psmv5: Fake 177

I noticed yesterday that Wetherspoon's in Epsom had moved into fake. Possibly something to do with tennis at Wimbledon. The sort of thing one sees quite a lot of in town these days: presumably there has been a step change in the price, making these sorts of display a runner.

I didn't check, but from a distance the plants in Wetherspoon's looked to be real. I was amused to think that when Mr. Martin started out, I don't suppose he thought he was going to wind up worrying about fake flowers and real pot plants. I wonder now whether he was a beer man by background - his houses having sold respectable warm bitter ever since they started, thirty years ago or so now. However, I learn from reference 1, that while his father might have done time with Guinness, he trained as a lawyer in the first instance.

I might mention another fake here, this one from the drinks business noticed in the last post, more particularly from the Chilean wine operation fronted at reference 3. Not content with giving their wine floral notes by stirring flowers into the mix, they also want the authentic taste of old French barrels. So they get new French barrels, made of French oak, and then have fires of wood chips inside to age them. Wood chips made from Chilean oaks which get blown down in storms. Or perhaps they smoke the barrels, rather in the way of kippers. In any event, a process which goes by the name of 'barroir'.

Quite keen on snazzy bottles too.

And while I am with the drinks business, I might also mention some push back on the bottling front. As I understand it, in the olden days, wine shippers in the east end used to import wines, sherries and port in bulk and bottle it up here for retail. Whereas now, many of us make a bit of a fetish of bottled on the estate. Encirc, the people at reference 4, are claiming that bottling here has all kinds of advantages, quite apart from the obvious eco-point that shipping wine across the world in tanks is a much more sensible method of transport than shipping all that glass across the world. With one that struck me being that wine in bottles, say stuck in the Red Sea, is much more apt to overheat than wine in a big container. Think of all that surface area exposed to the ambient temperature. Overheating which can damage the structure of the wine and so forth.