Shiteways Cider Company Ltd

The first phoneme of the subject of this splendid story by the Diario de Jerez appears to have colonised the first of the (long defunct) Whiteways Cider Co. Ltd., and they probably deserved it.

For Whiteways et al in 1966 sought a ruling allowing them to market as sherry beverages that used the Jerez process but that were not specifically of that district. González Byass managed to get away with staging an initial hearing in its own bodegas by claiming that Tío Manolo was too old to travel, and Mr. Justice Geoffrey Cross, after

29 days, 74 witnesses, 3,000 price lists, 1,600 bottle labels, hundreds of bottles, glasses, advertisements, photocopies from the British Museum archives, a reproduction of a 17th century English comedy, … letters of state between Queen Elizabeth I and her ambassador at the Spanish court, [and] a fragment of the map made in 1154 by the Arab poet and cartographer Al-Idrisi … on which appears the town of Seris

… decided, perhaps somewhat wearily, that Shiteways could continue to ply its wherry as long as that term was prepended by a disabling qualifier, e.g.

‘British Sherry’, ‘English Sherry’, ‘South African Sherry’, ‘Australian Sherry’, ‘Cyprus Sherry’, ‘Empire Sherry’

… as well as, presumably, Most Vomitsome Sherry, which led in one’s teenage years to frightful scenes in and around a fenland discotheque, followed by rapid ascent of a wall and precipitate flight, at a moment when quite other business was anticipated of one.

(H/t to your man for all your Jerez business, in English or Spanish, should anyone be looking for such a person in these sober times.)

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Last updated 04/08/2018

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Australia (6):

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Föcked Translation (414): I posted to a light-hearted blog called Fucked Translation over on Blogger from 2007 to 2016, when I was often in Barcelona. Its original subtitle was "What happens when Spanish institutions and businesses give translation contracts to relatives or to some guy in a bar who once went to London and only charges 0.05€/word." I never actually did much Spanish-English translation (most of my work is from Dutch, French and German) but I was intrigued and amused by the hubristic Spanish belief, then common, that nepotism and quality went hand in hand, and by the nemeses that inevitably followed.

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