When They Drank Methanol in the Lager

The unfortunate affair regarding methanol (methyl alcohol) found in wine is teaching us many sad lessons.1 First of all, our regulations about wine are like a sieve with areas where the mesh is ridiculously tight, and others strewn with huge holes. Italy, and Italy alone, notoriously forbids enriching wine with sugar. Yet, a few days ago, a “turncoat” admitted that much of the wine being sold is the product of an “assemblage” of several dozen components that are available on a vast black market. In itself, there is nothing wrong with this, provided that the liquid so produced is not harmful, tastes good, and is not called wine, but it points out a suspicious confusion that lends itself to innumerable frauds. Most important, it has revealed that alcohol is added to wine. Again, there is nothing wrong with that. The tax authorities, however, who are so sharp-eyed when it comes to alcohol, apparently don’t realize that there are truckloads of bootlegged alcohol around that doesn’t evade just manufacturing or import duties but escapes all analysis and can contain anything.

Since it’s absurd to think that even the most fiendish adulterator would deliberately add poison to his wine, it’s logical to think that batches of ethyl alcohol available on the black market may be “enriched” with methyl alcohol. The latter was exempted from taxation in 1984; since then, its cost has been a tenth that of ethyl alcohol. It has become very good business to sell, for example as a solvent, a product labeled ethyl that in reality contains methyl. Someone probably started adulterating wine with one such mixture immediately. As long as this was done in small percentages, with limited illicit gains, nothing particularly striking happened; but then, little by little. . . .

Second lesson. The old adage “what we like is good for us” is utterly false. Our senses serve us reasonably well with natural substances; no poisonous plant smells nice and no plant that smells nice is poisonous. But our senses work very poorly with the millions of substances that are chemically produced; one of them is methanol, whose smell is definitely pleasant and is not easily distinguishable from that of ethyl alcohol. It makes no difference whether methanol is synthetic (which by now is almost always the case) or comes from the distillation of wood: if pure, it always smells the same. The plant where I worked as a prisoner also produced methanol; the Russians would drink it, and die. The management had put up multilingual placards warning: “Those who drink methanol go blind and die.” This wasn’t enough; there were people who would steal the methanol, make it into something drinkable and sell it (not just to the Russians). Neither our nose nor our palate can defend us from the poisons of chemistry: only chemists can do that.

Hence, the third lesson. The extreme diffusion of wine in the marketplace multiplies to a frightening degree the number of regular inspections or spot checks that would be required. A single wholesaler has in stock tens or hundreds of tanks—large and small—all of which need to be checked, and at short intervals (assuming there is no false bottom, as this also can happen). The chemist must therefore possess several qualities. First of all, he must obviously abide by a deontological, or, rather, moral oath similar to the one Hippocrates prescribed for physicians. He has to be more knowledgeable than his adversary, the adulterator. So far, there should be no problems. But he also has to be more cunning than the adulterator, who is strongly motivated by profit; he needs the eyes of Sherlock Holmes and the nose of a bloodhound. Thus, he mustn’t be duped by sampling, which is often no more than an imaginative version of three-card monte. Finally, the way has to be smoothed for him. In the case under consideration, which is very serious for the Italian industry and for our image abroad, the chemist sent to inspect the wine has to be able to perform the analyses on the spot—maybe preliminary, but reliable and rapid. In his laboratory, there are marvelous tools, but they are few, expensive, and not portable. They provide a complete analysis in twenty or thirty minutes, but, given the thousands of samples submitted to him, this time period is unacceptable, nor, at this stage, is a complete analysis necessary.

We should have recourse to analytical tools that are simple, small, inexpensive, and fast; I believe that some already exist, though they have not been approved. If they don’t exist, it will not be difficult to invent them. They could be used for preliminary screening; in suspicious cases, a formal analysis would then be undertaken. At the same time, drawing on the pool of unemployed youths, in the current slump it should not be impossible to train teams of “barefoot chemists,” just as Mao did with doctors. No degree is necessary to learn how to find methanol in wine with the tools I have in mind; two or three days of practical training would suffice.

But there is more. In legal terms, it is pointless to define wine as “the product of the alcoholic fermentation of the must of fresh grapes”—that is to say, in historical terms. No army of inspectors will ever be able to check the paths followed by the innumerable small and medium-sized winemakers, and things done earlier in the process will surely escape any control. It would be better to elaborate a general specification, broad enough to encompass all wines, and without unnecessary restrictions. If the value and taste of wine improves with the addition of sugar and alcohol (ethyl!), why forbid it? Those who are eager for profit will have less of an incentive to cheat.

Finally, reporters and journalists should neither minimize nor dramatize. In recent weeks, the reader has been upset. He cannot understand whether the quantities of methanol that were found, those permitted by law and those considered toxic, are calculated as a percentage of the total wine, or in thousandths, or in parts per million, or in grams per bottle, or in grams per gram of ethyl alcohol. A little precision would clarify matters; only a few days ago, we read that “traces of pH9” were found in Michele Sindona’s coffee mug,2 as if pH were a well-defined toxic substance, rather than a measure of acidity.

La Stampa, April 5, 1986

1. In March 1986, several dozen Italians were poisoned by drinking wine that was adulterated with methanol; nineteen died. Producers added methanol as a cheap way of increasing the alcoholic content.

2. Sindona was a banker and convicted felon who was poisoned with cyanide in his coffee while in prison.