The Sun article, which was sent my way by the illustrious wine-counterfeiting scholar/economist Günter Schamel (whose work I’ve previously discussed here), has the amusing title “You Plonkers” and an equally amusing photo of a nonplussed McGowan.

The most unusual thing about this story is that while has been much discussion of counterfeit wine in the high-end rare and fine wine market—Jefferson bottles and first-growth Bordeaux and such—there hasn’t been nearly as much talk about counterfeiting in the low-to-midrange wine market.

In that market, the trick might be a lot easier to get away with, for at least three reasons: first of all, evidence from psychology and neuroscience indicates that the end consumers of inexpensive or midpriced wines aren’t probably paying as much attention to the wine’s sensory qualities as they would if it were expensive. Second of all, consumers’ quality expectations are clearly lower when they pay less, so they’re less likely to complain even if the wine doesn’t meet those expectations. Third, and perhaps most importantly, there’s little incentive for any individual to sue for fraud. Unlike, say, wine collector Bill Koch, who alleges millions of dollars in counterfeit damages related to his collection alone—and thus has incentive to sue on his own behalf—even the theoretical smattering of consumers that are more or less certain the wine is counterfeit probably can’t be bothered to raise a big stink over a potential refund (barring punitive damages) of £5 per bottle.

This last phenomenon is the same sort of collective action dilemma that mobile phone companies, credit-card companies, and the like have been trading on for years: they upcharge customers a few cents here and there—rounding the length of a dropped call up to the nearest minute, for instance, or playing with the spread on exchange rates on foreign transactions—but it’s below the radar screen of anyone but the most obsessively litigious or penny-pinching customer. It adds up to a lot of money for the company, but not enough is taken from any individual to incite a lawsuit. It’s thus a highly effective form of fraud.

When there are enough instances of such a scam, plaintiff firms sometimes come after the perpetrators with class-action suits, because contingency fees allow the firms to collect a percentage of the entire settlement even when the payout to any individual member of the class is small. The amalgamated damages then function as incentives for the plaintiff firms that look more like Koch’s and less like McGowan’s, even as many of the plaintiffs themselves probably don’t even go to the trouble to deposit their miniscule winnings (have you ever received one of those 40-cent settlement checks in the mail?).

It might seem, then, that the optimal opportunity for fraud is where (1) the damages to each individual are relatively low; (2) the number of instances is fewer than would make the case worth a plaintiff firm’s time; and yet (3) the business is large enough to make good money for the counterfeiter.

If low-end wine counterfeiting fits into this magical middle ground, then it’s here, perhaps, that sensationalist tabloids like the Sun can serve serve a critical role in the information marketplace and substitute for the plaintiff firm in solving this collective action problem. The tabloid punishes the supermarket chain with a public shaming while also rewarding the whistleblower with fifteen minutes of fame, which may not be worth millions, but whose cocktail-party value, plus perhaps a few pounds for the story, creates enough incentive for a consumer somewhere to tell all. If the story catches on, the extra ad impressions justify the tabloid’s effort. And all of this happens at little cost compared with that of preparing a fraud suit.

Unless, that is, you figure in the Sun’s liability risk if the facts turn out not to be true. This can be a serious matter in Britain, whose libel laws are so friendly to plaintiffs that the jurisdiction is said to attract so-called “libel tourists” from other countries. At least in Britain, then, this sort of middle-ground fraud might have to be particularly brazen and verifiable to be reported in a tabloid. (This one was probably reviewed by the Sun’s legal staff before publication and certified as such, in keeping with the age-old adage that the lawyers get paid no matter what.)

On its face, the Jadot fraud does look unusually brazen, from the apparently not-very-believable label to the fact that, according to McGowan, the wine tasted like Liebfraumilch—an off-dry German wine—when it was supposed to be white Burgundy. Even wine novices are pretty good at differentiating sugar levels, and passing off a sweet wine as dry—if that is indeed what happened here—would be an unusually challenging feat to attempt. But in the world of wine counterfeiting these days, maybe brazenness is no drawback, and the challenge is the game.

