Puritanism is alive and well (in French)

WINE TALK
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Sud Ouest : actualités en direct et infos du journal Sudouest.fr" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Best regards,
Alex R.

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Explanation:

What it amounts to is that a Bordeaux wine producer wanted to export wine to the US with verse - in French! - from Charles Baudelaire’s famous Fleurs du Mal (“Flowers of Evil”) on the label.

They American authorities refused saying that the words were “an incitement to debauchery”.
This is hardly believable, and shows what tremendous abuse of power there is by bureaucrats, and the ridiculous reign of “political correctness” in the US.

Here is the translation of the “incriminated” 8 lines I pulled off the Intenet L'Âme du vin (The Soul of Wine) by Charles Baudelaire" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; :

"One night, the soul of wine was singing in the flask:
"O man, dear disinherited! to you I sing
This song full of light and of brotherhood
From my prison of glass with its scarlet wax seals.

Vegetal ambrosia, precious grain scattered
By the eternal Sower, I shall descend in you
So that from our love there will be born poetry,
Which will spring up toward God like a rare flower!"

I ask you: what sane person would refuse those words on a wine label?

Best regards,
Alex R.

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Another censored wine label:

http://www.terredevins.com/article-586-Sensualite-et-immodestie-les-infortunes-de-letiquette-.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Alex R.

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Can’t read French and don’t know whether the story about this label is accurate, but it repeats the inaccurate urban legend that Mouton’s 1993 label was censored in the US. It was not. The label was voluntarily withdrawn by Mouton-Rothschild, perhaps because the opportunity to make a sanctimonious complaint about American puritanism was more attention-getting than the label itself.