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Food fraud is not limited to our solid consumptions, of course – beverages are just as prone. In this chapter we will look at fraud in wine, juice and alcohol. As with other foodstuffs, we see fraud cases with potentially disastrous health implications – the constituents of antifreeze added to sweeten wine, for example. But there are others that hurt only the wallet. Of this latter kind, there is no other area of the food and beverage industry more prone than the wine industry. It is ripe with economic adulteration and this is where we must begin this story.
While some of the stories of food fraud thus far – dung powder in coriander and milk made of urea – may have induced feelings of nausea, stories of fraud from the wine industry may turn your stomach for an entirely different reason. The affluence associated with the high-end wine market is baffling, with rare collections worth millions of pounds, single bottles worth tens of thousands. The amount of money some people are able and willing to spend on some fermented grapes is simply astounding. And of course, where there is such money to be spent, there is also an incentive to rip people off – even if it is done with a sophisticated flair. Some of the stories of adulteration from the fine wine market are worthy of CSI or Sherlock in their complexity. People who will pay £11,000 (US$16,800) for a good vintage of Romanée-Conti are likely to have a reasonably robust knowledge of the product, or at least to be able to afford the services of someone who does. The criminals who try to swindle these connoisseurs must be equally knowledgeable about wine if they wish to avoid being caught and they must also move in the right circles in order to move their product. There are resources on both sides, which from our perspective makes for a captivating story.
The best example of these, which is perhaps better known in the US, despite it spanning both sides of the Atlantic, is that of the Jefferson bottles. We shall not go into enormous detail as the story has been told before in articles in the New Yorker, the Independent and elsewhere. There’s even an entire book dedicated to the controversy entitled The Billionaire’s Vinegar, which was later at the centre of a libel suit. We offer an abridged version here.
A prominent German wine collector, Hardy Rodenstock (legal name Meinhard Görke), claims that in the spring of 1985 he was told about a dozen or so very old bottles of wine that had been uncovered when a wall was taken down in a house in Paris. The bottles were engraved with the initials Th. J. and were all eighteenth-century vintage. Rodenstock acquired the bottles.
Later that year, Rodenstock approached the famous auction house Christie’s about selling one of these bottles. The bottle was made of handblown dark green glass and it had no label, but it had 1787 Lafitte (now spelled Lafite) and the Th. J. initials etched into the glass. It was sealed with a thick black wax. Rodenstock claimed that the circumstantial evidence suggested this was a bottle from the personal collection of Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States.
The experts at Christie’s set about authenticating the claim. Glass experts confirmed that the glass and engravings were consistent with late eighteenth-century French style. Historical documents placed Thomas Jefferson in Paris between 1784 and 1789. He had even stayed in Bordeaux in May 1787, visiting many of the wine-producing Châteaux, including Château Lafitte.1 A letter from 1790, after Jefferson returned to the US, asked that the shipments of Bordeaux wine that he continued to order for himself and President George Washington be marked with his initials. The circumstantial evidence was positive. Michael Broadbent, who was head of Christie’s wine department at the time, sampled two other bottles from the same collection and found them to be authentic based on his extensive knowledge of wine. Christie’s sold the bottle in December 1985 to Christopher Forbes, son of Malcolm Forbes and Vice-Chairman of Forbes Magazine, for £105,000 (roughly US$156,000 at the time). It was the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold.
As well as the bottle purchased by Forbes and the two sampled by Broadbent, another bottle from the Jefferson collection was purchased by a Middle Eastern businessman. Marvin Shanken, publisher of Wine Spectator, purchased a half-bottle of 1784 Château Margaux for a bargain £19,600 (US$30,000). A New York wine merchant had a bottle of 1787 Château Margaux from the collection, which he took to dinner to show off to his friends. A waiter inadvertently knocked the bottle over and the insurance subsequently paid out US$225,000 (£147,300). A German collector named Hans-Peter Frericks also had a bottle of Lafitte he had purchased directly from Rodenstock. US businessman Bill Koch spent half a million dollars on four bottles from the collection: a 1787 Brane-Mouton, a 1784 Brane-Mouton, a 1784 Lafitte and a 1787 Lafitte. That’s eleven bottles and seven of them had a combined value of nearly £600,000 (nearly US$1 million).
Frericks became suspicious of his bottle of Lafitte when Sotheby’s declined to sell it owing to its uncertain provenance. He sent it to a Munich lab, which examined the contents using radiocarbon dating methods. They looked at the relative proportions of the radioactive isotope 14C in the wine. Radioactive carbon in the atmosphere (in the form of radioactive CO2) is taken up by plants as they photosynthesise. In the case of wine, when the grapes are picked, they stop acquiring new carbon from the atmosphere and the 14C they have incorporated into their tissues starts to decay. The known rate of decay can then be used to date the sample. Atmospheric nuclear testing, which started in 1945 and continued until the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, created several tonnes of 14C creating a spike in levels around 1965. The Munich lab concluded that the results of the radiocarbon dating suggested that Frericks’ bottle of Lafitte was consistent with organic material from the 1960s or later (meaning the wine had higher levels of 14C than one would expect if it was 200 years old). Frericks sued Rodenstock for selling adulterated wine and won. Rodenstock had another bottle from the collection radiocarbon dated by a Swiss scientist, which showed no similarly high 14C levels. Rodenstock sued Frericks for defamation. They settled out of court.
Bill Koch also began to suspect the authenticity of his half-million-dollar investment in 2005. In preparing to include the bottles as part of an exhibition, Koch’s staff couldn’t verify their provenance. A curator with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello could find no evidence that the bottles ever belonged to Jefferson – no letters or orders within Jefferson’s meticulously kept paperwork. Koch, with immense resources at his disposal (Forbes estimates his net worth at US$4 billion), began investigating and hired a retired FBI agent, Jim Elroy.
