What is it with all the fruit wine concealed as red wine?

[binjalin]

5 minutes ago, Oxx said:

Made in Thailand by Thai people.

Maybe licensed here but it's not a Thai Beer. As are many other British Beers but they are not Thai ok?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Miguel_Beer

[xylophone]

14 hours ago, Happy Grumpy said:

 

You sound like a paranoid neurotic on a TV show like Seinfeld.

 

Why do that when all you do is look at the excise sticker over the cap/cork to know which is fruit wine and which isn't.

 

http://www.thebigchilli.com/uploads/1/2/2/0/12204015/3055463_orig.png

I'm afraid things aren't that simple.............

 

Wine imported from any other country which already has fruit juice added has to pay some form of duty/excise and therefore has the blue sticker on it. That is the same with the casks, many of which are imported from Australia and which clearly state that fruit juice is added, however there is a blue sticker on it.

 

If you want an example go and look in the supermarket for a bottle of 289 baht red wine called "Rolling" (not the more expensive version which doesn't have fruit juice added) and on the back label it will clearly state fruit juice has been added, and the sticker is blue!

 

The whole situation is confusing and I believe the only reason that there are a whole bunch of Australian wines with a few from France and Italy which contain fruit juice is because they have found it to be a way to get the product into the country and still have a fairly cheap price point at retail – – this because the likes of Siam winery have been able to set this price point with their range which have various things added, fruit included.

[torrzent]

4 hours ago, dddave said:

"Boo-Hoo"...Winers whinging about wine....think they're getting a fine Cabernet for B299 and don't bother to look closely and read the back label.

7-11 should be so ashamed for taking advantage of these poor illiterates.

 

Lucky it's not France and Italy where they dump ox blood into Algerian wine and don't even write it in small print.

 

Didnt you mean whingers whining about wine?

[owl sees all]

2 hours ago, Oxx said:

Made in Thailand by Thai people.

This could be misleading. It certainly baffles me. How can beer be 'made'. I always thought there was more to it than simply being 'made'.

 

I make (blend) my own wine (55 Bhat a litre) but I'm going to try beer next. 

[ChidlomDweller]

5 hours ago, Thian said:

I can't find that.

But San Miguel light is also overraded on this forum, it also gives me headache but not as fast as other Thai beers.

They have it in Central and even my local 7/11.  They give it very little shelf space (1 bottle wide at the bottom of the fridge), but have a look.  Much better than San Miguel IMO.  It's imported from Laos and costs 53 Baht for the regular and 65 or something for the dark one.  

[Thian]

6 hours ago, binjalin said:

It's not a 'Thai Beer' it's Philippines 

I see, but the brewery is in thailand right? So they use Thai water which makes it a Thai beer for me.

[topt]

2 hours ago, ChidlomDweller said:

They have it in Central and even my local 7/11.  They give it very little shelf space (1 bottle wide at the bottom of the fridge), but have a look.  Much better than San Miguel IMO.  It's imported from Laos and costs 53 Baht for the regular and 65 or something for the dark one.  

You can also buy it by the case in Makro.

The dark is 6.5%.........

[amvet]

37 minutes ago, Thian said:

I see, but the brewery is in thailand right? So they use Thai water which makes it a Thai beer for me.

Buy a bottle of Thai soda water and an imported bottle of soda water and see if you can tell the difference in a blind test.  If you can you have an educated palate if you can't you are ethnocentric. 

[pauleddy]

The non-fruity genuine Rolling is a nice drop, and is 666b in Villa. On the next shelf is fruit-mixed Rolling at 289b. Until you study the labels closely, you can easily get confused. Both labels are blue and have the same design.

[binjalin]

10 hours ago, Thian said:

I see, but the brewery is in thailand right? So they use Thai water which makes it a Thai beer for me.

 

Right so all the Hondas, Toyotas and Isuzus are Thai cars right?  nothing to do with the Japanese.

 

Weird thinking I would normally attribute to a Thai who is 'proud' of their country so will warp everything to that end lol.

[1BADDAT]

1 hour ago, pauleddy said:

The non-fruity genuine Rolling is a nice drop, and is 666b in Villa. On the next shelf is fruit-mixed Rolling at 289b. Until you study the labels closely, you can easily get confused. Both labels are blue and have the same design.

This is Thailand. The label is not going to change to be easier to read. Just look at the price.  No real wine is gonna be 299 baht.  A real wine is going to be 500 baht+

[Thian]

50 minutes ago, binjalin said:

 

Right so all the Hondas, Toyotas and Isuzus are Thai cars right?  nothing to do with the Japanese.

