SCANDAL!

Tim James looks at wine scandals, and how Austria eventually emerged triumphant from one of the worst

Greed is, of course, the motive behind wine adulteration, as of other frauds. It was a little bit of extra greed, touched with stupidity, that prompted the unrolling of a scandal in Austria in 1985 that was to lead to catastrophe and then triumph for its wine industry. Imagine, transposing the situation to the Cape twenty years later, if a sauvignon blanc producer in (for the sake of illustration) Worcester submitted claims to the tax authorities for a refund of VAT payments on large volumes of green peppers.

What happened in Austria was that an alert tax official queried the submission of VAT claims for diethylene glycol – something he had not heard of before, but which seemed an unusual winemaking requirement. That was at the end of 1984. Six months later, the first suspects were arrested, and the authorities impounded some five million litres of wine contaminated by diethylene glycol – a chemical more legimitimately used in making the anti-freeze which keeps motor vehicle radiators working in cold European winters.

 Wine, along with fine art, seems to particularly attract fraudsters. Or perhaps it is just that it is with with particular glee that the media seize on to any exposure of cheating which suggests that, after all, the ‘experts’ in these abstruse fields of connoisseurship do not really know what they are talking about: despite their certainties, see how they get taken in!

In fact, if fraud is more prevalent in the wine trade, it is probably because wine notoriously varies in character and quality according to year and origin, and outwardly announces qualitative difference only through claims made on its behalf. False claims on labels and adulteration of contents are only too easy, even now, with the wealth of controls and regulations at the modern state’s disposal.

In the past, things were simpler still for unscrupulous producers and merchants, and governments repeatedly attempted to stamp their controlling authority. In England in 1660, for example, an Act of Parliament was passed ‘For the better ordering of wine by retail, and for preventing abuses in the mingling, corrupting and vitiating of wines, etc’. Numerous subsequent Acts show the difficulty of the task, and the extent of the problem of fraud and other scandals. So too do titles of books such as Wine and spirit adulterers unmasked (1829), and the earlier Directory in the making and managing of British wines, which gave recipes for such delights as English Claret and suggested remedies to innkeepers and butlers wanting to freshen up wines that had gone off.

In fact, the headline-making power of a revelation about adulteration and fraud in wine nowadays is testimony to the comparative rareness of the practice since, particularly, the establishment of appellation systems in Europe and bodies to monitor and enforce them, such as France’s Service de la Répression des Fraudes.

Gone are the days when heady Algerian wine would routinely be used to beef up a well-reputed burgundy or bordeaux in a weak vintage. Well, not quite gone, in fact, as was made clear yet again a few years back, when merchants in Burgundy were charged with ‘ameliorating’ some older vintages (bearing proud names like Chambolle-Musigny, Corton and Meursault) with humble wines from the Midi and Spain. Similar dark doings have been uncovered more recently in Chianti, and just a few months back vast amounts of pinot grigio ostensibly from Friuli in the north of Italy turned out to be the product of quite another grape, grown in the rather warmer climate of Sicily.

Etc, etc. One of the commoner features of trials of fraudsters is their assertion that yes, perhaps they are guilty, but many others are doing similarly. Scandals have embarrassed both modest and aristocratic regions, particularly in Europe where there are after all so many more rules and regulations to profitably transgress. The grander areas get particularly embarrassed when unscrupulous individuals bring scandal upon it: stakes are higher, and the probing media keener; Bordeaux seems to suffer more than most.

But nowhere, and never, has the fallout of a scandal been as great as in Austria in the mid 1980s.

An experimenting Austrian biochemist in the mid 1970s realised that judiciously adding diethylene glycol to cheap table wines could make them richer and sweeter – particularly desirable in lower-end Germanic wines. The recipe was sold to numerous producers, and, as the ‘anti-freeze’ was not analysable by standard methods, things could have proceeded happily for much longer but for that bit of super-added greed and the alertness of the tax official.

Almost overnight, following the exposure, the Austrian export market collapsed – and locals were not much impressed either. Sales dropped by around 80%. Bankruptcies spread much wider than the companies directly responsible. Germany became increasingly involved – as most Austrian wine was exported there. Interestingly, a number of German wines stocked by the importers of Austrian wines were found to be lightly contaminated – despite some writhing denials, it was clear that the German wines had been illegally blended with Austrian ones!

While the Germans perhaps got off more lightly than they should have for their role, almost scandalous in itself is how the Austrian wine industry was being lynched in the international press while a vastly more serious situation in Italy was treated comparatively gently.

