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The 1985 diethylene glycol wine scandal was an incident in which several Austrian wineries illegally adulterated their wines using the toxic substance diethylene glycol (a primary ingredient in some brands of antifreeze) to make the wines appear sweeter and more full-bodied in the style of late harvest wines.〔(Sonntagsblitz, July 10, 2005: ''Im Wein war nicht nur Wahrheit'' ) ("In wine was not only truth") 〕 Many of these Austrian wines were exported to Germany, some of them in bulk to be bottled at large-scale German bottling facilities. At these facilities, some Austrian wines were illegally blended into German wines by the importers, resulting in diethylene glycol ending up in some bulk-bottled German wines as well.〔(Zeit Online, 1985: ''Die Tricks der Weinmischer'' ) ("The tricks of the wine mixers") 〕 The scandal was uncovered by German wine laboratories performing quality controls on wines sold in Germany, and immediately made headlines around the world. The affected wines were immediately withdrawn from the market. A number of people involved in the scandal were sentenced to prison or heavy fines in Austria and Germany. The short-term effect of the scandal was a complete collapse of Austrian wine exports and a total loss of reputation of the entire Austrian wine industry, with significant adverse effects on the reputation of German wines as well. The long-term effect was that the Austrian wine industry focused their production on other wine types than previously, primarily dry white wines instead of sweet wines, and increasingly targeted a higher market segment, but it took the Austrian wine industry over a decade to recover. Much stricter wine laws were also enacted by Austria. == Background == At the time of the scandal, Germany was the most important export market for Austrian wine and had been so for a number of years, with an increasing trend.〔〔 The Austrian wines exported to Germany were of a similar style to those produced by Germany itself, meaning semi-sweet and sweet white wines. However, much of these Austrian wines were focused on the low cost segment, and were priced lower than German wines at the corresponding level of sweetness.〔 The traditional sweet wines of Germany and Austria are produced from late harvest grapes, some of them affected by noble rot, and labelled in a hierarchy of Prädikat designations from Kabinett to Trockenbeerenauslese depending on the ripeness of the grapes. Although sweet reserve (blending a wine with its own must) was allowed for the production of semi-sweet wines, no external sources of sugar were allowed for any wines with a Prädikat designation. Thus, the production of wines at higher Prädikat levels tends to vary from year to year depending on vintage conditions, and all wines with higher designations sell at a premium price. As the sweet wines were more favoured at the time of the scandal than they have been in the 1990s and 2000s, and since the Prädikat designations were almost universally recognized throughout the German-speaking countries, a cheap Auslese or Beerenauslese was often identified as a "bargain" by many German consumers. Many of the cheap sweet wines exported from Austria were blends from different grape varieties, and several of them did not carry any varietal designations, in contrast to the more expensive Prädikat wines of Germany, which often were produced from Riesling grapes. Some Austrian exporters had entered into long-term contracts with supermarket chains to supply large quantities of wine at a specified quality level in terms of Prädikat. Apparently these producers ran into problems in some weak vintages, where much of the grape harvest did not reach sufficient ripeness levels. At the levels of ripeness that were reached, the wines would be less sweet, less full-bodied and more acidic. One vintage plagued by these problems in Austria was 1982. It is believed that when this led to insufficient quantities of wine being available to fulfill the contracts, some producers started to search for methods, including illegal ones, to "correct" the wines. By itself, simple sweetening (also illegal) would not necessarily do the job, since it would not sufficiently correct the taste profile of the wine. By using diethylene glycol, it was possible to affect both the impression of sweetness and the body of the wine. German wine chemists have stated that it is unlikely that an individual winemaker of a small winery had sufficient chemical knowledge to devise the scheme, implying that the recipe must have been drawn up by a knowledgeable wine chemist consulting for a large-scale producer.〔(Zeit Online, 1985: ''Zum Wohl: Glykol'' ) ("Cheers: glycol") 〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「1985 diethylene glycol wine scandal」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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