 

Weird thinking I would normally attribute to a Thai who is 'proud' of their country so will warp everything to that end lol.

There's a big black market for Heineken beer in China, they pay double price for imported Heineken from Amsterdam. Even they have their own Heineken factory in China.

 

Same goes for milkpowder from Nestle, the Chinese don't want that from China, only from Holland and pay extreme prices for that.

 

No idea why i get headaches from Thai beer and not from Belgium beer but i can tell it has to do with the brewery process and/or ingredients/water used. 

 

 

 

Edited August 28, 2017 by Thian

[xylophone]

45 minutes ago, 1BADDAT said:

This is Thailand. The label is not going to change to be easier to read. Just look at the price.  No real wine is gonna be 299 baht.  A real wine is going to be 500 baht+

Well there is one good thing about it in as much as the back label, as is often the case with many wines, clearly states that it is a wine made from a particular grape and then mixed with fruit juice, so they're not trying to hide anything, which is what a lot of posters on here and other threads have complained about – – the inclusion of fruit juice of some sort, but without clear mention of it, is on the Siam winery stuff (Montclair, Mar Y Sol, Finca de whatever et cetera).

 

 

[joeyg]

On 8/25/2017 at 10:05 PM, 1BADDAT said:

That is not true.  They have Jacob's Creek from Australia at many 7-11's i've been.  It is like 5-600 baht a bottle though.

Exactly.  Also Pump House is a pretty good Cab.  800 bhat.  Depends on the store.  Some 7/11's have better selection than others.  I find Best has good prices and selection.

 

[joeyg]

1 hour ago, 1BADDAT said:

This is Thailand. The label is not going to change to be easier to read. Just look at the price.  No real wine is gonna be 299 baht.  A real wine is going to be 500 baht+

I have found a couple 299 bottles that were pretty good, drinkable for an everyday wine.

[ExpatOilWorker]

1 hour ago, Thian said:

There's a big black market for Heineken beer in China, they pay double price for imported Heineken from Amsterdam. Even they have their own Heineken factory in China.

 

Same goes for milkpowder from Nestle, the Chinese don't want that from China, only from Holland and pay extreme prices for that.

 

No idea why i get headaches from Thai beer and not from Belgium beer but i can tell it has to do with the brewery process and/or ingredients/water used. 

 

 

 

 

Happy to hear I am not alone. I stopped drinking beers altogether, just 2 beers give me a headache.

[dddave]

17 hours ago, torrzent said:

Didnt you mean whingers whining about wine?

Yah..Thanks.

It was the wine....

[joeyg]

1 hour ago, ExpatOilWorker said:

 

Happy to hear I am not alone. I stopped drinking beers altogether, just 2 beers give me a headache.

Heineken gave me headaches in high school.  Don't drink much these days.  I prefer a Singha when I do.  Beer Lao Dark is a good treat once in a while...

[Thian]

10 hours ago, ExpatOilWorker said:

 

Happy to hear I am not alone. I stopped drinking beers altogether, just 2 beers give me a headache.

I can drink one small Thai beer without feeling the headache coming up. During the 2nd beer it starts already.

 

Never have that with Belgian beer. So now i only drink beer in Europe and only Belgian beer.

 

 

[oldhippy]

11 minutes ago, Thian said:

I can drink one small Thai beer without feeling the headache coming up. During the 2nd beer it starts already.

 

Never have that with Belgian beer. So now i only drink beer in Europe and only Belgian beer.

 

 

Now please tell me that you are NOT talking about Stella....

As a Belgian I am ashamed for that imitation beer.

[topt]

10 minutes ago, oldhippy said:

Now please tell me that you are NOT talking about Stella....

As a Belgian I am ashamed for that imitation beer.

I used to drink Stella in the UK - my go to lager if I was drinking lager........

So hold your head up - much tastier than the other "normal" alternatives of Heineken, Carling, Skol et al

 

 

 

[Thian]

8 hours ago, topt said:

I used to drink Stella in the UK - my go to lager if I was drinking lager........

So hold your head up - much tastier than the other "normal" alternatives of Heineken, Carling, Skol et al

 

 

 

Heineken can give lethal headaches, i won't drink that..And Skol i haven't seen for 30 years or so. Carling never heard of.

I mostly drink Palm or Hoegaarden depending on the season and also wine.

 

In Thailand i drunk loads of water, good for staying slim.

 

[pauleddy]

Stella is tastier than Carling or Heiny, perhaps because it is stronger by 2%. Personally I have found it to taste of chemicals and to give me a bruising hangover.

[grollies]

14 hours ago, oldhippy said:

Now please tell me that you are NOT talking about Stella....

