Saturday, December 31, 2011

GO FIGURE

We have had a problem with a back label on a wine product sent to China recently.
The Chinese Customs have held up the shipment because the wording on the back label does not exactly match the wording on the invoice.

The wording difference?

On the invoice, in addition to the varietal, vintage and other mandatories is the wording:

(Brand company)'s New Zealand Dry Red Wine

On the back label, along with all the important mandatories including varietal, vintage etc. is the wording:

New Zealand (Brand company)'s Dry Red Wine.

Now the writing on this back label is in Chinese.
The print company for some reason substituted the agreed label artwork for a previous one so that the wording is not in the same order as the invoice.
The line of words in question has exactly  the same number and type of characters on each of the label variants so was virtually impossible to distinguish if one was compared to the other. All of the other Chinese characters on this back label (about 15 lines of it, describe the wine, where it was made, who it was made by, who it is being shipped to, what date it was bottled etc. All of this information is the same on each label and has the same number, type (and order) of characters.

Knowing this we can now simply change the invoice to read exactly as the label but the importer has lost a couple of weeks in the process.

This from a country that regularly poisons people in their own country and around the world with dodgy foodstuffs, illegal and dangerous additives and totally non-compliant labelling.

Go figure!

3 comments:

Richard (of RBB) said...

You tell em, The Wine Guy!

Twisted Scottish Bastard said...

Now don't get bitter.
Remember in the words (almost) of Yoda:
There is no try;
there is only Do,
or
Do Not,
or
Compltely Fuck It Up.

Ki WiNZ said...

Haha