About five hours after the end of yesterday’s match, FIFA.com, perhaps in response to pressure online, began allowing a limited number of comments onto the “Have Your Say” discussion board that referenced the disallowed goal. The first such comment allowed was from Deutschnuk, on June 18 at 21:49. In the 24 hours or so since then, by my count, seven other comments, not including replies, have been posted that are critical of the call (by sp0rtsfan8, bknutz, T-Rixx, stinson87, LAUREN2010, MarcS420, and jacob163).

To counter these, FIFA.com has also posted (as of this writing) seven comments arguing that the call was justified, often by suggesting that the USA side was playing rough (from algeroid7, Stipe24, Brisaca, roedl22, j0000nz, and two from SVNFTW). One comment has also been posted that discusses the call but considers both sides. From reading the board, in other words, you’d assume that soccer fans were more or less split on the question of whether Coulibaly made a bad call.

The reason that this distribution seems utterly unrelated to the distribution of opinion amongst soccer fans, bloggers, and commentators across the rest of cyberspace is that there still seems to be massive comment suppression happening on the “Have Your Say” board.

The primary evidence for this suppression is that the volume of comments does not appear to be returning to anywhere near the normal volume on other boards (which, it bears mention, are also probably subject to some censorship as well). If things have improved since the first five hours after the match (during which only 37 comments in total were approved), it’s only slightly: only 77 total comments have been approved in the 24 hours after the game, whereas 137 comments were approved in that same time span for the lower-profile Algeria-Slovenia match.

And of the comments that have been approved by FIFA.com since the match’s end, only 31 have come from Americans—that’s an average of less than one per hour. By comparison, 31 comments by Americans were posted in the first half-hour after the conclusion of the USA’s 1-1 tie against England.

In spite of what seems to be a slight policy shift, none of the undoubtedly numerous deleted comments that referenced the call in the first five hours after the match ended have been revived and posted. And there are many areas of discussion that still seem taboo, so we have no idea how many comments are still being deleted. As of this writing, for instance, no comment has been approved that mentions the referee by name, even as FIFA itself prepares to comment publicly on his performance on Monday.

And no comment has been approved that mentions (as do most newspaper articles about the match) the numerous soccer analysts and experts that have criticized the call, including Bob Ley and Alexi Lalas of ESPN (who called Coulibaly’s nullification “a disgrace”); CNN/SI’s Peter King (“Americans, and the world, should be outraged at FIFA”); the New York Times’ Jeff Klein (“Horrible performance from the Malian referee, who wrongly nullified what would have been the winning US goal!”); and even the British paper, the Guardian (“what looked like a perfectly good late winner was ruled out”), whose home team stood to benefit from the call.

Some other interesting FIFA-censorship-related tidbits have also been floating around, such as the organization’s decision to seize and destroy a Liverpool FC banner containing the words “Save Liverpool FC Hicks & Gillett Out,” according to Richard Buxton of Click Liverpool, because it “contravened their rules against obscene or vulgar images being displayed at games.” George Gillett and Tom Hicks are the unpopular American owners of the club.

Buxton also reports that FIFA “ejected 36 Holland fans from yesterday’s 2-0 win over Denmark for wearing mini-dresses designed by Dutch brewer Bavaria, citing ‘ambush marketing.’”

And here’s some interesting new wording from the capsule summary of the controversial match result on FIFA.com: “USA retrieved a 2-0 half-time deficit to earn a deserved draw with Group C rivals Slovenia.”

Emphasis added.

Other soccer discussion boards, like the Washington Post’s Soccer Insider, were flooded with debate and discussion about the questionable call, which began almost immediately after it happened at about 16:40 GMT (the time zone used by FIFA.com). So were Twitter feeds (although at some point Twitter crashed, as it frequently has during the World Cup). The discussion over the controversy really exploded around the internet after the game ended at 16:51, and before long, USA’s tie with Slovenia already had more Google News blog hits (850) than Serbia’s upset of Germany (701).

But on FIFA.com, the silence about USA-Slovenia has been deafening. The latest comment to appear on the discussion board has a timestamp of 20:04. In the 193-minute span between the game’s end and the latest comment’s time stamp, only 24 squeaky-clean comments have been approved. For instance: “great fightback by the USA”; “this is the right result on the balance of play”; “way to go USA”; “the match was really exciting!”; “slovenia is the best team”; “USA are becoming a real nice team!”; and “Slovenia had a great chance to qualify in the next round!! But in the second half we were too defensive.”

