Winebits 193: Wine names, wine and alcohol, fake wine

• What's in a name? A lot, if you make Budweiser beer. Anheuser-Busch, the multi-national behind the brand, has threated a small Argentine winery called Budini. The latter's name is too similar to Bud, says Anheuser-Busch, and you'd better change your name or else. Which Budini has done; it's now Bodini in the U.S. The Wine Curmudgeon wonders if everyone who has a child named Clyde will now have to change it to Claude, given the Budweiser Clydesdales. I'm baffled as to why so many huge companies are so terrified of smaller companies with barely similar names. No doubt this is one of those things that, to paraphrase Mel Brooks, company bosses have to do to protect their phony baloney jobs.

• Getting drunk: An article by Michael Apstein in the San Francisco Chronicle notes that higher alcohol wines get people drunk more quickly. This doesn't get much attention in the discussion about high alcohol wines (even I don't talk about it much), but it should. Apstein says two glasses of 15 percent wine can get you more drunk than two glasses of 12 percent wine, taking into account weight, gender, and how often you drink. Even though the alcohol content of the wine increases only one-quarter (from 12 to 15 percent), the blood alcohol content goes up by 35 percent. For some people, that will put them over the legal limit.

• Fake Chinese wine: How about walking into a Beijing grocery store and finding counterfeit wine, including "bottles of Bordeaux wine that have been diluted with sugared water and had coloring agents and artificial flavorings added, before being sold for exorbitant prices." That's the situation in China, where more bottles of some high-end wines are for sale than were ever produced. I wonder: Would the Chinese have this problem if they weren't so obsessed with expensive wine. Who is going to counterfeit a bottle of $10 wine?

Comments

[K. Schlachter]

What does that say about what InBev thinks about its consumers? Do they really think that they will confuse an Argentinian wine with Budweiser?

[Jeff Siegel]

My particular theory, Kyle, is that it's safer, cheaper and easier for the people who run a company to do something like that than to actually create jobs and do the sorts of things that bosses are supposed to do. This way, they can always go to the board and boast about how they are protecting the brand and make it look like they're actually doing something.