From 1857, a hundred ways to commit wine fraud

This month, Bordeaux wine merchant Vincent Lataste received a prison sentence for wine fraud. Lataste has been accused of mislabeling wine, illegally mixing wine from different producers and regions, adding sulfur dioxide above legal limits, and—perhaps most shocking to wine lovers—watering down his wines.

Watering or otherwise adulterating wine is less common than it used to be, thanks in part to stricter regulations and better detection methods. But wine fraud used to be both rampant and hard to unmask, especially in cheaper wines meant for mass consumption. In that way, Lataste’s crimes are actually a bit of a throwback. Today, we often associate wine fraud with priceless bottles bought by billionaire collectors. However, at various times in history, wine fraud was—and, to some extent, still is—committed against everyday wine drinkers, not billionaires.

In 1857, Dr. Arthur Hill Hassall, a British physician and public health advocate, published Adulterations Detected; Or, Plain Instructions for the Discovery of Frauds in Food and Medicine. This book provided thousands of descriptions of the ways food and drinks were commonly adulterated in England at the time.

According to Hassall, wine was more susceptible to fraud than other products:

There are no manufactured articles subject to greater adulteration than wines, and this on account of the high price they bear, the extent to which they are consumed, and the ease with which many of thein may be imitated, and this in a variety of ways which altogether baffle the efforts of science to detect.

Usually, the purpose of wine fraud was to make it cheaper to produce wine, “fix” the taste or appearance of defective wine, dilute expensive wine with cheap wine or other ingredients, or pass off a cheaper wine as a more expensive one.

Some of the wine adulteration methods of the time included:

• Adding lead to clear up cloudy wine (said to be “common in Paris” and to have caused multiple cases of illness and death)

• Making fake Port, Sherry, and Madeira by mixing together cheap wines—or even “spoiled cider”—with brandy and other ingredients

• Making fake Champagne using cheaper wines (including non-grape wines, such as those made from gooseberries) along with table sugar and other flavorings

• Coloring wine with cochineal, logwood, strawberries, or elderberries

Hassall proceeds to describe a number of chemical tests that aspiring wine fraud investigators could use to detect these adulterations. Try them at your own risk.

The section on wine fraud ends on a pessimistic note. Hassall records that the Excise Office at the time didn’t seem too concerned with what was happening to British wines:

We gather, from the evidence before the Committee on Adulteration, the following particulars in regard to the proceedings of the Excise as to wine:

Mr. Villiers. “How does foreign wine come within your province to examine?” — “I cannot tell; we have had two samples, one in the year 1850, and one in 1852.”

"Are there any tasters appointed for the wine brought into this country?” — “We have none.”

Mr. Moffatt. “The wine is under the Customs, is it not?” — “Yes, and the dealers have to pay a license to us.”

Mr. Villiers. “Are British wines much adulterated?” — “British wines are made up in a variety of ways; we do not interfere with them much.”

So much for the efficiency of the Excise in regard to wine. It appears that two samples were examined in twelve years.

Wine fraud still occasionally pops up in the U.K. and is usually investigated by the Chartered Trading Standards Institute. Earlier this year, officers seized fake bottles of Yellow Tail from a supermarket in Walmley.

Yellow Tail (real, I assume) on a supermarket shelf. Photo by Wikimedia Commons OlldCreN ivbj.

The wines were suspected to have been bought by the shopkeeper “off the back of a lorry” and were reported to have “not taste[d] right,” which, for Yellow Tail, is saying something.

Further reading

Adulterations Detected; Or, Plain Instructions for the Discovery of Frauds in Food and Medicine, Arthur Hill Hassall, 1857 (available for free on Google Books)