By comparison, in that same span of time—193 minutes—after the end of Germany-Serbia (which ended today at 14:20), there were already 175 comments posted. That’s more than seven times as many.

At one point, a user named Rossus, from South Africa, posted one comment that did, in the most polite possible way, at least hint at the idea that there might have been some controversy. Rather than suggesting any human fault, Rossus’s comment merely used the word “luck”: “I am not a USA supporter but the USA was very unlucky not to win.” But even that comment, after briefly appearing on the match overview page (which streams the latest comments), was later censored, and never made it to the discussion board page itself. The comment is no longer on the site, but I took a screen shot of it during the brief time that it appeared on the overview page, which appears here to the left.

Just to test my theory personally, I also tried posting the following comment: “I disagree with referee Koman Coulibaly’s decision to nullify the third US goal.” Sure enough, as other posts materialized on the board, mine never did. It goes without saying that FIFA.com refused to comment on or post my followup questions about what the standards were for censorship on their site.

It’s interesting to see how often, and how deeply, large organizations seem to misunderstand the purpose of discussion boards, blogs, and other internet debate and discussion fora. They seem to imagine that most users and readers won’t notice the censorship, or that they will find cleansed discussion boards to be valid platforms for authentic debate and discussion.

I suspect, though, that these organizations tend to underestimate both the curiosity of their readers and the power of the internet as a commons, and that this sort of board cleansing just leads people simply to speak with their fingers by ditching FIFA.com—in spite of its undoubtedly large software budget—and seek their information elsewhere. This goes not just for the would-be commenters that have suffered through the sting of a rejected comment, on which they might have spent a good deal of time; it also goes for the would-be readers, many of whom immediately notice that something seems fishy.

This doesn’t just undermine fans’ trust in FIFA; it also squanders an easy opportunity for the body that administers the world’s favorite sporting event to become a place where fans can share, discuss, and debate the things that they care most deeply about—thus engendering goodwill and helping to spread the good word about soccer.

Instead, the fans are turning elsewhere. A homemade-looking website called bigsoccer.com, for instance, already has 728 posts on its SerbiaSlovenia-USA discussion thread.

Its motto? “Share the passion.”

Here’s the news from today, according to the New York Times: 1,200 members of the National Guard have been sent to the border to “combat drug smuggling.” More drug-related violence can only be dealt with through greater enforcement, goes the Bush-McCain-and-now-Obama story. We’ve got to fight the war on drugs; to fight the drug criminals; to save the people from violence.

There’s just one flaw in this story: it’s got the causality going in the wrong direction. US drug policy is the cause of the current epidemic of violence and lawlessness in northern Mexico and along the border, not the cure for it. The more resources we devote to enforcing our drug prohibition, the higher we drive prices, the bigger the incentives to smuggle drugs, the bigger the spoils for the gangs of lawless criminals to whom we redirect the unimaginable profits of several massive, centuries-old industries, and the more these gangs will be willing to fight to the death over pieces of that enormous black-market pie.

By legislating common drugs out of the legal marketplace, we are creating a black market out of thin air. It is not hyperbole to suggest that US law is not just providing a subsidy of billions to the Sinaloa cartel—our laws have actually legislated the cartel, and its rivals, into existence.

Who stands to lose the most if we legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana and cocaine, and open these industries to legitimate companies? The Sinaloa cartel. We devote $11 billion of military and law enforcement resources to eliminating their competition and maintaining their monopoly power—and thus their staggering profits. They are probably the foremost advocates of the current US drug policy. Their worst nightmare would be for the marijuana industry to turn into something like tobacco: low-margin, heavily regulated, taxed, nonviolent, unglamorous, highly competitive, unable to command a risk premium. When was the last time you heard about a tobacco gang shooting?

The effects of US drug policy have never been felt more tragically in northern Mexico, where turf wars between rival drug cartels are fought. Ciudad Juárez, where the murder of innocent civilians is as commonplace as a fender-bender, is now confronting the very real prospect of a lost generation of youth—a generation so scared to walk the streets of its own city that it grows up as if in a coma, with fear the only coherent thread of civic life. In Juárez, beheadings are barely newsworthy. Is it any wonder that some of the civilians caught in this warfare would risk their lives to cross the border into the US?

