Image: original Moët Hennessey USA. Amended by @tibettruth

Good wine is born from the soil, sunshine and people of the locality, It’s aroma, flavor and quality is an alchemy of provenance. Imagine then drinking a wine from a land whose rivers, air and mountains was saturated by decades of suffering. What toxins of human misery are absorbed by the noble grape?

Well for around $250 a bottle you can now savor the flavor of oppression courtesy of prominent French business, Moët-Hennessy, whose venture with a Chinese company (Moët Hennessy Shangri-La (Deqin) Winery Co,) is now producing a red wine from a vineyard in a valley of south-eastern Tibet.

It is an area within the eastern Tibetan region of Kham, like the rest of Tibet it has witnessed years of misery under China’s tyranny, colonized and oppressed by a massive military occupation Tibetans have been subjected to a range of human rights abuses and violently denied the most basic of freedoms. It is no exaggeration to describe what is happening inside occupied Tibet as a cultural genocide, a ‘final solution’ that aims to eradicate Tibetan national identity.

Such realities however do not seem to have dissuaded Moët Hennessey from collaborating with China’s regime or this Chinese company, whose cynical branding of this wine as ‘Shangri-la’ aims to conceal the brutal reality endured by Tibetans. Those with a refined and sensitive palate may well be concentrating upon the qualities of this particular wine, people possessed of conscience and in solidarity with liberty, justice and human rights will however find the taste unpalatable when considering the plight of Tibet and its people.