On
this New Year’s Eve I’m sure many HPANWO-readers will be looking for ways to
eat, drink and make merry to toast in 2013. In doing so it has become and
unfortunate necessity to avoid being taken in by perfectly legal acts of fraud
like the one I discovered a few months ago; see:
Here
for an important background article: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/fake-wine.html
And it’s happened again! This time with this bottle you see me holding above.
It looks like a bottle of Champagne; it has a silvery metallic covering and even
has the word “Champagne” on the label. What’s more it’s an absolute snip at £4.99.
I thought
that the price looked too good to be true; why did I forget the second half of
that old maxim?: “So what made you think it would not be?” The
word on the label is actually “Charlemagne” not “Champagne”, but with the
handwritten, cursive style of the lettering the two words are fairly hard to
distinguish. As I say in the article linked above I think this is deliberate.
Charlemagne is actually not any kind of wine; it’s a perry, what is usually
called today “pear cider”. Its alcohol content is a mere 5%, far lower than
Champagne, and although this is a big 1.5 litre bottle it might not be enough on
its own to spark off the New Year joviality.
Because of
my previous experience I’m forewarned and forearmed, but it’s important to
realize that the manufacturers of Charlemagne
Perry are not actually breaking any rules. You can bet that they
had it thoroughly checked by a lawyer before selling it. However this is one of
those all too familiar cases in our society in which something bad is done,
while holding itself away from the borderline beyond which things are
officially labeled “bad”, by using legal loopholes. Red tape and acres of
Byzantine small print turn black into white and up into down. The marketing aim
of Charlemagne Perry is to make their product look like Champagne. They’re
counting on getting in a lot of sales they would not otherwise make from people
buying a bottle under the misapprehension that they are buying a bottle of
Champagne, and patting themselves on the back for picking one up so cheaply, no
doubt. A lot of those people are going to be much more vulnerable than a
certain big, tough old ex-Hospital Porter you might have heard of.
I suppose the answer a lot of people will give me is:
“Serve them right for not being on their guard! They should have checked the
label. More fool them! They’ll know better next time.” I must be in a minority
in that I’m concerned that trickery seems to be the normal way to do business
nowadays. It shows a great deal of contempt for their potential customers for
Charlemagne Perry’s manufacturers to do what they did. “But so what? It’s a
dog-eat-dog world, Man!”, as we’re so often told. It also worries me that the
ethics of conventional society are changing; the victims of trickery are
more likely to be blamed than the perpetrators. If some old lady, a blind person
or somebody else vulnerable buys a bottle of this stuff thinking that it’s
Champagne then they are to blame for allowing themselves to be fooled.
The one doing the fooling is morally A-OK! I find it sad that fairness, trust,
honest trade and respect for human dignity and sovereignty have become so
marginalized and outmoded. These lamented attitudes are seen by most people as
rather quaint and naïve. To believe in them marks you out as weak and
sentimental.