A rational humanitarian policy would contemplate welcoming residents of Ciudad Juárez into the United States as war refugees. Why don’t we do this? Maybe it’s because admitting there’s a war in Mexico might mean confronting the horrifying truth that this war is ours, our failed war on drugs, and the citizens of Juárez, these would-be refugees, are our collateral damage. Washington now seems comfortable with the idea that we own the violence in Baghdad, yet the idea that we own the violence in Juárez is still Washington taboo. We don’t even believe we’re involved.

As Tax Cannabis 2010—a November 2010 referendum to legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana—gains steam in California and has a slim lead in public opinion polls, with vast bipartisan support amongst academics (especially social scientists) and medical doctors, it becomes more and more bizarre that the Obama administration, far from being merely mum on the topic, has come out strongly and repeatedly in favor of the current US drug policy. Even most right-wing commentators acknowledge that our drug policy disproportionately affects minorities, imprisoning and disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of minority citizens for private behavior with public health/safety risks that, in the case of marijuana (according to the American Medical Association), are vastly less than those of high-fructose corn syrup.

Let us, as Obama might say, be perfectly clear: our supposedly pro-minority, pro-human-rights, pro-diplomacy president holds the unambiguous position that the importance of preventing Americans from smoking herb dwarfs any concerns about the uncontained numbers of murders, Mexican cities on the brink of civil war, a lost generation in northern Mexico. The administration’s decision not to go after the medical marijuana dispensaries in California now seems like a sleazy handout to his Hollywood hippie base. It is clear that enforcing the marijuana prohibition is of paramount political importance to the administration, and that the DOJ and military intend to be swift and merciless with such enforcement anywhere near our national borders.

Can we use taxpayer money to create and maintain an unprecedented network of interior border checkpoints whose dogs sniff every single person driving along the interstate highways between Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas? Yes, we can. Can we shift the focus of our military forces and allocate thousands of troops from our national guard to hunt down people who want to transport bud across the Sonora desert? Yes, we can. Can we utilize our scarce prison beds and resources to imprison and disenfranchise 600,000 nonviolent Americans for passing joints around their living rooms, even as we furlough and parole murderers and rapists because we don’t have enough room for them? Yes, we can.

Protesting Arizona’s anti-immigrant laws has become fashionable in recent weeks, and it’s been nice to see some normally staid American authority figures (like mayors and police officers) stand up for the rights of Mexicans (and people who look Hispanic) in the US. Now how about an open conversation about the fact that the US drug prohibition has created a violent black market out of thin air and, in the process, brought upon northern Mexico such a scourge of violence that millions of innocent Mexican civilians have lost the basic opportunity to lead safe, civilized lives?

As of today, Obama is no longer a mere heir of the broken US drug policy. He isn’t just carrying on the torch of keeping hundreds of thousands of nonviolent pot smokers in jail for victimless crimes. He’s now doubling down in the war on drugs. He’s increasing the subsidies for the Sinaloa cartel. He’s raising their prices and profits—and incentives to fight over more and more turf—to unprecedented levels.

This is Barack Obama’s war now: the blood of Juárez is on his hands.

We could answer merely that under blind tasting conditions, the panel didn’t like this beer, or that the beer was boring or flawed. But that would be the boring, flawed answer. All the fun lies in the more substantive defense of each of these ratings and the dialogue that ensues—a dialogue that could well lead to new blind tastings and have a material effect on future editions. What exactly should we be searching for in an ideal European pale lager? Supremely refreshing bitterness, or balanced hop character and greater complexity? (Seamus and I debated this one a lot; the answer, I think, might be connected to how many beers you plan to drink.) That’s why, as Seamus has said, we also really hope you look past the ratings and read the text of the reviews.

It is the more interesting conversation about what constitutes a “good” or “bad” beer, about what it even is to rate beer, and ultimately about the basic philosophical problem of intersubjectivity—that we’re hoping to stimulate. That’s also part of why we chose not just to review the cult beers, but also the everyday beers that are most available around the country. We wanted parts of the book to be familiar to anyone who had ever tasted beer; we wanted to include benchmarks, points of reference, for everyone.

