers $10 for every day they taste and record wine notes on their laptops in the LCBO sensory labs. The LCBO has never charged for electricity before, but recent building brown-outs have been attributed to media charging their batteries with free electricity. Said a spokesperson, "This bit of gravy has been at taxpayer expense and it must stop."

 

-audio broadcasting of wine commercials in LCBO stores;

 

-initiating Drive-Through Liquor Stores in heavily urbanized areas.

 

The strategy will be implemented after the Civic Holiday weekend, and should generate several millions of Liberal dollars ahead of the October 6 election.

 

More on this story as it happens…

Chimo!  www.deantudor.com AND http://gothicepicures.blogspot.com

Apology from Foxy Wine News Network re: stretch water

TRAWNA – (GOSH Wine New Services) – The Foxy Wine News Network, now enjoyed by over 5,000 nightly viewers, wishes to issue the following apology which was broadcasted in prime time:

 

"For the past two years, Dean Tudor, ace investigative reporter for GOSH Wine News Services and Foxy Wine News Network, had commented that the stretch water component of International and Canadian Blended wines was not a joke, that it was for real. We've read lots of your emails about your laughter, folks, but we've re-iterated over and over again that STRETCH WATER IS NOT A JOKE, THAT IT IS FOR REAL, and the Canadian public is paying big bucks in taxes on simple tap water.

 

"Tudor has said it, over and over: STRETCH WATER IS REALITY, it is not a joke.

 

"Well, guess what, folks, IT ACTUALLY IS A JOKE -- that's right, Stretch Water (no relation to Stretch Cunningham) is a one-trick pony joke that has been perpetrated on the Canadian public.

 

"Dean Tudor wishes to apologize for insisting that stretch water is real. He defers to the judgment of the email writers and hacked voicemail messages, and he apologizes for his mistake. To not do so would be irresponsible. If he were to continue to make such mistakes and misstatements, and not correct them, especially if each and every one of those statements happened to go in one very particular direction on the political spectrum, that would undermine the very integrity and credibility that he works so hard to pretend to care about."

 

"Dean Tudor also apologizes for directly stealing this apology from another satirist. It was not intended to be a factual statement."

 

Chimo!  www.deantudor.com AND http://gothicepicures.blogspot.com

Foxy Wine News: Parker to Change his wine scoring systrem.

TRAWNA – (GOSH Wine News Services – The Foxy Wine News Network, viewed by almost 4,000 people during the recent Stanley Cup games, today has learned that Robert M. Parker Jr., the Dean of Wine Writers, the guy who started measuring and evaluating wines in terms of school performance report cards, will be changing his scoring scheme beginning with wines tasted in August 2011.

 

Said Parker (no relation to the creator of the Spenser mystery novels), "It is about time I changed. I've come under so much flak from others over my ParkerNumbers™. Besides I wanted to leave a legacy for Buddy, my bulldog."

 

In essence, Parker is shifting from an arithmetical scale to a common logarithmic scale, much like the decibel. "I've called it the Buddy scale", said Parker.  "The common logarithm has a base 10. It is indicated by log₁₀(x). On calculators it is usually 'log'. So it is perfectly adaptable to the computer society."

 

The Buddy, then, is based on the common logarithm of ratios — -10 times the logarithm of a power ratio. As Parker explains, "The signal-to-noise ratio describing the amount of unwanted noise in relation to a (meaningful) signal is measured in decibels and in Buddies. In a similar vein, the peak signal-to-noise ratio is commonly used to assess the quality, in this case, of wine."

 

Parker continued, "My 94 Buddy point wine is ten times better than my 93 Buddy point wine, and my 95 Buddy point wine is 100 times better than my 93 Buddy point wine. That's how it goes. It will give me more scope to refine my judgement with those wines that closely approach perfection upwards to 100 points. But like Zeno's Paradox, I may never reach 100 points again."

 

Initial responses have been fast, furious, and to some extent chaotic. Nobody knew that this was coming. The International Wine and Food Society abandoned its seven point scale in favour of the modified Richter log scale. The University of California at Davis immediately re-vamped its 20-point scale as a natural log. The Wine Speculator, though, stuck with its 100-point scale, saying, "There's nothing we can quickly do: the points are arrived at by committee. It would take years to change our glacial approach."

 

The Wine Writers' Circle of Canada commented, "We have no control over our members. They can use whatever numbers or letters they want. We got one guy who rates all the wines as either Tops, Dandy, So-So, Punk or Lousy. We have another who rates all wines in terms of whether they should be served to mothers-in-law. What can I say?"

 

More on this story as it rolls along…

 

Chimo!  www.deantudor.com AND http://gothicepicures.blogspot.com

GOSH: LCBO items "on sale" move exclusively to Twitter!

TRAWNA – (GOSH Wine News Services) – The LCBO today announced that it had joined the Twitterverse.

 

Beginning tomorrow at 10 AM, the LCBO will promulgate its usual special sales and deep discounts only through Twitter. These sales, indicated by the CSPC, will be for TEN minutes only, and must be completed by return Tweets pointing to pre-registered credit card data to ensure payment. Customers must, of course, have a Twitter account in order to take advantage of the sales.

 

Customers will then have 24 hours to pick up their purchases from a central location. Should the consumer already be in a store when the Tweet arrives, he can pick up the sale item then and there. Apparently, there is no limit on quantities purchased this way.

 

Initially, sales will be for $1 off a bottle, peaking at $2.50 off during the slowest selling time of the day. So there will be hourly variations, adding a bit of thrill to the proceedings. Some may even call this "gambling" or "rolling the dice". 

 

As the system gets rolling, there will be special discounts and news alerts, plus the chance of pre-ordering Vintages products. There is also speculation that home delivery may be available, but only to the Twits.

 

"We're giving people what they requested -- virtual instant access to reduced prices. Eventually, the sales of all delisted products will also move over to Twitter, giving those Twits a leg up on purchases," said a spokesperson.

 

More as this story evolves…

 

 Chimo!  www.deantudor.com AND http://gothicepicures.blogspot.com