Chinese wine cork declares “you fat”
Rob, a site reader living in China, sent in these photos. He says he doesn’t drink Chinese wine (“for obvious reasons”) but this bottle was a birthday present (“tasted terrible and was definitely not made of 100% juice”).
Still, are the Chinese trying to send anglophone customers messages via corks a la fortune cookies? If so, cute idea but they may want to use a service other than Google Translate. Oh wait, maybe “You Fat in bed” sounds better? Hmm, not really.
May
21
2011
On May 21st, 2011 at 10:50 pm ,Mike G wrote:
An Idiom perhaps?
On May 22nd, 2011 at 10:39 am ,Robbie C. wrote:
I’ve been thinking that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to market a Chinese wine with fortune telling corks. It would sell if cheap enough, and would certainly have more going for it than some other “novelty” wines out there. What do you think?
On May 23rd, 2011 at 8:11 am ,1WineDude wrote:
This one needs to get submitted to Engrish.com, STAT!
On May 23rd, 2011 at 12:57 pm ,Dr. Vino wrote:
Robbie – Yes, I think the fortune cookie corks (fortune corkies?) would be cute. However, in my experience, cute and wine quality are not always as closely related as I would like. But I’m sure cute and sales have a much more positive correlation!
On May 23rd, 2011 at 4:58 pm ,WineCombo wrote:
Maybe the actor Chow Yun Fat owns a winery now? Hm, just trying to make sense of this…
On May 24th, 2011 at 12:10 am ,fatty wrote:
yes america is fat, that is for sure
On May 24th, 2011 at 9:02 am ,Robbie C. wrote:
so, here’s the rest of the story………….Winecombo, yes there is a connection there, but it’s a linguistic one. The name of the winery is You Fa…just as the actors name is Chao Run-Fa in Mandrin. In Cantonese, the Winery is called You Fat…just as the anglicized version of the actor’s Cantonese name is Chao Yun-Fat. Tyler, I love that “fortune corkies”! I think were well on our way to selling shitty wine to the masses in “Cute” packaging.
On May 24th, 2011 at 10:18 am ,Dr. Vino wrote:
Robbie,
Thanks for your exploration of this wine/producer.
Glad you like “fortune corkie”! I should trademark the term like Pat Riley did with “three-peat” before it is too late…then I can sit back and collect the royalties!
On May 24th, 2011 at 1:14 pm ,Steve Nelson wrote:
Maybe they looked “fat” up on urbandictionary.com, where it means cool. Although I guess that homophone is spelled “phat”. Perplexing, indeed.