Beat It, Scalemouth

Technically, sharks’ teeth aren’t teeth but highly specialized scales. They grow in rows and are replaced throughout the beast’s life.

Earthquake Wine

Chateau Latour doesn’t have a purple label, it has a white one. A purple-labeled bottle of Latour may have been damaged by the liquid from other bottles broken in the Jan. 17 earthquake. The label may not be what it should be, but the wine inside is probably sound.

A number of wine shops have such bottles. Some sat in a pool of wine for hours and actually lost their labels, or portions of them, and retailers may offer them at special prices.

Wine Warehouse, Los Angeles-based wholesaler, worried about what you’d think if you saw a purple label on Latour, or if you saw a new fresh label pasted over the old soiled one. So it has printed up a series of humorous stickers for wines so damaged.

One of the five stickers, though, may actually tempt some wine shop owners to charge more for stained wine than for unstained. The sticker says “Quake Souvenir.”