my FIRST favorite episode of snw btw is S1E06. of all the ass kissing I’ve seen for snw that’s been like “wow this is what trek should be”, “this feels like old trek” etc, S1E06 episode genuinely felt the most like old trek to me, in a good way. Planet population and politics that amount to like one city and ten guys? Check. Only the Captain on the planet? Check. “Twist” that you can see coming a mile away and feels very Twilight-Zone-esque, with a very simple morality to it? Check. Captain bangs the alien woman? Check. (WHILE he was still dating his admiral girlfriend btw, but don’t even worry about it I guess.) Standalone plotwise? (except for a sprinkle of M'benga daughter stuff?) Check. AND it banked on NO direct nostalgia from tos, instead just capturing a tos episode tone fairly well.
literally I think my second favorite episode of all of snw so far was the la'an time travel one JUST for the scene where la'an wakes up in the middle of the night and goes out there and just stares at jim sleeping peacefully. And I said to myself oh my god. This is the type of soft focus shit normally reserved for a woman love interest. They’re making James Kirk a one-episode-love-interest. And I was right. and it RULED.
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?
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).
greetings sire, i am but a worm beneath you, but my dear sister is deathly ill and your work is the only thing that brings her happiness still. anywho, in season 2 of good omens do crowley and aziraphale have fucknasty butt sex? thank you!
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