New wine in old bottle

In these times of everything fake – news, relationships, food, labels, in fact the entire world, it comes as no big surprise that there is a huge racket of selling fake wines too! And it is literally a spin to the idiom – old wine in new bottle; now it is fake wine in old bottles.

Just as there is a huge demand for perfume bottles as fake scents are bottled in these genuine discarded, old bottles, ditto for wine bottles. And Italy seems to be big in this fake wine bottle business. Last year, some 9000 bottles of fake Moët Chandon were caught by the authorities there. These fake wines do not come cheap – it is sold at a retail value of $375,000. Another big casket of fake wines was found – some 40,000 fake Moët labels and the worth of this was pegged at around $2 million.

The wine companies are doing everything they can to combat this menace. After the wine tastings, before discarding the bottles, an “X” is marked across all opened bottles to prevent misuse and some wine makers, smash the bottles after tastings. All are adopting what is known as a Bubble Tag – it is a sticker-like strip, which is affixed over both the foil covering the cork and the glass of the bottle with a unique, random pattern of bubbles, as well as an alphanumeric code and a QR code, which act as a unique fingerprint for each bottle. When you scan the code, you'll get verification.

Well, these wine makers go through all this to counter the fakes; we only hope the Indian medical sector, which is abound with fatal fakes, adopts these measures; a life is worth more than an expensive glass of wine, for sure!