I was happy to see this review of The Beer Trials by Rob Rutledge discuss this engagement with mainstream beers. Rutledge writes: “along with Chimay Blue, they actually DO rate Natural Light! And Bud Light, for that matter, and MGD, and Busch, and every other cheap beer under the sun.” We wanted to see how these beers would hold up in blind tastings. We wanted to praise the ones like Steel Reserve, which outperformed expectations, while calling out the beers like Corona and Heineken, whose premium positioning (compared with entry-level domestic lagers) isn’t supported by much going on in the bottle.

Above all, to start a broad conversation about beer in America while ignoring the country’s most popular beers would be to lose sight of the conversation’s purpose.

I’m looking forward to reading Seamus for the rest of the week at the Powell’s blog. In the meantime, here’s a previously posted preview of the book (including all beer ratings), which is now in stock at, appropriately enough, Powells.com (Portland indy pride!) along with Amazon.

The book, due out on April 15 from Fearless Critic Media (distributed by Workman Publishing), rates and reviews 250 of the world’s most prominent beers (craft brews, macro-lagers, and everything in between), based on blind tastings by a panel of brewers and experts in the beer mecca of Portland, Oregon—Seamus’ hometown. We also include a broad and (hopefully) accessible reference guide to the world’s major beer styles, flavors, and regions.

The collaboration was, I must admit, a bit lopsided: Seamus (who is a brewer and one of the world’s 96 Certified Cicerones) did the lion’s share of the work. I contributed the “Trials” concept (building on the ideas set forth in The Wine Trials) and co-wrote the first few chapters, which discuss the effects of behavioral marketing, perceptual bias, and the placebo effect on the beer industry.

In Portland, Seamus and I also conducted a beer experiment together in which we tested people’s ability (or, um, lack thereof) to discriminate between major European brands of mass-market lager beer. Johan Almenberg and Anna Dreber, the Swedish economists with whom we collaborated on much of the experimental research behind The Wine Trials, helped us analyze the data.

Seamus, along with his partner (and my old high school friend) Laurel Hoyt, assembled an excellent blind-tasting panel of brewers and beer experts in Portland. Seamus and Laurel tirelessly ran the blind tastings, procuring beer samples from all over the world, storing them in climate-controlled conditions, and running up to five tastings per week for months on end—all the while keeping the tasting panel happy and well-fed.

Seamus also crafted the reference guide to styles, flavors, and region, which more or less boils his brain’s enormous body of esoteric beer knowledge down to what’s most useful to readers and beer drinkers. The project was a blast, and I hope the book turns out to be helpful both to beer enthusiasts and to everyday beer drinkers.

This sneak preview PDF includes a press release about The Beer Trials; the book’s full preface; the book’s full beer ratings list; and 11 sample beer reviews.

The Beer Trials hits stores nationwide in the third week of April. It can be ordered online from Amazon.com.

For media requests, please contact Fearless Critic Media.

People have sometimes (often, maybe) misinterpreted The Wine Trials (and The Wine Trials 2010) as making the claim that no expensive wines are worth the money, or that cheap wine is generally “better” than expensive wine. In fact, I make neither one of those claims in the book.

Rather, my basic points are these:

(1) Evidence has shown that most everyday wine drinkers (not wine professionals) don’t prefer more expensive wines to cheaper wines in blind tastings. This is separate from the question of whether the properties of expensive wines are aesthetically superior in the minds of experts.

(2) Many (but certainly not all) expensive wines, such as the luxury brands from LVMH—which are advertised much like the group’s TAG Heuer watches, De Beers diamonds, Guerlain perfume, or Louis Vuitton handbags—are overpriced because such a large portion of their cost base is spent on marketing. This doesn’t just go for superpremium wines like LVMH’s Château d’Yquem, Krug, and Dom Pérignon; it also goes for brands like Cloudy Bay, a straightforward New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc whose price—without any apparent change in the production method—rose from about $15 per bottle to about $30 per bottle after LVMH acquired the brand in 2003 and began marketing Cloudy Bay as a luxury product.  To me, when the consumer dollar is going more toward advertising than toward materials or production, it’s a paradigm case of overpricing. It bothers me that the mainstream wine media doesn’t take brands to task for this.