Their investigation revealed titbits of information from Rodenstock’s past that brought his character into question. On top of this, Rodenstock had suspiciously good fortune in acquiring incredibly rare wines wherever he travelled.
Elroy took Koch’s bottles to French physicist Philippe Hubert, who was using low-level gamma rays to help date wine without having to open the bottle. Much like the radiocarbon dating, the method took advantage of changes in the post-nuclear atmosphere. Prior to the explosion of the first atomic bomb in 1945 there was no radiocaesium (137Cs) in the atmosphere. It’s a product of nuclear fission. As with the carbon, the grape vines would take up this element and incorporate it into their tissues, including the grapes. Any wine produced since 1945 will have 137Cs readings while anything produced before then won’t. Koch’s bottles came back negative. They were at least as old as 1945.
Elroy then brought in the expertise of a retired FBI tool expert and an expert glass engraver to take a closer look at the engravings on the bottle. A journalist had already brought up the fact that Thomas Jefferson tended to use a colon to separate his initials rather than a full point – Th: J. Perhaps the engraving could be the smoking gun. The two experts concluded that the engravings were too uniform to have been made with the technology of the time, a copper wheel operated by a foot pedal. There should be variations in the thickness of the lines, but there wasn’t. It was enough for Koch to pursue a civil complaint against Rodenstock. Rodenstock was in Germany and claimed that the US court had no jurisdiction over him there and therefore refused to participate in the case. Koch won a default judgement against Rodenstock in May 2010 for over US$600,000 (£392,000) in damages. Koch later filed a lawsuit against Christie’s, but this was thrown out of court as the judge stated that Koch had waited too long to take legal action after he suspected the wine was counterfeit.
Koch continues his crusade against wine swindlers. He has brought experts in to look at his extensive wine cellar and estimates that he has between 400 and 500 fakes among his 12,000-plus bottle collection. In 2013, Koch was awarded damages in a lawsuit he filed in 2007 against one-time billionaire Eric Greenberg. He accused Greenberg of knowingly selling him counterfeit wine – 24 bottles of rare vintage Bordeaux worth US$300,000 (£195,000) – through Zachys auction house in 2005. He was initially awarded US$12.4 million (£8 million) in damages; however, a federal judge later reduced this to just under US$1 million (£650,000). The judge took into account that Koch had already been compensated in a separate case against Zachys and therefore reduced the compensatory damages. And then the judge also reduced the punitive damages from US$12 million (£7.6 million) to US$711,622 (£454,000), stating (and we paraphrase) that this was an overcompensation considering that these actions really only hurt the wallets of billionaires.
Koch also pursued a lawsuit and testified against Rudy Kurniawan, an Indonesian national who was a high-roller in California and a well-known wine aficionado. Kurniawan sold rare vintage wines, except they were actually blends concocted in his kitchen. He used old bottles and mixed old vintages with new to create very believable full-bodied mixtures that he corked, sealed and labelled as authentic. He did this for eight years before his arrest in 2012. The start of his downfall was in 2007 when he tried to sell three magnums of 1982 Château Le Pin through Christie’s auction house, but the Château contacted Christie’s to say they were fakes. That same year it was discovered that the eight magnums of 1947 Château Lafleur that Kurniawan had sold at auction in 2006 must have been fake as only five magnums of Lafleur were made that year. Then, in 2008, he tried to sell several bottles labelled as Clos Saint-Denis Grand Cru, made by Domaine Ponsot of various vintages between 1945 and 1971. The head of Domaine Ponsot, contacted the auction house to say the Domaine had not made any Clos Saint-Denis prior to 1982. Koch had found that a number of his fake bottles originated from Kurniawan and filed a lawsuit against him in 2009. After an investigation by the FBI Kurniawan was arrested. Even after his trial it remains unclear just how many bottles he sold, turning $100 bottles into $1,000 bottles in his kitchen. Many of his rich and famous customers didn’t come forward for the trial, perhaps because they were embarrassed. In 2014, Kurniawan was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay over US$48 million (£31.4 million), of which US$28.4 million (£18.3 million) was to compensate his fraud victims (Koch will get $3 million). Kurniawan, once famous for his love of expensive wines, extravagant dinners and jet-setting ways, is now known as the first person ever jailed for selling fake wine in the US.
Koch filed a lawsuit worth millions against New York wine retailer Acker Merrall & Condit for selling him over 200 bottles of counterfeit wine over two years, for which he paid over US$2 million (£1.3 million). The settlement terms were never disclosed other than to say the figure was ‘substantial’.
There is a lot of money in the fine and rare wine market. It is low volume (comparably), but there are premium prices. Greenberg, unlike Kurniawan and Rodenstock, was not mixing his own wines; he still made about US$40 million (£26 million) selling wine that was not authentic, though he insists that he wasn’t aware of its dubious nature. Estimates of Kurniawan’s income from his kitchen mixings range between US$20 million and US$75 million (£11.9 million and £49 million), though he is reportedly poor now. It’s unknown how much Rodenstock made on the business.
The string of scandals in the 2000s damaged the fine wine market. Investors no longer trusted what they were buying. Billionaires were feeling burned. Koch was filing lawsuits rather than adding to his wine cellar; he estimates that he has paid out about US$25 million (£16 million) in legal fees. There is money to be made and money to be lost. As of 2015, the market is beginning to recover again.
