Yosano: I Like That We Say "oh Man" To Express Disappointment. Because Men, In Fact, Are Disappointing.

Wait, what's wine forgery? How would you fake wine?

VERY EASILY, MY FRIEND. BUCKLE UP.

First of all, you gotta understand that wine is BIG BUCKS. Old and rare vintages can sell for tens of thousands of dollars or even more to wealthy collectors at auctions. A single bottle of 1947 Cheval Blanc sold for $300,000 back in 2010. And a lot of 114 bottles of a rare Romanee-Conti sold for $1.4 million in 2014.

And it turns out that high-end wine is dazzlingly easy to fake. Only a handful of people have ever tasted the rarest vintages in the world; and how the bottles were stored, if they were exposed to sunlight or kept in darkness, if the bottle had been opened or kept sealed, or if the environment was humid or dry can affect the wine’s taste, especially after decades or centuries. So who knows what a bottle of 1785 Lefitte actually tastes like? Can anyone actually tell it apart, with certainty, from a hypothetically-much-less-valuable 1784 of the same vintage?

Considering that some of the greatest wine-tasters in the world have also been dupes of some of the biggest wine scams in the world, I’m gonna say no.

There are definitely flavors associated with old wines, even specific vintages of old wines; but you don’t need to shell out for a pricey bottle to top off your fake. Get a cheap bottle of old wine and mix it with some nice quality, younger wines, and no one will be the wiser. Million-dollar wine forgers like Harvey Rodenstock and Rudy Korniawan do exactly that.

It gets even easier when you think that a lot of the people who buy these ultra-pricey bottles never even open them. They’re not for drinking! They’re an investment, or they’re a prestige item, something you take down from your shelf to show off to your friends once in a while. You could fill the bottle with grape juice, and who would ever find out?

So how are you supposed to tell a real bottle from a fake one? The bottle itself? The label? Wine bottles are nothing special; get one made in the right couple-of-decades as the vintage you’re faking, and there’s nothing to tell them apart. Some of them have etched signatures, but those were done with simple hand tools, that you can still buy today. And the labels are no security at all. They’re just paper, ink, and paste. People today are forging the holograms off of $20 bills; you could convincingly fake a wine label using a standard laser printer.

Wine forgery is a HUGE problem in the wine world today. Tracing the provenance of any particular bottle is next to impossible. And frankly, the money in the business is just too good for anyone to want to ask too many questions. The head of Sotheby’s auction house’s international wine department joked that more bottles of 1945 Mouton were consumed on the 50th anniversary of the vintage than were ever produced in the first place. 

The question isn’t how do you fake wine: it’s how the fraudsters ever get caught. In Rodenstock and Korniawan’s cases, they just overplayed their hands. Rodenstock sold so many bottles of rare wine that a suspicious customer had a bottle carbon-dated, which revealed that it was two centuries younger than Rodenstock had claimed (and it still took years to take him down). 

As for Korniawan, he started selling a vintage so rare that, it turned out, it had never existed in the first place.

There’s a great podcast on this topic in the Stuff You Should Know archives, if you want to hear a whole lot more about this. 

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

what a week huh?

God the shirtless Akutagawa and Higuchi I'm crying

Bungou Stray Dogs Wan! Anime Preview!

petition to rename the usa ‘south canada’

Atsushi:Do you know how to cook?

Akutagawa:.....

Atsushi:.....

Akutagawa:....No.

Atsushi:.....

Akutagawa:.....

Atsushi:Do we call Chuuya?

Akutagawa:Yeah, now we call Chuuya.

The Persephone one so true

On that note read The Closed Doors it's so good idk I really enjoyed it it's about the myth of Persephone and Hades

Yall think the gods take classics classes for fun

Anonymous said:

Could you please do a clip of Team Rocket using insults that are a lot heavier than “twerp”?

meowth, control yourself

Friendly reminder that hating Pokemon Unite isn't just about ""no Sinnoh remakes or no let's Go Johto"".

Fucking Tencent is the one making it.

Tencent is known for spyware, punishes those who support the Hong Kong protests, are KNOWN to rip off larger companies or buy out larger companies if they're seen as competition, are extremely rampant with censorship of any kind, and were receiving personal information from Apple such as I.P Addresses, and the CEO is extremely honored by the communist party that supports Muslim concentration camps.

This company is absolutely fucking garbage and it's pretty obvious from the comment section of the video that everyone who knows about Tencent is chiming in with them dipping the moment they announced it was made by them.

And if that's not enough to stop you from wanting to play tencent has driven many players who actually did enjoy their games away due to the rampant cheating that occurs and isn't dealt with in their other online games. They're known to try and milk their gamers for money with pay to win deals and from the sounds of it ""free to start"" means you'll have to pay eventually no matter what and then continue to keep paying in order to succeed or advance in later levels due to the pay to win structure.

For those who are excited about this there are LITERALLY so many other games on this oversaturated market that spent time on their back grounds, and textures, and design that dont make them look like a dollar store rip off game. Please look into literally anything else.

Pokemon Unite is NOT the way to go

I'm sure that people in the videos comments did a MUCH better job of explaining the dangers of tencent instead of me and theyre most likely a lot more well aware of the first hand experience with them. But please just take my word for it when I say that the ""unfair hate around this game because it's not a Sinnoh Remake"" is bullshit.

There's hate for a reason