(3) There are also wines that are overpriced for reasons other than marketing—reasons like an irrational premium Bordeaux bubble that’s being inflated by indiscriminate demand from rich, unsophisticated consumers in emerging markets like China and Russia. Even if Pétrus spends no money on marketing, $5,000 is an irrational price for a bottle, and this is a demand-side phenomenon.

(4) Then there are the producers who model themselves after Pétrus in an effort to capitalize on that same demand-side phenomenon. These producers make “high-end” wine (with the characteristics typically associated with the 95-and-higher-point wines in wine magazines, e.g. aging in new French oak, high alcohol, extreme concentration) and price it as such. Here, there aren’t necessarily the extreme marketing expenditures of LVMH; rather, there’s simply a price-signalling play: the hope that positioning the product at the top end of the market will speak for itself, and that consumers in search of a luxury good will buy into that notion. In this case, the consumer dollar isn’t paying for lots of advertising and marketing—it’s just sustaining unconscionably high profit margins for the producer.

What situations (2), (3), and (4) have in common is that the cost of production of each of these premium wines is virtually unrelated to the street price.

One might divide wine pricing theory into two rough schools of thought. There is the camp that believes wine should be priced from a supply-side/cost-plus perspective–you take the cost of production of the wine, you add reasonable costs and a modest profit for the producer, you factor in markups for distribution and retail, and you arrive at more or less what the wine should cost. The other camp believes that wine should be priced from a demand-side perspective–that a wine is worth whatever the market is willing to pay for it.

The reason I’m in the first camp, and not the second, is that I don’t subscribe to the neoclassical model of consumer rationality upon which the demand-side pricing theory is built, a counterfactual universe of stingily hypersensitive, quality-sniffing consumers. My sense is that, especially when it comes to hazy markets like wine, real human beings—within certain constraints—generally anchor themselves to market prices that are imposed upon them, and generally pay for things what they’re told those things are worth.

One attempt to justify superpremium wines with modest costs of production is an opportunity-cost-of-land argument—that wine in the Champagne appellation is so expensive that the opportunity cost of that land can justify higher prices. I’m unsympathetic to that argument, because real estate prices track market wine prices, so the price of land is not an independent factor.

So when are premium prices justified in my camp?

When the cost of production is high. The fact that Matthews and Briand mention 1er Cru Burgundy and German whites as examples of expensive wines worth the money suggests that they might be in my camp too, because these are particular examples of wine regions in which grapes are often harvested from small plots with very low yields. In the case of German TBA, for instance, the harvesting is often done on steeply terraced slopes that are extremely difficult to work. Ice wines and botrytized wines—the priciest of German whites—are indisputably more difficult and expensive to produce than almost any other type of wine.

In short, while spending $50 or $75 or even $100 on a good Sauternes, TBA, or top red Burgundy might not always make economic sense for the buyer—particularly if it’s a buyer without much experience in wine—it’s at least justifiable from a supply-side pricing perspective. The $150 you’ll pay for a bottle of Opus One or Krug, meanwhile—never mind the $5,000 you’ll pay for a bottle of 2005 Pétrus—has little to do with the cost of production.

The Italian Ministry of Agriculture has a recent history of operating at the curious intersection of neofascism and culinary purism. Zaia’s “zero-tolerance policy” on food fraud became famous with his 2008 bust-up of cheating Brunello di Monalcino producers, which was hailed as a victory for consumers. But in a less-reported crackdown the following year, Zaia, a member of the extreme-right-wing Lega Nord—the political party that has advocated the seccession of Northern Italy—also instituted, with Berlusconi’s backing, a policy banning new “ethnic” restaurants from opening in certain northern Italian cities, including Lucca and Milan. It was a move that the left-wing newspaper La Stampa called “culinary ethnic cleansing.” Reporting on the policy, the Times of London quoted Lucca city spokesman Massimo Di Grazia as saying that “French restaurants would be allowed”; he was “unsure, though, about Sicilian cuisine. It is influenced by Arab cooking.” Continued the Times: “Asked if he had ever eaten a kebab, Mr Zaia said: ‘No—and I defy anyone to prove the contrary. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I even refuse to eat pineapple.’” This, from the country’s Minister of Agriculture.