As a Belgian I am ashamed for that imitation beer.

Oranjeboom larger is well-named.

[xylophone]

Back onto the subject of wine, not that I don't like an occasional beer, but red wine is my favourite tipple.

 

We have been discussing the subject of wine with fruit juice added and indeed as many of as posters know, there are a huge number of these wines that emanate from Australia in both casks/boxes and bottles – – i.e. the wine and fruit juice are blended and bottled in Australia and shipped to Thailand where they are sold cheaply.

 

Contrast this with the following couple of paragraphs from the renowned wine writer "James Suckling".........

 

Australia is no longer emerging. Australia is no longer a “one to watch.” Australia is here, and it stands tall among the world’s greatest wine nations. After all, it’s home to the oldest dirt on the planet, as well as a vast reserve of the world’s oldest vines. These vines are tended and their grapes carefully harvested and transformed by some of the most scientifically advanced, most youthfully capable, intelligent, widely-tasted and well-traveled winemakers anywhere.

 

Indeed, real Australian wine is a world away from cheap, commodity wine and overcooked caricatures. Yes, those happy-go-lucky supermarket wines and the odd fruit bombs are still to be found—just as they are in California, Tuscany, Bordeaux, Spain, Champagne and wherever else great wine has carved its path—but they are not the story of today nor that of the future.

 

So there you have a contrast, with an expert singing the praises of Australian wine, as I have done in the past, and I also wondered why a country which has taken so much trouble to build a reputation for good to great wines is exporting this other crap (fruit wines), thereby potentially damaging the reputation of very good wine producing country.

[kkerry]

Wineries in Australia exporting wine to Thailand with fruit juice added are simply supplying Thailand with what the local market can sell.

 

A cheap 4 litre wine cask in Australia is about $15. Australian wines sold in Thailand are three, four, even five times the Aussie price so imagine trying to sell a cask of Coolabah dry white for 1200-1500 baht. No one would buy it. Mix in some fruit juice to lower tax and reduce the selling price and they will sell some. Exporting cheap fruit wines is not going to damage the reputation of better quality Australian wines. People are smart enough to know a 299 baht bottle of red at Makro isn't what to expect from a bottle of 407 ($80 now, and I used to enjoy that fairly regularly once). 

[xylophone]

13 hours ago, kkerry said:

Wineries in Australia exporting wine to Thailand with fruit juice added are simply supplying Thailand with what the local market can sell.

 

A cheap 4 litre wine cask in Australia is about $15. Australian wines sold in Thailand are three, four, even five times the Aussie price so imagine trying to sell a cask of Coolabah dry white for 1200-1500 baht. No one would buy it. Mix in some fruit juice to lower tax and reduce the selling price and they will sell some. Exporting cheap fruit wines is not going to damage the reputation of better quality Australian wines. People are smart enough to know a 299 baht bottle of red at Makro isn't what to expect from a bottle of 407 ($80 now, and I used to enjoy that fairly regularly once). 

I agree with some of your points and indeed Australia is supplying Thailand with what the local market can sell, but then again that isn't always the smartest move, mainly because that wine is not indicative of the quality which Australia can produce.

 

It's about brand, product and positioning and that's the reason why the likes of Adidas and Nike, for example, don't make a cheaper version of their gear and sell it to Third World countries (where there would be a huge market) because it would damage their brand.

 

Sure there are people out there who know that there are some great Australian wines about, but you would be surprised how many people, apart from the wine enthusiasts, who don't know that the wines we've mentioned contain fruit juice.

 

The damage that can be done was evident in the UK in the late 60s and early 70s when it was a huge export market for French wines, however the reputation of French wines was being damaged by the absolute crap that was being sent over. So much so that a few things happened – – the French decided to tighten up their Appellation Controllee laws to try and control the quality (to a certain extent) and the British wine market started to look elsewhere for wines.

 

I tasted wines from Australia and Argentina in the late 70s and even though the Australian stuff was the strangely named "Kanga Rouge" and was part of a wine glut, it was streets above the everyday French offering. Wine merchants started looking elsewhere and wines from Chile, the USA and Australia were being explored and imported.

 

The damage had been done for the French wine industry and they now had serious competition.

 

To be fair, in the 60s they had endeavoured to improve the quality of their wine and the French government offered incentives to wine producers to pull out all of the high yielding vines from poor quality grape varieties (supposedly) and replant with quality vines.

 

Actually a similar thing happened in Australia when Shiraz was the "workhorse" of the Australian wine industry, however it wasn't seen as a potential worldbeater, apart from Max Schubert, and a lot of very average wine was produced, so the Australian government produced incentives to rip out some of the "oversupply" of Shiraz wines in order to improve the quality.

