Great White Sharks love to eat people, and they're baiting us in with wine (and I have the proof!)

ATTENTION:  If you drink wine, this post may save your life.

Are elephant seals being mistaken for Robert Parker?  Or, the other way around?

Forget the French Paradox.  All the medical study suggesting that a little bit of wine may be beneficial to your health.  All that crap is a bunch of dinky doo, propagated to sell health magazines and bottles of wine.  Wine- in fact- is the deadliest of all beverages.  It will most likely kill you before your time.  Drinking wine is- without a shadow of a doubt- extremely hazardous to any human being's health.

There have been rumors that this blog was shut down.  Things have gone very stale.  Maybe I got sick of being lost in the shuffle of thousands of other wine blogs.  Perhaps- after nearly five years of pecking away at the keyboard- I'd lost the desire to write.  Or, simply being in the business of wine sapped all my passion for what has now become a widget on a balance sheet.

Bollocks!  For the past several months, I've spent every waking hour painstakingly tracking a correlation between wine tourism and great white shark attacks.  After noticing a swell in stories like this over the past year, my convictions solidified.  Wine consumption is on the rise domestically.  As are  white shark sightings, on both coasts.  My mind began swimming like a foolish California sea lion, as I sifted through data at the National Shark Attack & Wine Tourism Command Center I set up in my garage:


A comprehensive analysis from our collection of massive, 1980's-style super-computers offered the following, indisputable conclusions:

1)  Sharks love to eat people (we already knew this, but confirmation from an expensive bank of 1980's-style super-computers bolstered validity)

2)  People love to drink wine, as evidenced by projected meteoric rise in consumption.

3)  Great white sharks frequent cooler waters off the coasts of California, Oregon, Australia, South Africa, Chile, and New Zealand.

4)  Some of the world's greatest wine growing regions exist near the coasts in California, Oregon, Australia, South Africa, Chile, and New Zealand.

After digesting the data, I took a large, nervous swig from my glass of cool ocean current-influenced Santa Barbara County Pinot Noir.  I detected aromas of cherry cola, red fruits, earth, water, bloodlust, pelagic skin, death...

My hand began to tremble.  My glass dropped to the floor, shattering as if it were my foolish dreams of chugging a bottle of Margaret River Cab while surfing off the coast of Perth.  Now... I knew.

GREAT WHITE SHARKS ARE BAITING US IN... WITH WINE.

The town of Stellenbosch, epicenter of South Africa's greatest wine growing region, lies a mere 20 miles from False Bay's Seal Island.  Some of California's finest product is grown in Sonoma County, Monterey County, San Luis Obispo County, and Santa Barbara County.  All counties hug the Pacific coast... a coast teeming with hungry, hungry sharks.  Australia sees the most fatal attacks in the world.  Perth, Melbourne, and Adelaide are the closest major cities to the sites of these attacks.  Not at all coincidentally, so are heralded regions like Margaret River, Yarra Valley, Barossa, McLaren Vale, and Eden Valley.

And, of course, Jaws was filmed in Martha's Vineyard, MA.  Conveniently, nearby Long Island's wine industry is on the rise.

It's such a simple, sinister plan the sharks have laid out.  Go to wine country, become inebriated in its beauty.  Then, tuck into a few bottles.  "Wow, the nearby ocean seems so inviting.  Let's take a bottle of this maritime-influenced Casablanca Valley Sauvignon Blanc to the beach and take a dip..."

Scientists claim a seal can elude the attack of a fearsome Great White.  But a seal can't drink a magnum of 16% ABV "cool climate" Bien Nacido Pinot Noir.  Drunken on both hubris and wine, we feel invincible as we sink below the depths, equipped with the awkward, minimal swimming abilities of land creatures.  It's all too easy.  Bellies swelling with fermented goodness, heads swimming with cloudy visions of elusive 2 oz. tasting pours, livers bloated like foie gras...  It's not because we look like seals.  It's because seals look like us that the sharks attack without remorse.

So, dear reader, only because I care about you, I'm offering this advice if you value your life:

1)  Don't drink wine.
2)  Stay the hell out of the water.
3)  Tell your local winery to move inland.  The hot climate will wreak havoc on the wine, but what good is wine if everyone you hope to buy it is dead?

Once the sharks no longer have a steady supply of booze-saturated humans to feast upon, they will go into alcohol withdrawal and resort to cigarettes.  Yet, with the water soaking the tobacco and making the use of lighters and matches futile, the pangs of said withdrawal will be too much for them.  Plus, they won't be able to get on land to buy cigarettes.  And, their flippers can't flick lighters.  And cigarettes are like $8 a pack in California.  And all the California oceans are probably designated "smoke free" anyway.  The sharks will flee.

It has to work.  And it you don't believe me, see if you can find any videos on Youtube of shark attacks that occurred during prohibition.

I didn't find any.