Côtes du Rhône's Famous Hippo and Hedgehog are Hitting the Pavement

Decanter reports that the famous cartoon mascots are currently hitting the Help Wanted pages, fired after recent fears that their "cute" appearance may influence children to drink. In a recent interview with both Hippo and Hedgehog on Nightline, they stated their concerns that the wine industry is being hypocritical.

"After a decade of having a glass of wine glued to my hoof, spending ridiculous amounts of money on dermatologist bills, and now they want me to give it all up because their largest export market, the UK, fears that children are associating a hippo drinking wine as a seductive message?! I find it ludicrous, especially when Budo Kun's making international headlines for his recent sexual escapades, yet that's not influencing kids to drink? He's a fu**** wine bottle for Christ's sake! Yet Hedgehog and I are seen as the anti-christs! When was the last time you associated my big ass with a fantastic bottle of wine?"

Hedgehog followed up his best friend's comments by stating his own frustrations with the blatantly apparent hypocrisy. "My personal take isn't as dramatic as my buddy's, as Chile is already negotiating a new contract with us, but I'm definitely seeing something more underhanded going on here. If this were truly about children's well-being, don't you think our friends posing on wine bottles internationally would also be out of a job? But nooo, while bull, kangaroo and little penguin all retain their contracts, we're out of work. So I'm not led to believe this is for "the good of the young", no, I'm seeing this more as outright prejudism against hippos and hedgehogs!!!"

The press agent for Côtes du Rhône would not comment, although recent reports of violence against hippos and hedgehogs has been reported worldwide. The most recent story coming from a man in NZ using innocent hedgehogs as violent weapons against children.

Wine-ing 2.0 Comes clean - The truth behind the authors

Finally due to outside pressure the authors of Wine-ing 2.0 have decided to fess up as it were. They've realized now the damage that they are inflicting upon the once calm Wine Blogging landscape. Blogger turning against blogger, friend against friend, it's so sad.

Well actually it isn't. We're loving it, we love the dialog and debate, the back and forth, and the waste of blogging columns, twitter feeds, and IM bandwidth that has been realized since the start. We hope that this continues, and helps to further clog the tubes of this here internet. Try writing something interesting and maybe we won't have to continue to wound you and your delicate ego's. Give me a tasting note with balls, yes, balls.

Here at Wine-ing 2.0 we strive for the absurd, and we hope we've hit our mark. We do want to warn you though that this is just the start. We're still in our warm up sweats, and we have yet to line up for the main event. If you think you've been let off easy, well stay tuned. We will bring down wine blogging as we know it. The internet will bend to our will, wine blogging will OBEY!!!!

So go now, and taste another wine for your precious WBW, and tell us something we don't know. By the way, there are 3 of us. One will continue covering gossip, one breaking news and analysis, and well we have one asshole, who really just can't be nice at all. So there...get ready, get set, let's go!