Alas, France Doesn't Actually Have A Wine-Bottle-Shaped Train

Wouldn't your commute be more pleasant if you could ride to the office in, say, a giant bottle of wine? That's the idea behind a video I found circulating Twitter over the weekend. In an August 28 tweet from one David Zipper, we see what looks like an enormous bottle of wine rocketing through the streets of a French city. Zipper captioned the video, "Meanwhile, in Bordeaux..."

After a cursory investigation, I discovered that the wine train was, in fact, too good to be true. The video is the work of Ian Padgham, who makes viral videos for startups and brands, according to his Twitter bio. Further research revealed that Padgham is a well-known artist behind several other videos of giant food sailing down idyllic French streets. (His pinned tweet shows an enormous baguette terrorizing the town of Verdun, France, and he's created a similar video of a giant french fry tram in Brussels.)

Still, at first glance, the wine bottle train looked all too real—so real that French travel industry TBM even put out a statement explaining the situation, clarifying that, no, "there is no bottle-tram circulating in Bordeaux."

This is, obviously, very sad. I'd love to cruise through the streets of Bordeaux inside a gargantuan bottle of wine. The seats could be little stools made of cork; your ticket to ride could be a single grape. It's an ideal way to travel, and it begs the question: is food-shaped public transit entirely out of the realm of possibility? Speaking strictly as a Chicagoan, we have a few novelty trains circling the city on a seasonal basis, although none of them are shaped like wine bottles or french fries. Is this too much to ask from a city planning perspective? I don't think so. Let's get to work, America.