Faked world-class wines are in the news enough these days that I can decisively call them trendy. They’ve already got a book and their own Hollywood movie on the way. But I didn’t know just how chic counterfeit wine was until I found out that my friend Lettie Teague (who happens to be the executive wine editor of Food & Wine Magazine) recently spent some time faking a bottle of 1982 Château Mouton Rothschild for a dinner party.

Of course, like many of Teague’s most interesting wine-related exploits, this latest adventure was done in the service of a story, which appears in the October issue of Food & Wine. It’s worth a read, if only for the chuckle you might get at how bent out of shape some of her friends get when she reveals that the 100 point wine that some of them loved wasn’t quite what they thought it was.

Teague goes to a moderate amount of effort to fake her wine, enlisting the help of a winemaker friend in Washington state, but she missed out on the real fun as far as I’m concerned. She bought a real bottle of the stuff, so she didn’t get a chance to doctor up a bottle with a fake label and spend hours “distressing” her new creation to make it look authentic. Half the fun would have been figuring out how to fade the ink and where to abrade the paper, not to mention figuring out how to grow a little mold under the capsule.

Despite skipping some of the parts of the counterfeiting process that I would have been most excited about, the story is a fun read. Check it out.

Thanks to my friend Jack at Fork & Bottle for the tip.

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Beaujolais is a classic case of a wine not meant for aging. But as with every rule, there’s an occasional standout exception.

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I’ve beat the drum a lot about public wine tastings, but there’s just no getting around the fact that they are the best way for wine lovers to educate their palates. There’s just no substitute for tasting a lot of wines in a single “sitting” to learn what the differences are, and more importantly, what you like.

One of the other nice things about public tastings, put on as they are by big organizations, or in this case, publications, is that they often allow you to taste wines that you might not get a chance to taste otherwise for some reason — whether that is because of their cost, their small production levels, or the fact that it’s simply a pain in the rear to go track them down.

Of course one of the other reasons you might not get a chance to taste certain wines is because they’ve been so highly-rated by some magazine or critic that they’re pretty hard to find on the shelves of even the best wine shops in the country. Which is one of the many reasons I urge people to attend the Wine &amp Spirits Top 100 Tasting every year. While inclusion in Wine & Spirits doesn’t quite make the available inventory of a wine vaporize, as a top score in some other magazines will do, the wines that are chosen for their list of “Top 100 of the year” are really some of the best wines in the world, and are not all that easy to track down for the casual wine lover.

I go to this tasting every year because of the high quality of the wines, and the excellent food that is usually on offer. This is, of course, the reason that so many other people go too (it can get a little crowded at times). But despite the popularity of the event, it is still one of the best public tasting events in San Francisco each year, and usually has a few utterly fantastic wines mixed in with a whole lot of excellent ones.

So grab a wine loving friend, or look your best and try to make a new one at the tasting, but definitely don’t miss the Top 100.

Wine & Spirits Magazine’s Top 100 Tasting
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
6:30 pm to 9:00 pm
The Mint Building
88 Fifth Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
(212) 695 4660 for more info

Tickets are $125 and include a subscription to the magazine. This event will likely sell out, so I recommend buying tickets ASAP. They can be purchased online at the event web site.

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