Graped In The Face

Q. What's the difference between pinot noir and merlot?
A. Nothing, suckers.

So yeah, you remember how that movie Sideways did so well? It was a fine film: Paul Giamatti drinks a whole lot of Californian wine, rants about how pinot noir is so great and merlot is so terrible.

Mmm. Grapes.

Most people who saw Sideways immediately decided that, yes, indeed:

1. pinot noir is brilliant

2. all other wines – especially merlot – are really just fermented hackjuice

There was thus an instant craze in the market for pinot wine, and a corresponding crash in demand for the less respectable grapes (like merlot and shiraz). So: a group of French wine merchants decided to scam the American market by repackaging 13.5 MILLION LITRES of their excess merlot and shiraz wine as pinot noir, instead.

A couple of years later, French auditors became suspicious of some unusually cheap "pinot" grape transactions; a few days ago, a French court unravelled the scam and found a cartel of Carcassonne wine merchants guilty of fraud.

Mugshot!

In the meantime, how many American wine drinkers had figured out that they weren't actually drinking pinot noir? Here is a picture of them all:

Aw, it was only 13.5 million litres . . .