In all the articles on Rodenstock and Kurniawan, there are stories of grandiose parties and extreme generosity on the part of these hosts. Those who knew them marvelled at their knowledge of wine and sophisticated palates. These men are master mixers, capable of creating a superior product. The contents of the bottle might not have been what the label said, but nobody could deny it was an outstanding wine. Put into the broader context of food fraud where babies are dying in China from melamine in milk, and toxic chemicals are being intentionally added to spices, this really is a case of deceiving the privileged. If only such resources were available to investigate and stop more detrimental forms of food fraud.
Corking copies and salvaging failures
Before we discuss the ways wine has been adulterated through the ages and how we might go about detecting those adulterations, let’s just go back to the basics of how wine is made. It’s part of understanding the product and therefore asking the right questions when it comes to seeking out the fakes.
There are over 10,000 different grape varieties, which are mostly cultivars of the species Vitis vinifera plus a few from Vitis labrusca. A varietal is a wine that has been made predominantly from a single grape variety – Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Gris, for example. To further complicate matters, there are also clones of many of these grape varieties. The vines accumulate mutations over time, some of which may lead to production of a superior grape or some other desirable trait. This trait may be propagated by taking a cutting of this vine – a clone of the parent – which carries the same DNA and therefore the same mutation. Chardonnay, for example, has at least 34 clonal varieties. For clarification, if a hardwood cutting is taken from a grape vine and grown, it is a clone or clonal variety. If a seed is taken from that same plant, however, and grown, the new vine would be a new variety as it would be genetically different from that plant having had genetic input from a second parent.
So, we start with a grape variety. The fruits of this variety will have slight variations in taste depending on the soil and the unique environmental conditions experienced each season. Once the juice is squeezed from the grapes, it’s fermented with the skins or without. The wine is then aged in oak barrels or stainless-steel tanks. These barrels will be made from different oak species depending on the country. The barrels are also toasted – a contained fire is quite literally dropped into the centre of the barrel – which will impart different flavours into the oak. These flavours, such as smoke, spice, vanilla, tobacco and cigar box, will then be passed on to the wine. The wine-makers will request different levels of toasting (light, medium or heavy), depending on the wine being produced. The first fermentation of wine is to convert the sugars to alcohol. Many wines (most reds and some whites) will have a second fermentation, which converts aggressive tart-tasting malic acid into softer creamier-tasting lactic acid. Some wines even undergo a third fermentation. Sparkling wines, for example, undergo a third (and sometimes fourth) fermentation between sugar and yeast to give them their sparkling quality.
In the end, we have a product that is highly variable – from the grapes it is squeezed from, to all the aromatic and flavour compounds that infuse themselves into this liquid along the way. Depending on the origins of this liquid and how it is treated, it may sell for less than £5 (US$7.75) per bottle, up to more than £10,000 (US$15,500) per bottle. This enormous price differential provides an economic incentive for fraud, and the variation in the product can motivate problem-solvers to bend the rules, as you might say. Wine-making is a skilled art form and while some processes always need to happen, it is the artistic tweaks that will lead either to masterpiece or to failure (and a whole lot of high-volume commercial art in between). When nature and human influences work together to create wine and one or the other falls short of the task, there may be a temptation to try and salvage it. And it is this that has motivated many adulterations.
We have learned quite a bit in the 9,000 or so years we have been fermenting grapes, and we know that adulteration to repair less-than-adequate wine was common practice among ancient wine-makers. In Africa, wine would be softened with gypsum or lime. Greeks would add potter’s earth, marble dust, salt or sea-water to liven up wine. In the Mediterranean, where it was difficult to keep wines (though it is unclear whether this was due to the climate or simply to a propensity for overindulgence), resin was used to coat the inside of its earthenware containers and was also added to the wine itself to help preserve it. This method is still practised in the form of retsina, the Greek resinated wine. However, these are all arguably just useful additives – creative licence, at worst. There wasn’t necessarily any malicious intent or economic objective behind any of them.
Romans added lead to preserve and sweeten sour wine. Lead is sweet (please don’t go around finding samples to lick), but it is also a poison. But the Romans didn’t know this. It would have simply accumulated in their tissues over time. First it caused abdominal pain and constipation, then their joints and muscles would have begun to ache. They would have a hard time concentrating and would suffer headaches and memory loss. They would lose feeling in their extremities, be unable to speak, lose the ability to procreate and, eventually, die. We didn’t really figure out the dangers of lead until the end of the seventeenth century, when lead was still being added to wine. Even after this, lead continued to be used. In eighteenth-century France, tax inspectors became suspicious when they saw the volumes of spoiled wine being brought into Paris. It was legally used to make vinegar, but the volumes coming in did not match the volumes of vinegar going out. Wine merchants were registering as vinegar merchants to bring in the spoiled wine and they were adding litharge (a mineral form of lead oxide) and selling it as proper wine. Addition of a known poison for profit – malicious intent and economic fraud.
The devastation of vines in France during the late nineteenth century by the aphid Phylloxera was an example of nature falling short in the wine-making process. With almost 2.5 million hectares of vineyards in France destroyed, wiped-out dishonest wine-makers got creative. No doubt even the honest wine-makers were forced onto the path of dishonesty in desperation. Greek raisins were brought in to make raisin wine, though it was not labelled as such. Second, third and fourth pressings of grapes would be made into watery wine and the dye fuchsine, which contains arsenic, would be added to improve its colour. Whether nature was at fault or it was human error, the end result was substandard wine that needed ‘fixing’. Stating this on the label would no doubt have turned consumers off. And so adulteration continued, despite numerous laws through the centuries to try and prevent it.
