Dear Los Angeles Times.
Hi. It's me, your local troglodyte. Which one, you ask? Probably the only one in LA - where there are no basements and certainly no wine storage facilities in basements, minus our humble and awesome The Cave. But I digress.
I was reading your newspaper today, and there were TWO (!) whole wine stories in one day, both about wine and China. On the front page, Pricey counterfeit labels proliferate as China wine market booms, and in the Travel section China: a domestic wine industry starts to take root. (Get it? Take root?)
My very savvy winos are on top of these things and in fact, dear LA Times, both these stories are such old news I hesitate mentioning them. This blog posted about counterfeit wine last March, based on info from CNN and, moreso, Nicks blog over there at Bordeaux Undiscovered. In fact Nick's current post is entitled Life sentence for Chinese smuggler of top flight Bordeaux wines. If you scroll back, Nick has kept us very up-to-date on China's influence on Bordeaux, including Chateau sales and China's own efforts in wine making.
(I'm also mentioning Nick because I'm about to blame him for something, but not yet - you'll have to stay tuned for that one.)
In fact, dear LA Times, we at The Cave are declaring the insanity and madness of Bordeaux in China officially peaked, and ready to even off a little, minimally. But we also like newspapers here, real ones, on actual paper, with pages that turn awkwardly, that the cat would be sitting on if I had one, and that stain your fingertips. So we will keep reading you until you expire entirely, and hope that won't be any time soon, because a world without Twinkies is bad enough.
PS. It is in that second article where you will find the Grape Wall of China blog referenced, now linked on our side bar. (Get it?)
