The Scandal that changed everything

Weinskandal (wine scandal) is a potent word, much like blitzkrieg or wanderlust. The German language has such a talent for words like this, it even exports them into English. Anyone whose interest in wine isn’t limited to asking where the corkscrew is knows the story of the Austrian wine scandal. It’s a good story, especially because it has a happy ending.

For anyone who doesn’t have the facts to hand right now: in the summer of 1985, anonymous reports revealed that Austrian winemakers, as well as large German bottlers, had laced their wines with diethylene glycol. Added in the form of antifreeze, the chemical made the wines sweeter and more full-bodied, creating the impression that they were particularly valuable late vintages – which were very much in demand on the German market at that time.

The revelations were not without an element of comedy. At the same time as police were receiving anonymous reports, the tax authorities were investigating the case of a tax fiddler who wanted the conspicuous amount of antifreeze he was using to pimp his wines to be made tax deductible.

The consequences were dramatic. Millions of bottles had to be removed from sale. Several winemakers were arrested. The market for Austrian wines collapsed completely. The German Federal Health Ministry advised against drinking wines from Austria. A convicted winemaker committed suicide. In the course of the court proceedings, it became apparent that large-scale German bottlers had also played the glycol card, including some companies in which state ministers held shares.

The good part: in Austria, where the winegrowing industry had been razed to its very foundations, it was decided not to rebuild on the old smoking ruins, but to start from scratch instead. The result was one of the strictest wine laws in the world, a state inspection of every single bottle and the complete reversal of all the established doctrines of the time. Both old and young winemakers – the ones who had not been ruined by the wine scandal – started again, with a clean slate, to make quality wine.

The result is well known: Austria’s winegrowing industry experienced unprecedented growth in the quality sector and today possesses both conventional and organic vineyards of international renown. When I speak with winegrowers in neighbouring lands, such as Switzerland or Italy, time and again I hear the same, rather paradoxical assessment: “Austria has an enormous advantage. With the wine scandal, all the changes that were necessary were made possible overnight.” And, even more paradoxically: “It’s a pity we didn’t have a wine scandal.”

The wine scandal has been given such a thoroughly positive aura over the past decades that the talented wine merchant Moritz Herzog gave his store a new name not so long ago. It’s called – that’s right – Wine Scandal.

Recently, as I was driving back to Vienna from a trip to Piedmont, I recalled the words of a young winemaker I’d met there. He had complained about a colleague in the Langhe region who changed traditional winemaking techniques in the area with the large-scale use of wood and pure yeast cultures (and who had found a willing accomplice in Robert Parker).

As soon as I told him that I came from Austria, he, too, mentioned the cathartic effect of “our” wine scandal, and speculated on the opportunities that such a catharsis would have brought in his region, Piedmont. The correct answer to this thought experiment only occurred to me somewhat later, after I’d made a couple of phone calls. The answer is: nada. Niente. Nothing.

After all, the year 1986, seen as the pivotal year for coming to terms with the scandal in Austria, was not without incident in Italy. On 10 March the public authorities discovered for the first time a dose of methyl alcohol in a bottle of wine that was judged to be “harmful to health”. This was a clear understatement. More than 20 people died from methanol poisoning in the following weeks. 25 million litres of wine were seized and destroyed. 60 wine producers and wholesalers were publicly pilloried: hysterical newspaper reports and television adverts warned against drinking their products.

The large-scale adulteration operation had a complex background. Italy produced 65-80 million hectolitres of wine annually at the time, around 25 per cent of the total wine currently produced per year worldwide. Today, Italian wine production has levelled off at around 40-45 million hectoliters/year. Because of the enormous over-production in the early 1980s, a good part of the wine was unsellable. Less than a quarter had a registered designation of origin (DOC) and was actually worth a decent price. The majority of the rest was ordinary table wine, often sold at highly competitive prices. The cheapest blend wines were good for absolutely nothing. They were converted directly into pure alcohol and sold to industry.

The European Community supported this. It encouraged the production of methyl alcohol or methanol as a chemical raw material and energy source. An enormous methanol storage facility was created. In 1984, methyl alcohol was also exempted from alcohol taxation, therefore becoming extremely cheap.

Bottlers in Piedmont, Emilia Romagna and Apulia, who had earlier appeared on police files for illegally sweetening sour wines, sensed an opportunity. They founded companies for “chemical industrial purposes” and bought thousands of hectolitres of methyl alcohol at bargain prices. They did not need to account for how it was subsequently used, as the tax exemption meant no further financial controls applied.

The plan was sophisticated. The criminal bottlers wanted to fortify especially light, thin wines with a couple of tenths of a per cent of methyl alcohol, so they would pass for mature and storable wines due to the higher alcohol content. However, the people responsible for putting this idea into practice sometimes mixed far too much methanol into the wine, meaning that bottles came into circulation with a methanol content of closer to 30 per cent. This was a toxic dose. Just one small glass of a wine like this, gulped thirstily down, could be fatal.

Methyl alcohol (CH4O), has a strong toxic effect on the human organism. Once it has entered the system, it leads to hyperacidity of the blood, and of the whole body, within six to 30 hours. The symptoms are headaches, vomiting, dizziness and breathlessness. If treatment (usually administration of the antidote, fomepizole) is not started in time, it causes nerve damage, in particular damage to the optic nerve, followed by blindness, and eventually respiratory failure and death.

