So, after taking a week of hiatus from this series, I’m all Gene Autry, back in the saddle again. Here goes…

The Good

Joe Herrig from Suburban Wino had two great posts this week that featured some great movie and wine pairings. I think a lot of us wine bloggers have thought about what wines we would pair with our favorite television shows, songs, movies, and pretty much every thing else because…, well, because we are weird. This post is pretty much the perfect intersection of two of my obsessions.

The Bad

There was a totally crazy story this week about a French man who tried to blackmail the Romanee-Conti vineyards, who produce grapes for wines that can cost more than $15,000 a bottle. The man threatened to poison the vines until he was given approximately 1.5 million dollars. And I thought American criminals were crazy. You can read more about it here. Thanks for Dr. Vino for posting this link. You can also read about this story on Louisville Juice.

The Ugly

Try as I might, I just couldn’t find any new ugly news out there in the wine blogosphere. I didn’t want to be cheap and post another HR5034 post here, or some kind of image totally unrelated to wine, but I just couldn’t find a single post on the blogs that I read that was a good fit for the Ugly section.

So, I offer two challenges for this week:

• I challenge anyone to find a post that they think would be a good fit for the Ugly section this week. We will be on the honor system somewhat here, as I do allow older posts/videos/other that you discovered within the last week, although I would prefer hot off the presses during the last 7 days.
• In the interest of posting SOMETHING ugly on the site today, I leave you with an image, and a challenge; first one to tell me what this is gets a big pat on the back and the satisfaction of a job well done -