Wine Fraud - Hazardous Materials

Hazardous Materials

One of the most dangerous forms of wine fraud is when producers use hazardous materials such as lead acetate, diethylene glycol and methanol to wine in order to increase sweetness. Some chemicals may be used to mask other wine faults and unpleasant aroma. Government authorities, such as the European Union and the American Food and Drug Administration, across the globe have set up laws and regulations of acceptable chemicals that can be added to wine in order to avoid some of the scandals that have plagued certain wine producing countries in the 20th century.

In 1985, diethylene glycol appeared to have been added as an adulterant by some Austrian producers of white wines to make them sweeter and upgrade the dry wines to sweet wines; production of sweet wines is expensive and addition of sugar is easy to detect. Fortunately, the amount added was not high enough to be toxic except at impossibly high (for most people) levels of consumption (one would have needed to ingest about 28 bottles per day for approximately two weeks in order to suffer fatal effects). Twenty-three people died in 1986 because a fraudulent winemaker in Italy blended toxic methanol (wood alcohol) into his low-alcohol wine to increase its alcohol content.