When reports of the victims of this methanol poisoning became public, consumption of wine sank dramatically. Italy, so in love with wine, drank beer for a whole summer long. Then the authorities began to fight over who was really responsible for the scandal. The Italian customs agency blamed the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Agriculture blamed the producers and the supermarket buyers. Export wines had to be checked for methyl alcohol content in testing centres and provided with a certificate. The testing centres were hopelessly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of wine to analyse. In contrast to Austria, where the roots of the wine scandal were pulled up in a quick and targeted manner, the damage control in Italy was largely merely cosmetic. When the testing centres were too slow in handing out certificates, wine destined for export was simply brought to its destination in opaque, untraceable ways. In Germany, various bottles of Barbera from Asti containing fatal amounts of methanol appeared. They all originated from producer Vincenzo Odore of the comune Incisa Scapaccino. In France and Switzerland, whole tanks of contaminated wine were seized.

When governments in the affected countries published warnings about what they called the Italian wine scandal, the Italian government, public authorities and media finally did something; they closed ranks and created a common front against what they dubbed attacks on Italian wine.

It was a campaign against “honest producers”, postulated the president of the farmers association, Arcangelo Lobianco. The general director of the Association of Wine Producers identified the “manoeuvring of illegal competition”, and even the otherwise serious Corriere della Sera addressed the wine scandal with the headline: “Foreign campaign against Italian wine”. Let’s not forget, 20 people had already died due to this wine.

The Germans, on the other hand, looked in the archives under the keywords “wine scandal, Italy”, and soon found a precedent. In the 1960s, with tourism to Italy going through a boom, Italian wine started to be brought back home as a happy holiday souvenir. Incredible revelations were brought back with it. In the bulky, raffia-wrapped bottles – found in all Italian restaurants around the world for a while – a liquid had been discovered that could barely even be described as a wine-like drink. “Synthetic wine made of sugar and water,” as the news magazine Der Spiegel described it disgustedly at the time, “embellished with ox blood or the plant slime agar-agar. The wine’s fiery sheen is mostly thanks to plaster, a popular addition in the south.”

In response, Italy established French-style legislation governing wine production in 1963. But just five years later 200 wine adulterators were brought to trial. The details that came to light in court surpassed the earlier horror stories. Apparently even tap water and sugar were too expensive for some of the wine forgers, who instead took river water and mixed it with a brew of rotten figs or bananas. They then sent it to Germany as Chianti, Valpolicella or Lambrusco.

“Wine scandal” is a tricky phrase. It describes, as I have learnt from what happened in Italy, not the events that we rightly find scandalous, but their accidental exposure. Besides, the Italian version of the “wine scandal” doesn’t even contain trace elements of a cathartic effect –just maximum cathartic rhetoric, if at all.

What is particularly noticeable is that each wine scandal already contains the seeds of the next. It is fundamentally always about producing wine so cheaply that it can be sold at a very low price but still make a profit. The revolting methods of the 1960s were replaced by the murderous techniques of the 1980s. Each time the responsible parties swore blind that history would never repeat itself – but it did, and it did again 20 years later.

In 2008, the magazine L’Espresso broke the story, right on time for the Vinitaly wine trade fair in Verona, that at least 20 producers of cheap wine (sold at between 70 cents and two euros a litre) had produced “wine” made only partially from grapes. The L’Espresso analysis reported that only a third of the so-called wine consisted of grape must. The rest was water, sugar, fertiliser, chemicals, even “a dash of hydrochloric acid”. Wine producers had once more founded their own chemical companies to discreetly source the chemicals. Does that sound familiar?

Yes – and no. This time, to avoid the adulterated wine being caught by the export authorities, the supply was directed at the domestic market. The large supermarkets bought 70 million litres of the stuff. The producers saw profits increase by up to 90 per cent. “Frankenstein wine!” wailed the la Repubblica, and rightly so.

If we study the anatomy of the Italian wine scandals, it immediately becomes obvious we should avoid consuming the cheapest Italian wines rolling around somewhere on the shelves of discount supermarkets.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite so easy to avoid falling foul of adulterated wine. Because, at the same time as L’Espresso printed their revelations about the cheap end of the market, a number of high-end winemakers in Tuscany were accused of fiddling their interpretation of the DOC rules. The most famous producers of perhaps the most famous Italian wine, Brunello di Montalcino, supposedly hadn’t used exclusively Sangiovese grapes for the 2003 harvest, as required by the regulations. Instead, world famous estates owned by Frescobaldi, Antinori, Argiano and Castello Banfi had production seized due to suspicions they had blended Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grapes with the Tuscan Sangiovese.

This may have been done to increase supply of Brunello, which was trading at record prices. But the principal motivation was to make the wines that had been blended appear sweeter, softer and smoother. The aim was to gain more points on the American market, the largest importer of this wine, where sweet, fruity styles were very much in vogue, thanks to Mr Parker.

The Minister for Agriculture, Paolo de Castro, incidentally, appeared in all seriousness before the press and praised himself. This wine scandal, according to De Castro, demonstrated that “our controls are working”. That it was journalists who had brought the scandal to light was not important. The fourth estate is also part of the state and can be seen as a government authority when necessary, it seems.

Since then, nothing much has happened. It’s gone quiet. There’s a good phrase for that, too. It’s called “the silence of the graveyard”: a silence that’s not at all natural.