Klosterkeller Siegendorf (Austria) Question

Hi,

You might want to drop a line to Julia Sevenich.

She is a delightful lady who lives in Austria, is attending the Austrian Wine Academy and contributes her writings to our site

You can see her pages at

Art Stratemeyer ============================

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Michael Pronay, thanks for the very detailed information. Besides the wine I mentioned, there are 2 half bottles of TBA Weissburgunder, a 1973 and a 1976, also 14 % alcohol. All of the mentioned wines were imported by a Texas firm. The better Austrian wines were seldom seen in the US in those days. I obtained the lot of half bottles on auction at the Chicago Wine Company many years ago at a very attractive price. I will open one before long and post notes.

I also have a Retzer Gruener Veltiner Eiswein Auslese from 1973. I assume a modern Austrian eiswein must be at least the beerenauslese level just as is he case in Germany. However, in the 70s, the Germans even sometimes made a kabinett eiswein, which likely is the reason the law was changed to require beerenauslese or above and banned mention of anything other than plain eiswein on the label. If you have never tasted a kabinett eiswein, be thankful.

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Do you think that means those bottles are tainted? Whenever I read about the scandal of '85, I am unclear for how long the involved wineries were using additives. Just curious, e.

There was much sensational reporting of the wine scandal in the press in the US, UK, and elsewhere. First, the compound that was supposed to have been added is diethylene glycol. This is an extremely sweet substance, and likely only a very small amount of it would be needed to sweeten. It is not antifreeze, athough it may be used in some antifreeze solutions that usually are a mixture of several compounds. However antifreeze made a good headline for scandal sheets. The period of concern probably extends from sometime in the 70s to 1985 when several were arrested and stocks of wine were seized. At that time there was a large demand for less expensive sweet wine in Germany, and Austria was able to supply large quantities of sweet wine to meet this demand. There were contracts between Austrian and German wine firms to fill this need for sweet wine. The bulk of the wines sweetened were cheaper ones that were shipped to Germany. There appears to be no record of anyone being harmed by this. However there are 2 serious problems. In the pure legal sense, something was added to wine that was not allowed. The second problem is the health issue. Here you must remember that nearly everything, including table salt, can be toxic in a high enough dose. The lethal dose of diethylene glycol that cause 1/2 of those taking it to die (LD50) when taken by mouth is 20.76 grams per kilogram of body weight for rats and 13.21 for guinea pigs. Extrapolated to a large human size

100 kg super rat, this would be over 2000 grams. Thus traces used to sweeten wine are likely to be of little health concern, although undesirable. For example, much, much less of some of the oil soluble vitamins, that we all need, can make you extremely sick or even kill. The LD50 information quoted comes from the 11th edition of the Merck Index.

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I would not want anyone to think diethylene glycol is safe for human use in large quantities. There have in fact been deaths from ingestion of large amounts, and it may be more toxic for humans than for rats. There is a review article on this subject in the Annals of internal Medicine that can be viewed at:

Note that the deaths resulted from consumption of mainly repeated doses of medicine that contained mainly diethylene glycol as a solvent. Near the bottom of this article the finding of diethyl glycol added to wine from Europe is noted, but it is also stated that no human toxicity was observed with a link to Lancet as a reference. As noted in the article, there was a large group of deaths in the late 1930s, and this was well known and documented in the scientific and medical literature. A simple literature search by even one major wine companyin Austria or Germany before deciding to sweeten wine with tiny quantiies of diethylene glycol would have saved the Austrian wine industry from a severe PR problem and loss of a huge amount of income.

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Don't expect *too* much. Much has been said (and written) about the ageing abilities of Austria BAs and TBAs, but very rarely did I come across anything older than 20 years that was still fresh. Otoh, if you don't mind madeirisation, go ahead!

True.

;-)

M.

99 percent of the companies involved use diethylene glycol (DEG), 1 percent a substance I don't remember. Tt was something with a sulphur component. Unlike DEG, this substance was not used to adulterate or counterfait wine, but was used as a preservative. But since it was not on the legal list of wine additives, it was illegal. Iirc, in Klosterkeller Siegendorf wines they found this substance.

M.

Sorry to correct you, but diethylene glycol (DEG) is *not* extremely sweet, not even "sweet", "slightly sweet" at most.

And, in contrary to what most believed, it was *not* used to sweeten wines. What happened was that to wine water (20 to 30 percent) and alcohol was added. This adulterated brew had to pass legal exams where the low dry extract (or any other of the minimum requirements) would have posed problems. DEG boosted this value to legal levels, and augmented the wine output (at little cost) by 20 to 30%.

Since the labs did not search for DEG, the adultorators were of the safe side, at least in principle. The way it found its way to the authorities sounds incredible: One of the winegrowers (apparently with an IQ lower than his cellar steps) put the DEG bill into his income tax declaration. The rest is history.