A series of events in the early twentieth century helped restore respect and trust in the wine-making industry. Contributions from scientists such as Louis Pasteur helped to make the art of wine-making more reliable, so there was less need to add ingredients to counter the frequent mishaps. The Appellation Contrôlée system, introduced officially in 1935 in France, helped restrict geographical fraud – only wines from Bordeaux could be labelled as such – but the system also set strict rules for other aspects of wine-making. Furthermore, consumers’ palates became more sophisticated and they were less prone to being swindled.
Yet, as we have seen, scandals still happen, and they happen across all wine markets. We have already shared stories of fraud from the fine and rare wine market, concerning wines largely sold at auction houses and through dealers. Prices within this market can be very volatile. At a UK government chemists’ conference in 2014, Geoff Taylor, a wine expert with Campden BRI, which provides scientific and technical services to the food and beverage industry, explained this volatility with some hypothetical prices. A 1982 Château Lafite – one of the top five wines in the world – may sell for £19,000 a case (US$29,500); Château Lafite bottled the following year may sell for £3,000 a case (US$4,600). What incentive to change a 3 into a 2! A search on the online database Wine-Searcher for one of the most famous wines in the world, 1990 Romanée-Conti Grand Cru, shows an average price of just over £13,000 per bottle (US$20,000). A bottle of Échezeaux Grand Cru, which is a product of the same wine estate (domaine), is listed at an average price of just under £900 per bottle (US$1,400). From an analytical viewpoint, these two wines are very similar, yet they fetch very different prices.
There can also be fraud in the mass volume market. These are the bottles that those of us without billions tend to buy that lie in the £5 to £20 (US$7 to US$31) price arena. These are primarily varietal wines. The price differential isn’t as great compared with fine wines, but it makes up for it with volume. An Australian red blend, for example, sells for £3.50 (US$5.40) a bottle in the supermarket. Label that as an Australian Shiraz and it is worth double that. There is still money to be made.
At the low-price end of the mass market there are deals we’ve all seen that seem too good to be true, often in off-licences and corner stores. Three bottles for £10 (US$15)? In 2011 and 2012, wine labelled as Jacob’s Creek was being sold at independent off-licences around the UK for as little as £2 (US$3.12). A close look at the back label on the bottle, however, revealed a fatal flaw. It stated that the product was ‘Wine of Austrlia’. Ah, the power of typos! Some of the cheap products at these ridiculous prices might not even be wine. They have a low alcohol content and therefore aren’t subjected to the same duties. Geoff Taylor from Campden BRI refers to these as aromatised wine products.
Beyond label swapping, there are modern-day scandals with potentially more deleterious effects. In 1985 some Austrian wineries were adding diethylene glycol (a component of antifreeze) to sweeten wine so that it would seem to be the product of late harvest grapes. As with many wines, this wine was exported in bulk and bottled in other countries – largely Germany in this case. To layer one fraud upon another, the German bottlers then illegally mixed the Austrian wine in with German wine so that diethylene glycol ended up in bottles labelled as German wine as well as Austrian wine. Routine standards testing of the German wine revealed the adulteration. Charges and fines were laid in both Germany and Austria and the Austrian wine industry took a severe hit, with many countries banning imports and sales of Austrian wine. The levels of diethylene glycol found in the wine were low, so dozens of bottles of wine would have had to have been consumed to have triggered any symptoms.
The following year (1986), Italy found itself embroiled in a wine scandal. In mid-March people in northeastern Italy began to fall ill. By early April, 17 people had died and 60 had been hospitalised. The cause was wine laced with methyl alcohol, which is also known as methanol and is used largely in the synthesis of other chemicals, including antifreeze, fuel and solvents. It’s found naturally in wine in low concentrations, but four large Italian wine producers had added it to boost the alcohol content of some inadequate wines. Testing revealed concentrations 10 times the legally permitted limits. This wine had then been sold on to be bottled for supermarkets. The fraud was revealed when three men who had been drinking large quantities of the same brand of wine died. By the end of the scandal, 24 people had died and Italy’s wine export market had plunged. The only silver lining in such incidents is that they prompt countries to tighten their rules and regulations, which Italy did, as did Germany and Austria.
A holistic approach to wine crime
So how do we find the fakes? The short answer is that it is complicated. It requires a very holistic approach, where product knowledge is essential – far more so than with any other food or beverage.
In terms of scientific analyses, there are sophisticated tests that can be used to look at the volatile compounds, aroma components, minerals and trace elements in the wine. However, many of these can be challenged in a fraud case because so much can be introduced to a wine in its normal (and legitimate) evolution, while other markers can disappear with time as the wine continues to evolve.
Analysis of the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen stable isotope ratios from the water and ethanol in the wine can be used to characterise the year of production of a legally defined wine region (appellation) as they are heavily influenced by climate. Combine this stable isotopic analysis with a measure of the trace elements in the wine and it becomes possible to trace the wine back to the soil from a particular slope in a sub-region of Burgundy. This type of analysis is critical to ensuring that the strict laws and regulations governing appellations are being followed.
As yet, there is no varietal test for wine, no dipstick that can be plunged into the bottle that confirms it is made with Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. Many attempts have been made. Scientists have tried to salvage residual DNA and use markers to identify the different cultivars, with little success. There has been considerable work in Australia to look at the feasibility of using visible near-infrared spectroscopy (discussed in the last chapter) for authenticity testing. They are trying to establish signatures that distinguish Spanish Tempranillo from Australian Tempranillo,2 for example, or that discriminate between Australian Chardonnay and Australian Riesling.3 However, there is limited wider application of these tests at this point as the studies have focused on specific wines from specific areas.
