Winebits 699: Wild boars, pandemic drinking, liquor lawsuit

This week’s wine news: Wild boars attack supermarket wine shopper, plus a historical look at pandemic drinking and another liquor lawsuit

• Attack of the wild boars: The U.S. has neo-Prohibitionists; Italy has wild boars. England’s Guardian newspaper reported that “a herd” of wild boars ambushed a woman who had just come out of a supermarket near Rome. The “four adults and two young boars” pursued the woman and stole her groceries (which I assume included wine, because it’s Italy and not the U.S.). The video at the top of the page shows what happened. Apparently, boar attacks like this are not uncommon in Italian cities; the country may have as many as 2 million wild boars.

• Pandemic drinking: An otherwise interesting piece about alcohol drinking during the Black Death has one fatal flaw (and yes, pun fully intended). The author, in recounting how pre-Modern Europe drank its way through the bubonic plague, wants to wag a finger at us for drinking so much during the current pandemic. But he omits one important fact: It wasn’t safe to drink water in most cities before the Industrial Revolution gave us modern sewerage systems. If you did, you likely died from something like typhoid, cholera, or dysentery. So when James Brown quotes Daniel Defoe saying an English grocer going into quarantine with his family had “12 hogsheads of beer; casks and rundlets containing four varieties of wine (canary, malmsey, sack and tent; 16 gallons of brandy; and “many sorts of distill’d waters” (spirits)” that’s because he had nothing else to drink. One has to watch those neo-Prohibitionists – they can be tricky.

• Peaky Blinders, indeed: The WC’s fascination with liquor trademark and intellectual property lawsuits dates to the blog’s early days and Cristal v. Cristalino. So I never pass up an opportunity to share another one. This time, the company that made the “Peaky Blinders” TV series is suing the company that makes “Peaky Blinder” liquor and beer. A U.S. federal court judge ruled for the liquor company, but not to worry – there will certainly lots of appeals and we can follow this story for much longer.