About the FB page "Fukuoka Winezuki Nokai"

The page that we are talking about is this one.

We, Vins Fins Motohama, feel sorry but we have to answer criticisms about our company that occured within this page.  Since we have been denied the access to this page that is private, we do it in the article below. We leave it to people concerned by this article, and in particularly the owners and regulators of that FB page, to reply in comments, would they wish to do so.

The claimed purpose of this FB page is to share opinions about wines. Actually this is not the case. Discussions or opinions about wines are rare in that page. People keep on posting pictures about bottles without any tasting notes, it seems that they are just happy to show off with prestigious or folklore bottles. A few non-professionals also keep on adverting about private wine parties with non-negligeable fees that they organise. So there is obviously some murky unofficial business happening there.

So far we have been following this list for two reasons. First of all we sincerely hoped to share opinions about wines and were interested about wine amateurs' views. Secondly, since we are professionals and serious about wines we were interested in looking at people's interests and consumption habits.  Quite quickly we realised though that many bottles presented by list members look suspicious -- if not ridiculous -- and some could possibly be fake, like old vintages from prestigious domains (60 years old DRC, old Petrus or Ausone, etc... to name some...). We felt quite annoyed about the situation and started recently querying systematically about the origins of such bottles. We have to say that we nearly never got any clear answers -- except once.

Our comments were always polite but clear but they obviously upseted a few list members and also regulators. Eventually our memberships and access to the FB list was removed after a thread posted on sunday the 12th of March.Therefore we could not even further reply to the ultimate totally biased criticism of the regulator in that thread that supported the side against us. We eventually got a copy of it that we decided not to reproduce.

So what was the thread about?

A member of the list posted a few pictures about a wine party. He showed a bottle of Château Latour à Pauillac vintage 1945 (photo below). Price of it should be about a few hundred thousand yens (may be?) depending of buyers' mood and madness.

We asked then whether he was sure that this bottle was genuine and asked for the origin of it (seller,  importer, etc...). We could get no clear answers to this. Instead a few members that seemed to have taken part in the wine parties criticised our queries claiming it was offensive. Eventually one of the list regulator added an ultimate comment supporting criticisms against us. 

We think that this is ridiculous. First of all, it should not be a problem, but rather a pride, for any owner of such a prestigious bottle to explain how he gets it. No? More importantly, we also think that any serious professional wine sellers should check and be able to certify the origins of the bottles he sales. We have been serious about this point and we will ever be. We do not have to justify anymore. So we leave it to the reader to make its own opinion about the dispute.

PS: Regarding the above bottle of Château Latour 45, we contacted the Château Latour and also the seller of the bottle to make sure that the bottle is genuine. But that is another story.