Sensory testing – as we described in the section on olive oil in Chapter 3 – remains one of the more reliable methods of testing wine. Such testing is generally used in quality control when identifying defects in the wine, such as mustiness that is attributed to the presence of trichloro-anisole (TCA). Sensory testing would be unlikely to stand up in court in an authenticity trial, however.
The big problem with all of these tests? You need to open the wine. As you can imagine, this is not ideal for someone trying to authenticate a rare vintage they’ve just paid a small fortune for. It is for this reason, probably more than any other, that most suspicions of fraud have been raised on everything BUT the actual contents of the bottle.
Sometimes, it’s a matter of numbers that simply don’t add up. The amount of soured wine into Paris versus the amount of vinegar out. The number of magnums of 1947 Château Lafleur produced versus the number sold. In 2000, an Italian distributor of Sassicaia – a prized Italian wine worth over £130 (US$201) a bottle – became suspicious when he noticed a plethora of 1994 and 1995 vintages out on the market. The Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s fraud squad, which deals with all types of fraud, stepped in and investigated. They traced the fakes back to Neapolitan counterfeiters in Tuscany with a known history of fraud. The labels on the real bottles were embossed and had more intense colours than the fakes. The Italian police confiscated 16,000 bottles of fake Sassicaia and arrested two people in connection with the counterfeiting scam.
Taylor (from Campden BRI) has been called in on a number of suspected fraud cases. He uses chemical analyses in his work, but he also advocates the need for product knowledge and watchful eyes. He shared a case study with the audience at the government chemists’ conference:
This was for a famous champagne house as they were concerned that some of their products were being copied. Fortunately, this house produced wines in a certain style. Champagne undergoes a primary fermentation that creates a base wine, this base wine is then bottled with sugar and yeast and undergoes a secondary fermentation in bottle. Some champagne houses modify their base wine by putting it through malolactic fermentation [to make it taste softer and creamier]. However, this particular champagne house does not put any of their product through malolactic fermentation. This is where product knowledge is essential. This knowledge allowed us to specifically look for lactic acid as an indicator that this was not their product. This was one bullet. The second [bullet] was that champagne is bottled with very good corks and closures. Typically, it would be a natural cork with two to three rondels [cork disks] in contact with the surface of the liquid. These rondels are some of the purest grade cork you can get. This champagne house always seals with two to three rondels depending on the quality of the champagne. The closure in the suspicious bottle used an agglomerate cork [the cork equivalent of chip or particle board] and only one rondel. We used a combination of analytical chemistry and observation.
In another case, Taylor used the presence of the reverse epsilon (э) among the markings in the glass of the wine bottle to show the bottle was a fake. The reverse epsilon only started being used on bottles in the 1980s, yet the bottle was supposedly of an early twentieth-century vintage. The glass itself was also flawless, which is uncharacteristic of glass from this period.
Some wines are not allowed to be bulk exported and this can be a clue that there’s been some deception. Rioja, for example, has to be bottled in Spain, so you should never find a bottle that has any markers that indicate it has been imported and bottled by a coded company starting with W as that would indicate a UK bottler. Finding wine fraud truly is a matter of holistic super-sleuthing.
On the whole, however, the wine industry is very highly regulated with laws specifically designed to combat fraud. Vintners take great pride in their products and they want to protect their reputation. As consumers, we can only arm ourselves with knowledge. The first principle is that you generally get what you pay for. Be suspicious of bottles under £5 (US$8). If they are indeed wine, they may not cause you great harm, but it is likely to be an assault on your palate. If you are lucky enough to be in the fine and rare wine market, then it is an investment and as such it is worthy of some research. If you don’t have the knowledge, spend a little more to bring in someone who does. For everyone else, read the label, look for typos and other suspicious details and, most importantly, when you find something you like ... buy a case!
Figure 8.1. Sleuthing suspicious wine requires a holistic approach, often in lieu of chemical analyses.
The juice market in the US is worth an estimated US$33 billion (£21 billion) per year. Every few years there seems to be another juice craze hitting the media, boasting the antioxidant powers of this juice or the vitamin boost of that juice. It is such big business, there are entire stores dedicated to the sale of only juices. Visit one of these places and the vibe is of health. There are energetic, fresh faces serving behind the counter. There’s upbeat music playing, though it is largely drowned out by the whirr of blenders and juicers. The walls are colourfully decorated with images of exotic fruits from around the world. Fresh fruit and vegetables tumble across the work benches. The token square of wheatgrass on the counter screams to customers that their day will be better once they’ve had the perfect blend of açai, strawberries, raspberries, bananas and yogurt with a ginseng boost, a double shot of wheatgrass and a sprinkling of chia. Unable to afford the luxuries of such high-end blends, many consumers buy juices from their supermarkets as a healthier choice to soft drinks. Yet media reports over the last few years suggest juice may not be as healthy as we like to think and it is certainly one of the most adulterated foodstuffs on the market.
