There's Good Wine Problems. And Bad Ones.

I'm sure most of us would love to be in the position of the Japanese government, who recently discovered that they had too much expensive wine on their hands.

Apparently entertaining with wine is serious business if you're a Japanese diplomat. At least, that is, if you're in France or New York. Apparently the Japanese mission in France kept 7896 bottles on hand at the Ambassador's residence "just in case." Official embassy records show them serving only 289 bottles to guests last year, according to Japan Today.

Having too many bottles of wine is really only a problem if you can't drink them, which apparently was true for their New York Ambassador, who had to get rid of 198 bottles (for which they paid $24,000) because of their "deteriorated condition."

Now I don't know about you, but if I had the means to buy $24k worth of wine, I'd damn well make sure I had a wine fridge to put it in. No wonder the government auditors who discovered all this were pissed.

Of course, things could be worse. You could be (accidentally?) killing your guests with the wine you serve them.

Apparently 14 Cambodian celebrants at a spiritual ceremony to ask for protection for their children were killed after drinking rice wine tainted with toxic chemicals. Apparently the homemade wine was poured into bottles that had previously contained a poisonous herbicide. Twenty more are in the hospital. Awful.

Posted by: Alder on October 18, 2010 9:01 PM: Tweet; Share this post elsewhere: Digg it! - Add to del.icio.us - Add to Stumbleupon - Add to Reddit; Filed under: Ramblings and Rants , Wine News

Previous Entry - Main - Next Entry

Comments (2)

wineguider wrote:

10.21.10 at 8:35 AM

Just 289 bottles out of 7,900 served in a year -- not even a bottle a day! What a shame! I guess even a healthy "save save save" mentality can be taken to unfortunate extremes.

Tyler Long wrote:

10.22.10 at 12:46 PM

Wow! It almost seems the Japanese government is scamming the whole country. SOMEone had to pay for all that wine!

Tyler Long
Norcross GA