DEG was added to wine at a dose of between 2 and 3 grams per litre, the maximum found was 5 g/l. If you compare 2 g/l of DEG to roughly 100 g/l of alcohol (ethanol) you find in a litre of wine, there is an easy calculus to be done. An lethal intake of 2000 grams of DEG would need an intake of 2000 litres of wine, which is simply impossible. Besides, the ethanol intake would be lethal way before DEG even might start to harm you.

M.

Here is a bit more information from the Merck Index, 11th ed. Diethylene Glycol aka. 2,2'-Oxybisethanol aka. 2,2'-oxy-diethanol. Colorless, hygroscopic, practically odorless liquid; sharply sweetish taste. Melting point: -6.5 degrees. Boling point: 244-245 degrees. The reports that I saw did not mention that the wine also was diluted with water. If this is so, there was intent of deliberate fraud rather than just improving the taste of the wine for a certain market. Most assumed, from descriptions such as those in Merck, that Diethylene Glycol was being used to sweeten and perhaps smooth the wine, which could well be, depending on the amount added. After all glycerol(glycerine) has food uses for smoothing homemade wines and can be bought in wine supply stores for that purpose. And glycerine is closely related to Diethylene Glycol in many respects except toxicity. Merck describes uses of glycerol as a sweetener, for finishing liqueurs, in confections etc. Here is what a bottle of Wine Art Finishing formula(glycerine USP) has to say. "To smooth and mellow wine add 1 - 2 oz.(US fluid oz) per gallon. To smooth out and add body to liqueurs and cordials, use 1 - 2 oz. per quart." Unless Diethylene Glycol is much more effective than glycerine for this purpose(doubtful), then the very small maximum detection limits you reported likely would rule out use for smoothing, including sweetening. Since Diethylene Glycol has a much higher boiling point than water, it likely would not boil off in a determination of total solids. I would guess that the tried and safe glycerine was not used because wine was tested for glycerine. If glycerine had been used, then there would have been just a mild scandal about watered down wine, which likely would have been forgotten fairly soon. However the association of Diethylene Glycol with many deaths in very high doses and the fact that , unlike glycerine, it is not approved for any food use of which I am aware sets the stage for a major public relations disaster and is the stuff that sensational publications love to report.

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I suspect that part of the scandal's perceived seriousness was the public's (and press's) association of the name diethylene glycol with that of the far more deadly ethylene glycol, known to many for its role as antifreeze for cars. To this day, many summaries of the '85 scandal talk about wine contaminated with antifreeze, at best a gross distortion of the facts.

Mark

I agree that the antifreeze distortion is what made it such a big deal here in the US. But this raised another question. I remember two other scandals in the US involving imported wines. One was a French company in the late 60's that was selling Algerian wine in the US as Bordeaux and the other was the 1971 Chianti scandal where 3 million gallons of chianti in a basket was imported into the US and it was not even wine. Did these same scams effect wine consumption in European countries?

Mark Lipton stated:"I suspect that part of the scandal's perceived seriousness was the public's (and press's) association of the name diethylene glycol with that of the far more deadly ethylene glycol, known to many for its role as antifreeze for cars. To this day, many summaries of the '85 scandal talk about wine contaminated with antifreeze, at best a gross distortion of the facts."

I think that your statement is correct. You do not want to have the word antifreeze assocated with any kind of food in the US these days. A woman in Georgia was recently convicted of killing both her husband and boyfriend using antifreeze in their food, and this was covered on Court TV. Another woman made headlines last summer by killing her husband in the same way.

Ethylene glycol is the main ingredient in many antifreezes now sold in the US. But some antifreezes also contain diethylene glycol. I found a can of antifreeze in the garage that listed ingredients. It is the Zerox brand and contains ethylene glycol, diethylene glycol, dipotassium phosphate, water, corrosion inhibitors, siicone silicate, defoamer, and dyes. It is labeled "Warning: Harmful or fatal if swallowed." There also is a caution that ethylene glycol has caused birth defects in animals.

Ethylene glycol is far more dangerous than diethylene glycol. However there have been hundreds of deaths from diethylene glycol ingested in large quantities over time, as described in the medical review paper I posted earlier. The most serious event in the US was in the late 1930s. Dithylene glycol was used as the main ingredient in a liquid containing a then new sulfa drug. Instead of being cured, many people were killed, and the problem was traced to the very large quantity of dethylene glycol consumed rather than to the sulfa drug. Now how you explain to the masses that the tiny amount of diethylene glycol that was found in wine is of no concern from a health viewpoint is extremely difficult. The passage of time has now helped, but it probably will require several more years for the diethylene glycol - wne connection to fade completely in the US.

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