enoavidh wrote:

> Oh, for pete's sake.
> "I have a wine-related website. I think it's a good marketing idea to
> pretend tht I found a cool site. Maybe I can sell something to those
> chumps at alt.food.wine."

> REGISTRANT CONTACT INFO
> Farnan,Daniel...
>
> or is it "?
>
> If you people would come out and be honest, you might get my business; as
> it is, my feeling is that if you will lie about who you are, then why
> should I bother?
>
> d who is a former fraud investigator...

Well, De, we don't want to jump to conclusions, but your case is a
pretty strong one:

1. Registrant's address is in Burlington, NJ and poster's IP address
traces to somewhere near Trenton, NJ

2. They share the same first name

3. has never posted to this or any other Usenet
newsgroup before

4. Dan Farnan *does* have a Yahoo ID, but it's danfarnan, not dnanraph.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and not accuse him of spamming
his own website. Instead, I'll just point out why such a product is
*completely* unnecessary ;-)

1. The people who developed the guidelines for wine serving temperature
were certainly not putting a thermometer inside the bottle to figure out
what temperature the wine was at; they were just using general
temperature figures: room temp (~65 F), cellar temp (~50 F), chilled
(~35 F). Anything more precise is overkill.

2. It isn't exactly rocket science to figure out if a bottle is warm,
cool or cold by simply touching it.

3. The temperature on the outside of the bottle may or may not reflect
the temperature of the wine. Unfortunately, the extent of difference is
governed by a partial differential equation (the heat or diffusion
equation) that depends on the initial temp of the wine, the temp of the
surroundings, the size of the bottle and the heat capacity of all the
materials -- in practical terms, it's best not to even attempt to solve
this.

The bottom line: feel the bottle. If it's a full-bodied red, it should
be slightly cool to the touch; if it's a big white or lighter red it
should be quite cool; if it's a lighter white it should be cold but not
ice cold. No need for any thermometer IMO.

HTH ;-)
Mark Lipton

p.s. Why is it that whenever people want to post "anonymously" to
Usenet, they use Google groups, who dutifully put the poster's IP
address in the headers? Is there some website giving bogus instructions
on how to spam Usenet or something??