Wine Fraud - History

History

For as long as wine has been made, wine has been manipulated, adulterated and counterfeited. In ancient Rome, Pliny the Elder complained about the abundance of fraudulent Roman wine which was so great that even the nobility could not be assured that the wine they were pouring on their table was genuine. For the poor and middle class of Rome, local bar establishments seemed to have an unlimited supply of the prestigious Falernian wine for unusually low prices.

During the Middle Ages, wines from questionable origins were often passed off as wines from more prestigious regions. In London, local authorities established laws for tavern owners prohibiting French, Spanish and German wines from being cellared together so as to prevent the potential for mixing the wines or falsely representing them to the consumer. If a producer or merchant was found selling fraudulent or "corrupt wine", they were forced to drink all of it. In medieval Germany, the penalty for selling fraudulent wine ranged from branding to beating to death by hanging.

During the Age of Enlightenment, advancements in science ushered in a new occupation of "wine doctors" who could fashion examples of wines from obscure items and chemicals. Writers like Joseph Addison wrote of this "fraternity of chymical operators (sic)" who would use apples to make Champagne and sloe to make Bordeaux and then sell these wines fraudulently on the market. Following the Phylloxera epidemic, when true wine was scarce, wine fraud rose. Some merchants would take dried raisins grown from other species of grapevines and make wine that they passed off as being from a more prestigious provenance such as the more well known wines from France or Italy.

In the early 19th century, several European writers wrote about the risk and prevalence of wine fraud. In 1820, German chemist Friedrich Accum noted that wine was one of the commodities most at risk for being fraudulently manipulated and misrepresented. In 1833, the British wine writer Cyrus Redding echoed the alarm over the unchecked operations of these "wine doctors". Eventually the concern over wine fraud grew enough that provisions against the adulteration and misrepresentation of wine was included in British Parliament's Adulteration of Food and Drink Act 1860. Several European government also enacted legislation defining what exactly constitutes "wine" so as to distinguish authentic winemaking from the workings of these wine counterfeiters. The French government first legally defined wine as the product of fermented grape juice in 1889, followed by the German government in 1892 (later expanded in 1909) and the Italian government in 1904.

Fraud of a different nature occurred during prohibition in the United States, when wine production was illegal, as grape merchants would sell "bricks" of grape concentrate across the United States along with a packet of dried yeast. The bricks would come with a "warning label" cautioning people not to mix the contents of the brick, yeast, water and sugar in a pot and then seal such pot for seven days, or else "an illegal alcoholic beverage will result".