"Mark Lipton" in message ...

There are certainly greedy and fraudulent winemakers, too. I try to
avoid them,
by and large. Remember that it wasn't a distributor or importer who put
ethylene
glycol into wine to sweeten it, or who added tankers full of wine from the
Southern Rhone and Algeria into more prestigious bottlings.

D'accord. Alas in another example, though fraud was necessary for the
famous incident (1976?) of cheap wine being shipped from France in
containers marked "Can be sold as Beaujolais in USA," fraud was not, as
mathematicians would say, sufficient. Buyers should have noticed a
difference if they were then also going to complain indignantly about this.
(Me, I buy for taste.)


By the way: is it just me, or have newsgroups lately acquired newbies who
don't know about editing down the past posts? I'll see 150 lines of repeat
that we've all read already, then one or two lines of response. (Some
newsreader software didn't even let you do that, 10-15 years ago.) Could
somebody ask these people to read RFC1855 or any other source on Netiquette?
(Urgently, if they haven't heard of RFC1855 or Netiquette.) Could we find a
way to require a minimal competency test before permitting postings? Even
the most trivial screening would do. (One or two of the moderated senior
administrative groups have, for decades, enforced the rule that newcomers
must read for three months before posting -- six months if it's not clear
why this is necessary -- these being compromises from double those
intervals.) I myself followed newsgroup wine discussion for several months
or a year before I first presumed to post anything. (That was some time
ago.)