From the newsdesk...

Picked up a cheap bottle of Penfolds 2001 Bin 128 Shiraz or Bin 407 Cab Sauv lately? Chances are it was part of a $1.4 million internal heist at Southcorp, the wine company now owned by Fosters.

Despite a sticky letter U which it would not have entered my head to include, I was afforded a quiet chortle by this little item appearing in today's edition of Melbourne's lefty blatt, The Age.

Those who have known me longest will doubtless remember the inordinate amount of fun we had with Grapes in those early heady days of Padsterism. The launching into the midst of the unsuspecting by half a dozen people all at once and all bearing some sort of reference to grapes in our nicks, mine being Grape_Ape was a nightly pleasure bearing much mirth for us and who cares what for everyone else.

Regular readers of The Swamp may also remember my disdain for premium wine.

In this country, Penfolds Grange sells for thousands of dollars per bottle and the two breeds of black vinegar mentioned above are not without their own rather eccentric price tags.

I merely mention this because the headline which attracted mein attention was:

Raids recover $200,000 in stolen wine.

Apart from the obvious ambiguity which served to heighten my amusement, I couldn't help but think of the $200,000 whine which preceded the raids. Are people insane or what?

Let's just get a bit of perspective about this. These are bottles of grape juice which have been allowed to go rotten in the bottle before being tested on the most contemptible of all snobs then sold off at outrageously stupid prices to the most contemptible of all fools.

Whom but the biggest of all dickheads would pay $5,000 for a bottle of purple vinegar the only value of which is contained in the bottle's potential. Pop that cork and it's worthless. The thing is not even a bottle of wine, it's just an idea with no potential to become anything more than that.

It occurred to me upon reading this article there is only one commodity one should never clean: an unopened bottle of wine.

To highlight the stupidity of wine snobs, more value is placed upon the dust on the outside of the bottle than is placed on the liquid contained within. The dust adds the appearance of a properly stored sample, allowed to improve with the passage of time thus adding to its perceived value. A bottle thus stored and allowed to gather dust for 20 years can multiply its original value by a factor of ten.

Utter bullshit.

And it's bullshit because of the reason quoted above: pop that cork and it's worthless, dust or no dust.

As I read further into the article, a pattern of stupidity emerged. I quote:

Detective Grumley said that while a series of raids yesterday pointed to four people involved in the distribution of the stolen wine, police are baffled at how such a large volume of wine was removed from the Bay Street warehouse in Cheltenham in the first place.

I live less than 5 minutes' walk from that warehouse. It is surrounded by Bay ROAD (not Street) on the north, a cemetery to the south, 10 or 20 yards of empty space to the east and, most importantly, a vast expanse of nothing on the west, which is where the driveway happens to be. All it would take to steal anything from that warehouse is knowledge of the pin codes which open the doors. Duh. Nobody would ever suspect anything amiss because trucks come and go in that place at all hours of the day and night. All you would need to convince the forkies at the depot is a convincing looking work order which can be faked by pinching a blank despatch docket either from the base printing stock or the waste paper bins.

But this wasn't Mr Plod's only stupid statement to the Left Wingers' Daily...

"The one who has been charged has been co-operative and he's pointed us in a pretty strong direction. He was the main bloke receiving it from another man we want to interview,'' Detective Grumley said.

You mean another man who has just royally fucked RIGHT off. Someone who can orchestrate the theft of 60 pallets of wine and then distribute them all around the country and possibly overseas is better connected than you are, Detective Grumley. And you have alerted him to the fact a member of that group has just spilled his guts and tipped you off. The head honcho knows more than the patsy you knocked over, Detective Grumley. He knows what you know which means you're playing catch up and he knows where not to go. Unless he's either barking mad or irretrievably stupid, you're not going to catch the main man this year.

"At this stage, the bottles have certainly travelled interstate and may even be overseas, so we're following up on all of those leads,'' he said. "But we get the impression it's common knowledge in the industry now."

No shit!

But the upshot of that is which shopkeeper is going to buy that wine now when doing so could mean a grand police enquiry if anyone reports the tainted label sitting on a liquor store shelf to Grumley's Plonk Recovery Squad?

Face it; the value of the haul is no longer 1.2 - 1.4 million dollars. That may be the loss to Southcorp, but baby, that wine ain't worth diddly now. Which dollar conscious shopkeeper is going to risk buying it? Those are tainted goods, rotten on the inside as well as the outside.

Now the last line on the page cracked me up. It was just superb. The location is a highly respected wine producing district in Western Australia:

Subscribe to The Age for your chance to win a Margaret River escape.

lolol... just purchase 60 pallets of Penfold's Cab Sav to go into the draw.