Sometime in 2001 or 2002, I recall meeting, and discussing pure-ingredient fervence with, Giorgio Alemanno, who was Italy’s Minister of Agriculture at the time (this was two Ministers ago). The man talked about wine with great passion. And like Zaia, he was also an absolute right-wing zealot. As mayor of Rome, Alemanno was famous for praising Mussolini, expelling immigrants, and mowing down gypsy camps. “Upon his election,” reported the Telegraph at the time, Alemanno “was greeted by crowds of supporters, among them skinheads, who chanted ‘Duce! Duce!’ and raised their arms in a fascist salute.” It’s interesting to see Zaia, with Berlusconi’s backing, continuing in this tradition.

Certainly, when we buy mozzarella di bufala—or Brunello di Montalcino—we want to get the real thing. But if we’re enjoying what’s sold as Brunello or bufala, and feel like we’re getting our money’s worth, is the cow/Cab crime really so great?

I’ve previously discussed the thorny issue of the overzealous advocacy of a traditional recipe to the exclusion of all others. In response to Florence Fabricant’s claim, for instance, that “for any pasta all’amatriciana to be authentic, it must be made with guanciale (pork jowl),” not bacon or pancetta, I responded that “too many food writers construct a counterfactual Italy of culinary dogmatism, a population of finger-wagging guanciale zealots, a nation…harrumphing around about how the world is going to shit now that people are making amatriciana with pancetta…People and recipes aren’t anthropological tokens. They’re living things, the products of neural assemblies and proteins and chemicals bouncing across the ages. Narrow your gaze and squint your eyes too tightly in the search for authenticity, and you might miss that whole, beautiful landscape.”

Perhaps I should revise this statement: clearly, there are some finger-wagging guanciale zealots in Italy. They tend to gravitate, it seems, toward the Ministry of Agriculture. The question of whether “zero tolerance,” when it comes to food, is fascist, patronizing, noble—or all three—is certainly one for further contemplation.

And in the index, there are two successive entries for the winery: “Casa Lapostolle (Argentina), 14; Casa Lapostolle (Chile), 84.”

I figured this was just an editing/database mistake. It happens.

But things got stranger when I actually compared the reviews of the exact same wines in the two chapters. Aside from the words “black currant” and “black fruits,” their descriptions turned out to be totally different from each other. Here they are:

(From Argentina chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Merlot Cuvée Alexandre Apalta Vineyard. This Merlot has an attractive nose of black currant, blueberry, vanilla, and clove. The wine has good weight on the palate with layers of black fruits and a firm structure. Drink it during its first 6 years of life.”

(From Chile chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Merlot Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre. The Merlot Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandra [sic] has aromas of cedar, spice box, black cherry, and black currant followed by a smooth-textured, ripe Merlot with ample savory black fruits, good depth, and a moderately long finish.”

Blueberry, vanilla, and clove have been replaced by cedar, spice box, and black cherry. Is there a wine-adjective dartboard in the house?

Moving on to the second double…

(From Argentina chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Cabernet Sauvignon Cuvée Alexandre Apalta Vineyard. Similarly styled but with the focus on black currants. It has enough structure to evolve for 2–3 years in the bottle and will drink well during its first 8 years of life.”

(From Chile chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Cabernet Sauvignon Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre. The Cabernet Sauvignon Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre has an expressive bouquet of smoke, pencil lead, spice box, black cherry, and black currant. The wine’s black fruit flavors linger into a medium-long finish.”

At least the black currants travel well.

Mistakes like this do happen. They don’t discredit the critics behind them; we all have slightly different experiences when we taste the same wine twice. And in this case, although the tasting notes are totally different, they’re not quite mutually exclusive, nor do they render dramatically divergent judgments/opinions about the wine (Parker ratings are not included in the under-$25 book). But I see it as yet another reminder of the arbitrariness of these fruit/spice adjectives, even in the hands of the world’s highest-end wine critics—which is particularly troubling when these opinions turn out to be so powerful in the marketplace.