However, before we get into the nitty-gritty of juice adulteration, we must first acquaint you with some juice jargon. When we began researching this section, we got bogged down in the different terminology used to describe juice. So, here is the crash course on the most useful terms, as defined by the FAO:
100% fruit juice |
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it’s all juice and it’s not from concentrate. |
Fresh squeezed |
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it’s not pasteurised and will be found in the refrigerated section of the supermarket. |
Juice concentrate |
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the water has been removed from the juice. This makes it more economical to transport and store. |
Not from concentrate |
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single strength juice (it hasn’t been concentrated) and it is usually pasteurised. |
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juice that’s been reconstituted from concentrate and then pasteurised. |
|
Juice blend |
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a mixture of pure juices. |
Puree |
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contains pulp and is more viscous than juice. |
Nectar |
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it is 25 to 50 per cent juice with added water, sugar and acid. |
Juice drinks |
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it contains 10 to 20 per cent juice (but standards differ by country). |
Let’s consider the most popular of the juices: the modest orange. The US alone squeezes around 30 billion oranges annually for their vitamin C-rich juices and it accounts for over half of all juice consumption. Its popularity alone makes it a target for fraud. The most common adulterants of orange juice are water, sugar, pulp wash (which is, as the name suggest, a water wash of the previously pressed pulp to try and squeeze out any remaining juice), and less expensive juices. These are, for the most part, rather innocuous adulterants compared with some we’ve shared within the pages of this book.
The addition of water, particularly when reconstituting juices from concentrate, is a straightforward and easy method of making juice stretch a little further. However, it is also an easy adulterant to detect. The brix measurement, taken with a refractometer, gives an approximation of the total sugar content; 1°brix is equivalent to 1g of sucrose in 100g of solution. Simply adding water can reduce the brix measurement of the juice and the Codex Alimentarius gives strict guidance on acceptable brix values for every type of juice on the market. This forces the fraudsters to add a second adulterant, sugar.
This is where things become somewhat less innocuous. First of all, the fruit we consume has been bred into unnaturally sweet proportions. We have selected species bearing the sweetest fruits because they taste best. Then, over centuries, we have cultivated the plants within that species that have the sweetest product. The result is fruit with a higher sugar content than what might be harvested from the wild. The higher sugar content in fruit has been noticed by zookeepers who have fed their animals, mostly primates, human-grade fruit on a daily basis. The animals were experiencing anxious and unsettled behaviour – pacing, inability to concentrate, aggression. Does this sound familiar to any primary school teachers? When they cut the quantity of fruit back and served them vegetables instead, the animals settled right down. They have attributed this to the higher sugar content in the fruits we humans like to eat. Juices take these already sweet fruits and concentrate the sugars by removing the pulp and fibre. Add to this the fraudster who is trying to mask some added water by adding more sugar to the juice, and suddenly this doesn’t seem like a very healthy product. A 250ml (8.4fl oz) serving of pomegranate, blueberry and açai smoothie can contain the equivalent amount of sugar of a 330ml (11fl oz) can of Coke.
Any sugar can be added to hide water adulteration and many have been tried, including cane, corn and beet sugar. HFCS, which we introduced in Chapter 2 with respect to honey, is another cheap sweetener that’s being added to juice (as well as many other foods). HFCS is cheaper than cane sugar, contains the same amount of calories, yet is processed differently by the body. Research to date has indicated that even after just two weeks of eating food with HFCS daily, risk factors associated with heart disease are increased and there may also be evidence of increased risk of diabetes and liver damage. Luckily, both sugar cane and corn are C4 plants and so stable isotope analysis, as we’ve described previously, can be used to distinguish whether these sugars have been added to the juice. This has made beet sugar (a C3 plant) the first-choice adulterant when it comes to juice.
To detect beet sugar in orange juice, stable isotope signatures are still useful, but instead of looking at carbon, analysts look at the isotope ratios of hydrogen and oxygen. The heavier isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen are found in higher proportions in the groundwater of warm citrus-producing regions compared with the groundwater of colder regions where sugar beets are grown; it’s back to the concept of isoscapes. Researchers from the Universities of Miami and California examined sucrose isolated from oranges and compared it with sucrose isolated from beets. They could easily distinguish the two sources of sucrose based on their isotope ratios.4 In fact, because oranges are reasonably restricted as to where they can grow, the isotope signatures were very consistent between all of the samples of orange juice examined. The researchers could predict with 99.99 per cent confidence that the isotope ratios for sucrose extracted from orange juice would fall within a particular range. The isotope ratios for beets are a little more variable, and this is because the geographical range where they can be grown is somewhat greater – beets grown in colder regions are depleted in heavier isotopes, whereas beets grown in warmer regions are less so. This means sugar from beets grown in colder regions will be more easily detected in orange juice than sugar from warm-weather beets. So in a strange turn of events, the fraudsters might need to verify the origins of their beet sugar supply chain in order to reduce their chances of being caught. Hopefully we have not just armed the fraudsters with information they didn’t already have!
As well as being adulterated with water and sugar, cheaper juices can be added to make more expensive juices stretch further; in the case of orange juice, this is often grapefruit juice. As luck would have it, these two citrus fruits have different flavonoids (plant pigments). As an aside, the major flavonoid in grapefruit is naringin, which not only gives the fruit its bitter taste, but is also the compound that can interfere with some prescription drugs, usually by increasing or decreasing how the drugs are absorbed in the intestine. Hesperidin is the major flavonoid in oranges. HPLC can be used to separate the compounds and therefore determine whether grapefruit juice has been added to orange. However, another method, which is not new, has recently been applied to juice authentication: front-face fluorescence spectroscopy. In a very simplified explanation, light from a xenon lamp is beamed at a sample of the cloudy fruit juice at incremental wavelengths through a filter. Some of the light is absorbed by the sample (as in other methods of spectroscopy) and this gets the molecules all excited in the juice. When certain molecules get excited by the light radiation they fluoresce (emit light), usually at a lower energy (longer wavelength) than what they’ve absorbed. This light gets scattered in all directions and is measured by a detector that is placed where it will get the least interference from the excitation light beam. The spectra for orange juice and grapefruit juice have different fluorophores (fluorescing compounds), which are probably the flavonoids again. HPLC and other spectroscopy techniques are used to screen various types of juice for the presence of cheaper juices and they all work on the same principle of identifying distinct chemical compounds that are unique to particular groups of plants.
