Monday, April 3, 2017

BEACH MUSINGS: You CAN Judge a Wine by its Label


My dear friend and fellow writer, GinaWarren Buzby, served a bottle of tasty 19 Crimes 2015 Red Wine when I visited her home a few weeks back. The label spoke to me (as labels often do), and somehow that just seemed such an appropriate blog topic for a mystery writer who loves all things vino!  So here goes…
     As readers, we read everything we can get our hands on.  That means at breakfast we peruse the back of the box of cereal. (That reminds me, I’ve been meaning to look up pyridoxine hydrochloride. It sounds positively toxic!) So it seems to follow that when we sit with a bottle of wine in front of us, we read that label, too.  This is on the back of the 19 Crimes wine:
     “NINETEEN CRIMES turned criminals into colonists.  Upon conviction, British rogues, guilty of at least one of the 19 crimes, were sentenced to live in Australia, rather than death.  This punishment by ‘transportation’ began in 1788, and many of the lawless died at sea.  For the rough-hewn prisoners who made it to shore, a new world awaited.”
     That got me to thinking (as wine often does), what were the 19 crimes?     I expected a list of serious crimes, such as murder or rape, but those were handled in Britain and punishable by death. Add “impersonating an Egyptian” to that list, too.
     So what 19 types of crimes were punishable by “transportation”?