 

My point is that all of this was done to improve the positioning of the relative countries with regards to their wine offering because exporting cheap, low quality wines does absolutely nothing for that country's wine producing reputation.

 

I did post a link to a UK newspaper on another thread, where the writer was lamenting the fact that wine mixed with fruit juice had found its way onto UK supermarket shelves and there was no differentiation between the real stuff and this fruit juice mix and his point was because of this, the everyday drinking public would be tasting what they thought was a "typical" wine from a particular country, when it was actually a fruit wine.

 

And as for the Penfold 407........... a lovely drop as is the 389, neither of which I've had of late although I did taste a "Two Hands Angels Share" McLaren Vale Shiraz the other day and it was a huge wine, lovely but a little too big for my liking these days.

 

[Lucky mike]

2 hours ago, xylophone said:

I agree with some of your points and indeed Australia is supplying Thailand with what the local market can sell, but then again that isn't always the smartest move, mainly because that wine is not indicative of the quality which Australia can produce.

 

It's about brand, product and positioning and that's the reason why the likes of Adidas and Nike, for example, don't make a cheaper version of their gear and sell it to Third World countries (where there would be a huge market) because it would damage their brand.

 

Sure there are people out there who know that there are some great Australian wines about, but you would be surprised how many people, apart from the wine enthusiasts, who don't know that the wines we've mentioned contain fruit juice.

 

The damage that can be done was evident in the UK in the late 60s and early 70s when it was a huge export market for French wines, however the reputation of French wines was being damaged by the absolute crap that was being sent over. So much so that a few things happened – – the French decided to tighten up their Appellation Controllee laws to try and control the quality (to a certain extent) and the British wine market started to look elsewhere for wines.

 

I tasted wines from Australia and Argentina in the late 70s and even though the Australian stuff was the strangely named "Kanga Rouge" and was part of a wine glut, it was streets above the everyday French offering. Wine merchants started looking elsewhere and wines from Chile, the USA and Australia were being explored and imported.

 

The damage had been done for the French wine industry and they now had serious competition.

 

To be fair, in the 60s they had endeavoured to improve the quality of their wine and the French government offered incentives to wine producers to pull out all of the high yielding vines from poor quality grape varieties (supposedly) and replant with quality vines.

 

Actually a similar thing happened in Australia when Shiraz was the "workhorse" of the Australian wine industry, however it wasn't seen as a potential worldbeater, apart from Max Schubert, and a lot of very average wine was produced, so the Australian government produced incentives to rip out some of the "oversupply" of Shiraz wines in order to improve the quality.

 

My point is that all of this was done to improve the positioning of the relative countries with regards to their wine offering because exporting cheap, low quality wines does absolutely nothing for that country's wine producing reputation.

 

I did post a link to a UK newspaper on another thread, where the writer was lamenting the fact that wine mixed with fruit juice had found its way onto UK supermarket shelves and there was no differentiation between the real stuff and this fruit juice mix and his point was because of this, the everyday drinking public would be tasting what they thought was a "typical" wine from a particular country, when it was actually a fruit wine.

 

And as for the Penfold 407........... a lovely drop as is the 389, neither of which I've had of late although I did taste a "Two Hands Angels Share" McLaren Vale Shiraz the other day and it was a huge wine, lovely but a little too big for my liking these days.

 

Quantum leap from mont Claire to 707, 389, st henri, those were the days !

[ExpatOilWorker]

On 8/25/2017 at 10:18 PM, ChidlomDweller said:

First of all, look at the label over the cap.  Blue means imported as is, brown-orange means it was imported as fruit juice (wine with alcohol extracted) with the alcohol added back in and bottled in Thailand as a tax dodge.  At least that bit is easy to see.  Anything under 400 Baht a bottle as well as cardboard boxes are nearly always with the orange label -- an abomination I refuse to drink.

 

Another red flag is where they call it "red" instead of "red wine".  If they studiously avoid to use the word "wine", you know why.  

 

Finally, read the fine print on the back and look for "fruit wine", "fruit blend" or the like.  

 

Annoying nanny-state shit like this is what's making me tired of this country.  

Not as simple, unfortunately. Below is a fruit wine with the blue tax label on the cap.

[xylophone]

52 minutes ago, ExpatOilWorker said:

Not as simple, unfortunately. Below is a fruit wine with the blue tax label on the cap.

Yes and this wine is actually bottled in Vietnam with grape juice from Oz and fruit juice of "black fruits" added, before being exported to Thailand. The white wine of similar origin has passion fruit juice added.