The addition of pulp wash is another common practice. After the first squeeze of juice from the pulp, juice vesicles remain that still contain juice. The separated pulp is washed in a way that recovers about 90 per cent of the juice from these vesicles. This juice is paler and more bitter and for this reason is considered a lower quality product – it isn’t considered to be juice. In the US, the pulp wash can be put back into frozen concentrated juice that is being made from the same oranges, but not any other type of juice. If it’s not put back into the juice as they are making it, the pulp wash can be concentrated and packaged up to be sold as fruit solids or pulp wash, which is a less expensive base for fruit drinks (not to be confused with fruit juices).
Manufacturers are not allowed to add pulp wash that isn’t from the oranges they are squeezing right there and then into any other type of orange juice. But it happens, usually along with the addition of citric acid, sugar, amino acids and even trace metals to try and replicate the chemical profile of pure orange juice. So how do you tell the first-squeeze juice from the really super-squeezed wash? Research has been done to try and find that magic chemical compound that can easily distinguish authentic juice from juice that has had pulp wash added. Dimethylproline (an analogue of the amino acid proline) is potentially a good candidate as it appears more prominently in the chemical signature of pulp wash.5 However, the US FDA has gone one step further, and in Florida all pulp wash has a trace compound introduced into the pulp wash. Much as chicken waste is dyed to make sure it doesn’t re-enter the human food chain, Florida adds small amounts of sodium benzoate (an approved food preservative – E211 in Europe) to pulp wash. The preservative is not allowed in orange juice and can easily be detected using HPLC. If it’s present, it indicates that pulp wash has been added to the juice. Though one may question whether the preservative added to detect the fraud is potentially more harmful than having a little pulp wash in your juice.
There is also considerable mislabelling of fruit juices (and this is where the juice jargon comes in handy). Reconstituted juice (from concentrate) may be labelled as fresh squeezed as it’s generally worth more, for example. Gas chromatography has been used to analyse volatile compounds in juices with some success, as the way each of the juices is treated – pasteurisation for example – will affect these compounds and help differentiate the fresh squeezed from the reconstituted. However, we have mentioned before that there is considerable natural variability of foodstuffs and orange juice is no different. At least 16 different compounds have to be analysed in order to develop a chemical signature for the different types of juices as there is enough variability between all of them that no one compound alone is enough to differentiate them. Even with straightforward tests, such types of fraud, which pose no health risks whatsoever, are not likely ever to be a priority. The best way to avoid this type of fraud is to just eat a piece of fruit, and gain the additional advantage of fibre!
Yet some adulterations of juice are not as risk-free. Many have undeclared additives that could potentially pose a risk to human health. In 2011, sports drinks and juices were in the headlines, as illegal clouding agents were being used by Taiwanese manufacturers of these beverages. Clouding agents are legitimate food additives that help maintain a uniform emulsion of the juice – in other words, they make them appear cloudy. Palm oil and citrus are both natural clouding agents that are commonly used in the food industry. However, in 2011, it was discovered that clouding agent manufacturers in Taiwan had been using the chemical di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) in their products, not only because it was cheaper, but also because it had a preserving effect compared with other clouding agents. DEHP is a plasticiser, which is used to make plastics, such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC), more flexible. According to reports, the plasticisers had been making their way into foodstuffs such as sports drinks, fruit juice, tea drinks, fruit jam or jelly and (ironically) health food supplements for years and had gone unnoticed. DEHP, like several other phthalates, are endocrine disrupters – they adversely affect sex and thyroid hormones, reproductive function and neurodevelopment.
The scandal broke when routine testing by Taiwan’s Food and Drug Administration (TFDA) discovered DEHP in a probiotic supplement, quite by accident. They started to find it in a diversity of other products that didn’t immediately appear to have anything in common. They detected DEHP in 20,880kg (46,000lb) of juice, fruit jam, syrup, fruit powder and yogurt powder, nearly half a million bottles of sports drinks, flavoured juices and artificial tea drinks, and 133,887 boxes of probiotic powders.6 Taiwan’s Department of Health (DOH) started to search for the ingredient common to all these products, and eventually all roads led to a perfumery-chemical company that was a supplier of emulsifiers. By the end of the month, the DOH had identified a second perfumery-chemical company that had been using another phthalate, diisononyl phthalate (DINP), as a clouding agent in its products for over a decade. Together, the two companies had supplied over 119 other companies, which had used the clouding agents in 371 products. The products had been exported to around 22 countries, including Australia, mainland Europe, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Brazil and Japan. Taiwan had a crisis on its hands. The Taiwan government informed the WHO and other international authorities. Within a month the government required that all food products in these categories have a phthalate-free certificate, which was obtained by submitting product samples for analysis at accredited laboratories. No product could be exported without this certificate, nor could it be put on supermarket shelves. The rule was rescinded once it became clear that the plasticisers were no longer being found in food products.
The Taiwan phthalate scandal was compared with the Chinese melamine scandal, but experts have said that the Taiwan government acted more swiftly and more openly than the Chinese government. The Taiwan government sent communications out daily at the height of the scandal. In the wake of the scandal, they imposed stricter penalties for those found adulterating food with potentially harmful chemicals. They also put resources into clinics around the country that people potentially affected by the products could attend for assessment and additional health information. Finally, the government started epidemiological studies to examine those that had been exposed to the phthalates.
