We all know wine can be an expensive business. The quality (or perceived quality) of a wine, it’s rarity and brand have all contributed to some wines demanding an exceptionally high price. However, a lucrative industry such as this one does attract attention from less scrupulous characters and encourages business and even countries to try some interesting things to protect their investments!
We obviously couldn’t try any illegal wines on the night but we did take some inspiration from some of the wines we tried! Take, for example, our first wine: a Masottina Contrada Prosecco Superiore from Veneto, just NW of Venice. This was a great Prosecco with a creamy, intense feeling in your mouth yet is a really crisp wine that was a little like tasting liquid Golden Delicious apples! We heard how Italy, in an attempt to protect their highly profitable cargo, tried to rename the Prosecco grape to Glera and make it only possible to produce wine from this grape in Italy, much like the Champagne region. Unfortunately they soon found out that several other countries had already been growing Prosecco vines for some time and were promptly told that wouldn’t be acceptable.
If you have ever tried wine from Austria, then you may have seen a red- and white-striped cap on the top, indicating that the wine has been tested for quality, This is a necessity given that, several years ago, New York Times reported that the Austrians had added “antifreeze” to their bottles in an attempt to sweeten wine during a poor harvest: they hadn’t (but had been up to no good adding some compounds that would allow them to sell their wine)! The result was they had to throw away several million litres of wine and the fallout was sufficient to cause sales of Austrian Riesling to plummet overnight and it took them over 15 years to recover!
We heard many other stories about people who drilled through concrete walls to get to cellars containing precious bottles of wine (just like a bank robbery), and a lady who ordered room service in a high end French hotel late at night, so her boyfriend could steal the wine cellar keys and get away with over £1.5m of wine!! Perhaps the scariest was when Romanée-Conti, a vineyard in the French Burgundy region producing Pinot Noir that starts at around £18,000 per bottle, was sent a detailed map of their vineyard, with a note saying that unless they paid €1 million each vine would be poisoned! The blackmailer was caught but it begs a question as to how you protect your land!
