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It is reminiscent of the Austrian antifreeze wine scandal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Austrian_diethylene_glycol_wine_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.o

It is reminiscent of the Austrian antifreeze wine scandal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Austrian_diethylene_glycol_wine_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Austrian_diethylene_gly... That was only a few wineries though, and it was pretty quickly caught and harshly punished. This is apparently a whole industry where the practice of poisoning consumers with lead is normalized.

lqet 3y ago
> As a consequence of the scandal, a total of 27,000,000 litres of wine (corresponding to 36 million bottles or seven months' worth of Austria's total wine exports at the pre-1985 level) had to be destroyed by the West German authorities, which had confiscated or otherwise collected the wine. Doing this in an environmentally acceptable way proved challenging because DEG was incompatible with sewage treatment plants. In the end, the wine was disposed of and destroyed by being poured into the ovens of a cement plant as a cooling agent instead of water. In Austria, it was reported that the wine, mixed with other agents, was used as a road antifreeze in the particularly severe continental winter of February to March 1986. According to the German Wikipedia, authorities in Austria first became suspicious when a small winegrower attempted to deduct large quantities of antifreeze from his taxes, although he only owned a single small tractor.
Laforet 3y ago
On a related and lighter hearted note, back in the beginning of the 20th century the government of Hungary once mandated adding the pH indicator phenylphthalein to locally produced wine as a way to mark its origin for tax purposes. The compound is tasteless and clear at the acidic pH of wines, but would turn bright pink with some alkali added. Sounds ideal right? However soon people started to complain that the wine gave them explosive diarrhea. Turns out that phenylphthalein is actually a potent laxative, just that nobody knew because it had never been given to such a large number of people in high doses. The wine were quickly withdrawn from the market and phenylphthalein remained a popular constipation medicine well into the 1980s before it was replaced by safer alternatives.
- hermitcrab 3y ago
  I was at an all-boys boarding school in the 70s when a bottle of phenylphthalein went missing. They shut the whole school down until it reappeared (it was left on the windowsill of a teacher's house IIRC). No idea what the culprit was intending to do with it. Put it in the tea urn and try to make the whole school shit itself to death?
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Vanishing fake blood? I'm way more curious about the reason for the harsh reaction from the school.
  - jliptzin 3y ago
    Interesting, when I was in school the preferred way to shut the school down was to call in a bomb threat from a pay phone
    - hermitcrab 3y ago
      Remember that this was a boarding school. We didn't get to go home, so there was no benefit to getting everything shut down. Also they were quite into using peer pressure via collective punishment.
    - hilbert42 3y ago
      That's stupid and infantile and would get everyone offside. However there was one incident of notoriety that occurred about a year after I left school (so I take no credit for it nor would I've bothered) but the details weren't spared on me by someone who was still there. We had a Kipp's generator (aka apparatus), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipp%27s_apparatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipp%27s_apparatus, in the school chemistry lab (it was a well equipped school with separate physics chemistry and biology labs). Anyway, the Kipp's generator was mainly used for making H2S and was used in a properly equipped fume cupboard with a decent exhaust. During the last day of term (muck-up day for final year students) some bright sparks decided to remove the generator from the lab and stick it in the airconditioning ducts with the view of stinking the whole school out. Trouble was the science wasn't well thought out, they'd not calculated how much H2S would be required to produce an objectionable effect. From what I gather the odor was so minimal that the perpetrators who were looking for the odor could barely detect it. BTW, everyone at school was taught [as part of the curriculum] the dangers of H2S and that after a certain threshold concentration it anesthetizes the nose so one thinks the concentration has fallen and that is why it's so dangerous.
perihelions 3y ago