For those of us who have squeezed our own juice, we know that within hours after making it, the juice starts to change, even in the fridge. Oxidation starts to turn the juice brown and the flavour starts to change as fermentation begins. It is therefore concerning that leading brands of orange juice sold in the UK, which list freshly squeezed oranges as the only ingredient, manage to look and taste the same even after they’ve been in the fridge for a week. What isn’t being declared on the label? How can these differ so much from the juice we squeeze at home? Something is amiss.
The booze bamboozle
As with wine and oil, spirits have a long history of adulteration. And if the health impacts of the alcohol itself aren’t questionable enough, the substances it has been adulterated with over the years certainly are. Turpentine (a volatile oil used in paints and varnishes), sulphuric acid (a corrosive acid used in processing minerals and manufacturing fertilisers), chloroform (the stuff villains in mystery movies douse a handkerchief with to knock out their victims), isopropyl alcohol and acetone (both solvents) have all been added to spirits for one reason or another with the common motive of making some money.
The most adulterated and counterfeited spirit products appear to be those that are relatively tasteless and clear – vodka and gin, for example. In 2011 and 2012, the UK FSA revealed that they were seeing an increase in the amount of counterfeit alcohol, particularly vodka. In fact, fake alcohol constituted nearly half (45 per cent) of the 170 fraud cases in the FSA food fraud database in 2012. Raids carried out in 2011 in Lincolnshire, England resulted in 88 litres of fake vodka being seized that were made with isopropyl alcohol, which is cheap and causes rapid intoxication. The alcohol was being made in dodgy facilities using unhygienic practices, though this seems like a rather minor point when they are quite literally bottling poison for sale. Symptoms of isopropyl alcohol poisoning include dizziness, low blood pressure, abdominal pain, vomiting and coma, but it can also lead to kidney failure. The symptoms are so acute that the people experiencing them believe that they’ve had a drug slipped into their drink, when in fact it’s the counterfeit alcohol at work.
Unflavoured vodka is composed of ethanol, water and sometimes small amounts of sugar. Counterfeit versions can be quickly identified from their chemical signature as there are always impurities that have been picked up from the tubing or vessels that are being used for its fabrication, which aren’t seen in pure vodka. The counterfeit vodka tends to be in the ‘too good to be true’ price range and with unknown brand labels. Again, you get what you pay for. Even in vodka’s native land of Russia, fakes have been found. Though vodka is already cheap in Russia, many people prefer home-made varieties because they cost even less. In 2005, 25 people were killed by a batch of illegal vodka that contained methanol. The cost savings simply aren’t worth it.
While we have seen that we are vulnerable to fraud even as alert consumers in the supermarket, imagine the potential for swindling the intoxicated fun-seeker. We can clearly make a decision not to buy the cheap bottle of gin, but when we are in a bar, a nightclub or even a restaurant we are introducing another dimension to the supply chain at a time when we are perhaps a little less alert to such manipulations.
Other alcohols that are not as easily replicated in terms of appearance and flavour may be subject to false labelling, particularly premium spirits. A cheap whisky blend, for example, might be poured into an 18-year-old single malt Talisker bottle. Or more likely, a cheaper brand is served in lieu of the more expensive one ordered at a restaurant or bar. Though this is certainly less of a health risk than the counterfeit vodka, it is still a crime. For this type of fraud, flavour and aroma compounds, which are often unique to each distillery, can be used to determine whether the beverage originated from there. The carbon isotope ratios can also be used to differentiate between whiskies as these vary more between the products of different distilleries than they do between production years at the same distillery.
A counterfeit Scotch operation in India was unearthed in 2015. Used bottles of Glenlivet, Glenfiddich, Ballantine’s and other known brands were being bought from scrap dealers and filled with cheap Indian-made whisky. Restaurants and bars are supposed to break the empty bottles of these big brands to prevent this from happening, but some clearly don’t. Some individuals will earn a little extra money by selling empty bottles to scrap dealers. As we’ve mentioned before, such criminal rackets require a certain unspoken cooperation between the parties. Surely the scrap dealers that collect the bottles know what the empties are being used for. Surely the restaurants and bars that buy the bottles from the ‘distributors’ must also be suspicious of a bottle of Glenfiddich that’s selling for half the normal price. Yet nobody says anything because they are all benefiting in some way.
The Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) has stated that millions of litres of this fake stuff is even finding its way back into Europe. Between 2009 and 2014, plans to export approximately 4.5 million litres (just under one million gallons) of fake whisky into Europe were thwarted by the authorities. This is just what was actually found. There aren’t any estimates as to how many fakes actually made it into Europe. In 2013, the SWA began lodging trademark infringements in more than 30 countries; 19 objections were lodged in India alone. It is legitimate producers that suffer as a result of counterfeiting and so they are forced to take action to protect their product. Protecting the authenticity of the name Scotch Whisky is one way to do this. As of 2014, any producers, blenders, bottlers, labellers or bulk importers of Scotch Whisky must apply to HM Revenue and Customs to be verified under the Spirit Drinks Verification Scheme. About a quarter of all UK food and drink exports are Scotch Whisky products – so the UK government has to support the industry by cracking down on the fraudsters.
So sadly not even our beverages are safe from the fraudsters. Whether we are buying rare vintage wines from Christie’s or just pouring a glass of OJ for breakfast, we are vulnerable to bogus beverages. Just as with other foodstuffs, we can take steps as consumers to reduce our susceptibility to such frauds. When it comes to cheap wine and cheap booze, you get what you pay for. Even if they may not technically be counterfeit mixtures of different solvents, they may not be far from it in terms of their taste. Avoid them and familiarise yourself with the symptoms of alcohol poisoning. Last, but not least, eat fruit.