A South Australian winemaker has been caught substituting sultana grapes for much more expensive chardonnay fruit, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the country.
The switch was uncovered after one of the wine company’s customers, a fellow winemaker, became suspicious when he tasted some of the grape juice and found it didn’t have the flavor characteristics expected of chardonnay.
The Australian Wine and Brandy Corp investigated the case and became even more suspicious when they audited Rivers Wines books, uncovering false records of grapes processed by the winery in 2003.
“It’s not good to have something like this happen, but I’ve been in this job for nine years ... and this is the first time we’ve had anything like this happen,” the corporation’s spokesman Steve Guy said.
In a judgment handed down last month, the South Australian Magistrates Court found that Rivers Wines made 34 entries in its books in which the firm falsely claimed it received almost 600 tonnes of chardonnay grapes.
The court said while the accusations were not the most serious of criminal offenses, the substitution of chardonnay grapes with sultana grapes could seriously affect the Australian wine industry.
Guy said the case had taken a painstaking investigation, but revealed the determination of the corporation, the country’s wine regulatory body, to protect the reputation of local wines.
He said that unlike a recent case in France in which 18 million bottles of wine presented as Pinot Noir but in fact made from far cheaper grape varieties had been sold, in this case the fraud was detected before the grape juice was made into wine.
“None of this actually landed in the marketplace and certainly none was exported,” he said.
The South Australian company and its former director face a maximum penalty on each count of falsifying records is A$15,000 (US$13,800) for a company and A$3,000 for an individual.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the