FREAK PARASITE SMITES WINE JUDGES

PHOTO by GWYNZER

Savage Tongue-eating Bug Jumps
Fishy Species Leaps To Humans
Horror Result At Adelaide Show
by PHILIP WHITE and AGENCIES

Judges in Australia’s internationally-revered wine show system are in shock and denial at news of a horror parasite endemic in their ranks.

Secret research showing judges are now consistently failing to recognize and reward the most beautiful entries in Australia’s 13,793 annual wine shows had been met with disbelief amongst the secretive circle.

Everything changed when the chief judge at the Royal Adelaide Wine Show III (A.iV340-2011) coughed something into his spittoon during a tannin siezure.

The team of 493 judges were half-way though the taste-off of 789 trophy winners to select the best wine of the show when the incident occurred.

Fellow judges became curious when they discovered the chairman would no longer speak. Imagining he’d coughed up his dentures, one of the first assistant director judges drained the golden spittoon to recover the teeth when a mature Ceratothoa imbricate bit her finger.

Ceratothoa imbricate was previously known only to live in fish.

When the first assistant director judge screamed, a second parasite leapt from her mouth. She, too, was suddenly silent, and refused other judges a chance to inspect her bleeding gullet.

Finally junior judges began to admit that they, too, were experiencing strange clicking sounds in their mouths as they tasted.

Ceratothoa imbricate, a native of South America, is believed to have come to Australia on the palate of this year’s guest Argentinian judge, a male, and moved to the mouth of a junior female judge during their liason after the Chairman’s Welcome Rare Bottle Dinner at the conclusion of the Show’s first day of tasting.

5,098 bottles of extremely rare Bordeaux and Burgundy were served at the dinner.

Secret laboratory work at the Australian Wine Research Institute is believed to indicate that the parasite lives on the tongues of wine judges. Once it has devoured the tongue completely, the creature remains resident in the mouth, gradually taking over the role originally performed by the tongue.

Scientists say their research is too short-lived to establish whether the creatures remain in the judges’ mouths all their lives, as only the passage of time will tell.

They remain tight-lipped about how Ceratothoa imbricate crossed species, or when it first jumped from living in the mouths of fish to humans.

However, the general alarm has intensified since South American merchant seamen discovered a metre-long specimen of the parasite loose in a container of Argentinian Malbec.

PHOTO BY GWYNZER