Or the carbon monoxide thing in the US (artificial colorant for supermarket meat): https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/CO-treated-meat-08.pdf https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2013... (pdf) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23958645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23958645 The common thread is that consumers buy whatever they think "looks fresh", so vendors optimize for that metric. (It's the wrong metric). Efficient markets, I suppose.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  >Efficient markets, I suppose. // Isn't the Capitalist notion of efficiency bound with perfect information - we'd have to legislate to make sure that consumers know the product is 'laced with poison for the appearance of freshness; packaging contains carbon monoxide (CO) a deadly gas' and then see if the customers buy more of that product. You're accusing consumers of optimising towards products _looking_ fresh, but the market isn't providing the information needed to also move away from 'purposefully laced with poison'. I have an idea for a sort of reverse-trademark, an Origin Mark that allows a consumer to view all the inputs into a product and their geographic and legal origins. Then you can see 'this meat maker buys carbon monoxide', at least.
  - perihelions 3y ago
    No comment on economic theory, but on the carbon monoxide thing, the issue here isn't its toxicity, but that vendors use it to mask the color appearance of non-fresh, unhygienic meat. Naive visual assessment is wrong.
    - AlexandrB 3y ago
      I thought meat was more tasty/tender when it's "aged" for a while anyways.
      - kadoban 3y ago
        It has to be aged correctly to be safe.
MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
Not really comparable. The glycol is only ~4 times as damaging as the alcohol that wine contains anyway, and there were no known health issues triggered by it.
- vario 3y ago
  don't you think by saying "there were no known health issues triggered by it" you are committing a statistical fallacy? Just because something has not bee observed does not mean it is not there....
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
thih9 3y ago
> That was only a few wineries though (…) The article you linked shows it was more than that and that the country’s industry was affected.
- pseudo0 3y ago
  Because of the practice of blending wines into other wines. So a few criminal wineries impacted orders of magnitude more blended wine production. The distinction I was trying to draw was that unless there is a similar practice of blending for tumeric, this a systemic, widespread issue where the practice of poisoning customers has become normalized in the industry.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - thih9 3y ago
    Do you have a source? I.e. on the number of criminal wineries and that the rest of the Austrian industry was unaware?
crazygringo 3y ago
That's insane: > 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 (DEG), 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. > Most of the recalled wines contained up to a few grams of DEG per litre (and many only a fraction of a gram), which meant that dozens of bottles would have to be consumed in a limited period to reach the lethal dose of approximately 40 grams. However, in one record-setting wine (a 1981 Welschriesling Beerenauslese from Burgenland), 48 grams per litre was detected, which meant that the consumption of a single bottle could have been lethal. Also, long-term consumption of DEG is known to damage the kidney, liver, and brain. > The industry's practice of DEG adulteration was traced back to Otto Nadrasky, a 58-year-old chemist and wine consultant from Grafenwörth, Lower Austria. It boggles my brain that a professional chemist could recommend winemakers incorporate an actual poison into their wine. And it's not like this was some unknown substance -- it's literally the harmful chemical that was the impetus to found the FDA back in 1938! In a way, it's the poster child for a harmful adulterant [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylene_glycol#1937_%E2%80%93_The_Massengill_incident_(United_States) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylene_glycol#1937_%E2%8...
emmelaich 3y ago
And poisons added to henna for Westerners because they think normal brown henna tattoos are less genuine.
HideousKojima 3y ago
Didn't realize that Simpsons episode was based on a real incident (though they depicted it in France, not Austria).
hilbert42 3y ago
I lived in Austria for a while and have been aware of that story for a long while but it still perplexes me because I can't figure out why these idiots chose to use diethylene glycol, it was not only an irresponsible and dangerous choice but also it seems such a such a stupid one. Di and ethylene glycol are both toxic and sweet which makes them risky chemicals to handle and store and that's been known since they were first used. These greedy idiots should have known that. After all, they knew the chemicals were sweet and whenever the properties of di/ethylene glycol are mentioned the terms sweetness and danger/poisonous are bundled together so why didn't they know they'd likely kill their customers? (Fortunately, these days, the extremely bitter denaturant denatonium (Bitrex) is added to them stop consumption.) Moreover, why didn't they use its closely related mate propylene glycol which is both sweet and non toxic and used in the food industry, it even has its own E number (E1521)? The only reason I can come with is that propylene glycol isn't as sweet as its ethylene cousins. That said, it does provide that 'bulky' consistency or body that one finds in very sweet wines. BTW, PEG as it's known, is often painted onto cakes and pastries to give them that shine after baking.