In northwest Italy a producer concocted a wine (which he went on to sell as a cheap Barbera) out of assorted dregs, and a lethal dose of methyl alcohol, or methanol. In that scandalous year of 1985 up to 20 people died as a result, and many went permanently blind. A scandal blew up, certainly, and it took Barbera long to mend its reputation. But perhaps because the Italian wine industry was more internationally significant than the Austrian – or perhaps simply because the Italians often somehow manage to be forgiven much – it was let off fairly lightly by the international trade and bureaucracy.

Unlike Austria. But then the good news. For the Austrian wine industry was, for the most part, an uninspiring one, with few wines rising about the ordinary, but out of its ashes emerged, remarkably quickly, excitement and excellence. In retrospect, the scandal was the best thing that could have happened to Austrian wine. The old networks based on distributing bulk plonk disappeared; many grape-growers became of necessity wine-producers determined to find better ways of doing things; a new generation of ambitious winemakers was pushed forward.

Above all, perhaps, the authorities had been forced to admit the disaster. They learned from it and imposed Europe’s strictest regulations, aiming at integrity and high quality. Austrian wine production remains fairly small – somewhere between Croatia’s and Switzerland’s – but has a high and rising reputation as one of the most dynamic, with at least its grüner veltliners and rieslings offering examples counted amongst the world’s great dry white wines.

There are at least two lessons that might be taken by the South African wine industry as its additives scandal remains unresolved. First, it is worth gritting your teeth to cope with the short-term problems resulting from scandal and seizing the occasion to rid the industry of damaging elements (not the exposers of problems, but the causers of problems). Secondly, if high quality is what is wanted, appropriate and tight regulation (seldom in the interest of the powerful business forces) is vital in an industry prone to fraud.

Viva wine scandals, viva! – at least when they end well.

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Grape and Melvyn Minnaar recently organised a tasting in Cape Town, which showed something of the excellence which Austrian wine can reach. (The tasting was made possible by the the Austrian Trade Commission, and the Austrian Wine Marketing Board.) Although there are now notable Austrian examples from ‘international’ varieties like chardonnay and pinot noir, the two grapes with which it has thoroughly impressed the world in recent years are riesling and the local speciality, grüner veltliner. We tasted single-vineyard examples of these two varieties from five of Austria’s most prestigious producers: Knoll, F X Pichler, Nikolaihof, and Freie Weingärtner Wachau, all from the lovely Wachau region on the banks of the Danube, and Bründlmayr from Kamptal.

Austrian wines are not commercially imported to South Africa, and wines of this quality are rare (and expensive) anywhere; few of the winewriters, retailers, buyers and others present had much experience of the styles of Austrian wine. Most experienced the tasting as a revelation that Austria now produces some of the world’s finest dry white wines.

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A typology of cheating

As synthesised by Dutch wine-writer Frank van der Auwera on www.underthecork.com, and expanded upon here.

Technique 1. WYSINWYG (What You See Is Not What You Get) This is ‘the paper fraud, whereby the appellation or only the vintage year are forged’. Van der Auwera tells a story of the 2000 Port vintage – of high quality, but very small. ‘Result: a few swindling wine producers and gangsters imported grapes from outside the Douro – even from Western Spain – and offered them to large Port houses ... with counterfeited documents. Clearly in the Port appellation only grapes from the region may be processed. The imported grapes cost only a fraction compared to the ... bunches from the rough Douro. Fortunately, fraud teams were able to find out the origin of many truckloads of “illegal grapes” and confiscated a total of about 50 tons’.

Technique 2: TISBIYB (There Is Something Bizarre In Your Bottle) Here ‘the fraud is extended to the level of oenology: the wine is technically manipulated’. The 1985 Austrian and Italian scandals exemplify this, as does the alleged addition of flavourants in South Africa. It is widely suspected that in regions like California (surely not the Cape), water is illegally added to wine made from ultra-ripe grapes, to bring the resulting high alcohol into balance. Mere location can sometimes dictate legality: adding sugar (chaptalisation) is fraudulent in quality German and Austrian wines, and in warm southerly regions – but is unfortunately almost de rigeur in France.

Technique 3: WSYSUABN (We Sell You Shit Under A Beautiful Name) This technique is clearly related to WYSINWYG, but would involve the adulteration or substitution of a wine from a prestigious region or year with lesser wines. Remember when KWV was caught apparently selling Cape bubbly to be passed off as champagne? And there are many stories of tanker-loads from the warm south arriving at wineries in central and northern Italy. Before appellation laws started being introduced in France in the 1930s, the use of Rhône wines in Bordeaux was so common and accepted a practice that it could scarcely be regarded as amounting to fraud.