Supermarket wine fraud: Yes, it’s a thing, pt. 2
Last time, I wrote about appellation fraud, a form of wine fraud that involves labeling wine from one region with the name of a more prestigious, costly region. Today, I’ll be talking about a different form of fraud targeting budget wine shoppers: adulteration.
Wine adulteration: fraud with a pedigree
Wine adulteration has been around for a while. In the 1st century A.D., Pliny the Elder wrote about the tendency of winemakers to add non-grape ingredients to enhance the flavors of their wine:
[T]he growers of [Gallia Narbonensis] have absolutely established manufactories for the purposes of adulteration, where they give a dark hue to their wines by the agency of smoke; I only wish I could say, too, that they do not employ various herbs and noxious drugs for the same purpose; indeed, these dealers are even known to use aloes for the purpose of heightening the flavour and improving the colour of their wines.
In any time and place wine has been made, adulteration has been practiced with various motives: changing the color or flavor of wine, correcting flaws, altering its alcohol content, disguising one type of wine as another, or simply making more of it.
From 1829’s Wine Adulteration Unmasked, a dramatic illustration of wine and spirit adulteration
Types of adulteration
One of the most common types of adulteration you’ll find in supermarket wines is dilution, which involves adding water to stretch it further. In one recent case in Italy, reported by the Nuclei Antisofisticazione e Sanità (the Italian food safety authority and the subject of what looks to be a fascinating TV drama), a winery was caught adding water, sugar, and aromas to their products. In another case, a winery was found to be in possession of a supply of sugar and ethyl alcohol, no doubt destined for fraudulent wines. The goal of diluting wine is simple: make as much of it as possible without making it obvious to the consumer that you’ve screwed with their wine—hence the alcohol, sugar, and flavorings.
It may come as a surprise that adding water to wine is not always illegal. It’s known as “watering back” and is often euphemistically referred to—at least in California, where it’s frequently practiced—as adding “Jesus units.” This practice is often a result of vintners demanding grapes with extraordinarily high sugar levels from winegrowers, which results in grapes becoming overripe and losing water; to create a balanced wine with a reasonable alcohol content, the vintner must add back water, a practice that California does not prohibit. (The effect of this practice on the style of California wines is a subject for a much grumpier blog post.)
Ann AI art program came up with this water/wine stock image for my article and I honestly think it’s pretty great. However, the posters the AI helped me create for fake movies starring Jennifer Coolidge were a lot better. Licensed under CreativeML Open RAIL-M.
A subtype of dilution is admixture. An easy way to stretch wine without watering it down or adding non-wine ingredients is to mix it with cheaper wine. In 2016, a Napa wine producer was caught blending wine labeled “Cabernet Sauvignon” with greater-than-allowed amounts of cheaper-than-Cabernet grapes. (For context, in California, wines with a varietal label must comprise at least 75% that grape variety.) This producer went as far as to create false records of the origins of the grapes he used.
In a case from 2012, a Bordeaux producer was caught blending low-quality wine from minor appellations into bottles labeled with more prestigious appellations, such as Saint-Emilion, Lalande-de-Pomerol, and Listrac-Medoc. The wine was worth nearly €800,000 and was destined for the shelves of supermarkets, including the french chains Auchan and Intermarché. The case was dubbed vins de lune (“moon wines”) due to the perpetrator’s practice of moving the lesser wines to his cellars under cover of darkness.
This is another image the AI came up with when I asked it to illustrate this post. Prompt is in the filename if you’re interested. Licensed under CreativeML Open RAIL-M.
Admixture is a type of fraud with a long history. Medieval wines were often blended in this way to the ire of local authorities. An entry in the Plea and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London from 1327 describes such cases:
The King is given to understand that vintners and their taverners, selling wine by retail in the City and suburbs, mix weak and corrupt wine with other wine and sell the mixture at the same price as good and pure wine, not allowing their customers to see whether the wine is drawn in measures from casks or otherwise, to the great scandal of the City and in corruption of the bodily health of the purchasers. The Mayor and Sheriffs are ordered to make a proclamation in the City forbidding these practices, and to exact from offenders fines for the King's use.
Another common type of adulteration is flavoring. As we saw above, it can sometimes be used to mask dilution. It’s also commonly used to give wine the characteristics of more expensive wine. In a notorious scandal in 1985, Austrian winemakers were found to have used diethylene glycol—a chemical that can cause brain and kidney damage—to sweeten and add body to their wines. (Austrian wines are graded by sweetness, and sweeter ones fetch higher prices.) In an intriguing twist, the chemical was also found in some West German wines, in the process revealing that they’d been illegally blended with Austrian ones. Flavoring and admixture, all in one scandal!
Consumers are perfectly happy to accept some types of wine additives—like adding alcohol to fortified wines, sweeteners to certain types of wine, or chemicals like stabilizers and fining agents—largely because of tradition, and because no one is lying to us about it. If you drink Port, you expect it to be high in alcohol, and you’re under no delusion that the alcohol level comes from the wine itself rather than additional distilled spirits. And when you pop a bottle of sweet Champagne, you know it’s been sweetened. It only becomes adulteration when the winemaker intentionally conceals what’s actually happening.
Who’s adulterating supermarket wines?
The examples I’m aware of are largely the actions of wine producers. It’s easy to see why. While smaller, individual operations might counterfeit small numbers of high-end bottles, creating fake or adulterated wines on a supermarket-level scale requires the equipment, physical space, and distribution channels that only winemakers typically have available to them. (And unlike medieval taverns, modern restaurants and supermarkets usually sell wine by the bottle, not from barrels, making adulteration a bit more challenging for them.)
While it wouldn’t be impossible for someone further along down the supply chain to adulterate wines, the extra equipment and steps involved mean that the fraud would probably not be economically viable. It would also require additional layers of fraudulent activity; in Europe, for example, creating wines with false appellations would require the fraudster to create forged neck labels. So I’m not expecting to see many, if any, cases of adulterated supermarket wines from non-producer sources in the future.
Next in this series: the exploding market for counterfeit wines in China.
Further reading
Pliny The Elder, The Natural History, Ch. 8 (6): Fifty Kinds of Generous Wines
Calendar of the Plea and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London: Volume 1, 1323-1364