lqet 3y ago

> As a consequence of the scandal, a total of 27,000,000 litres of wine (corresponding to 36 million bottles or seven months' worth of Austria's total wine exports at the pre-1985 level) had to be destroyed by the West German authorities, which had confiscated or otherwise collected the wine. Doing this in an environmentally acceptable way proved challenging because DEG was incompatible with sewage treatment plants. In the end, the wine was disposed of and destroyed by being poured into the ovens of a cement plant as a cooling agent instead of water. In Austria, it was reported that the wine, mixed with other agents, was used as a road antifreeze in the particularly severe continental winter of February to March 1986. According to the German Wikipedia, authorities in Austria first became suspicious when a small winegrower attempted to deduct large quantities of antifreeze from his taxes, although he only owned a single small tractor.

Laforet 3y ago

On a related and lighter hearted note, back in the beginning of the 20th century the government of Hungary once mandated adding the pH indicator phenylphthalein to locally produced wine as a way to mark its origin for tax purposes. The compound is tasteless and clear at the acidic pH of wines, but would turn bright pink with some alkali added. Sounds ideal right? However soon people started to complain that the wine gave them explosive diarrhea. Turns out that phenylphthalein is actually a potent laxative, just that nobody knew because it had never been given to such a large number of people in high doses. The wine were quickly withdrawn from the market and phenylphthalein remained a popular constipation medicine well into the 1980s before it was replaced by safer alternatives.

hermitcrab 3y ago
I was at an all-boys boarding school in the 70s when a bottle of phenylphthalein went missing. They shut the whole school down until it reappeared (it was left on the windowsill of a teacher's house IIRC). No idea what the culprit was intending to do with it. Put it in the tea urn and try to make the whole school shit itself to death?
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Vanishing fake blood? I'm way more curious about the reason for the harsh reaction from the school.
- jliptzin 3y ago
  Interesting, when I was in school the preferred way to shut the school down was to call in a bomb threat from a pay phone
  - hermitcrab 3y ago
    Remember that this was a boarding school. We didn't get to go home, so there was no benefit to getting everything shut down. Also they were quite into using peer pressure via collective punishment.
  - hilbert42 3y ago
    That's stupid and infantile and would get everyone offside. However there was one incident of notoriety that occurred about a year after I left school (so I take no credit for it nor would I've bothered) but the details weren't spared on me by someone who was still there. We had a Kipp's generator (aka apparatus), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipp%27s_apparatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipp%27s_apparatus, in the school chemistry lab (it was a well equipped school with separate physics chemistry and biology labs). Anyway, the Kipp's generator was mainly used for making H2S and was used in a properly equipped fume cupboard with a decent exhaust. During the last day of term (muck-up day for final year students) some bright sparks decided to remove the generator from the lab and stick it in the airconditioning ducts with the view of stinking the whole school out. Trouble was the science wasn't well thought out, they'd not calculated how much H2S would be required to produce an objectionable effect. From what I gather the odor was so minimal that the perpetrators who were looking for the odor could barely detect it. BTW, everyone at school was taught [as part of the curriculum] the dangers of H2S and that after a certain threshold concentration it anesthetizes the nose so one thinks the concentration has fallen and that is why it's so dangerous.

perihelions 3y ago

Or the carbon monoxide thing in the US (artificial colorant for supermarket meat): https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/CO-treated-meat-08.pdf https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2013... (pdf) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23958645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23958645 The common thread is that consumers buy whatever they think "looks fresh", so vendors optimize for that metric. (It's the wrong metric). Efficient markets, I suppose.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
>Efficient markets, I suppose. // Isn't the Capitalist notion of efficiency bound with perfect information - we'd have to legislate to make sure that consumers know the product is 'laced with poison for the appearance of freshness; packaging contains carbon monoxide (CO) a deadly gas' and then see if the customers buy more of that product. You're accusing consumers of optimising towards products _looking_ fresh, but the market isn't providing the information needed to also move away from 'purposefully laced with poison'. I have an idea for a sort of reverse-trademark, an Origin Mark that allows a consumer to view all the inputs into a product and their geographic and legal origins. Then you can see 'this meat maker buys carbon monoxide', at least.
- perihelions 3y ago
  No comment on economic theory, but on the carbon monoxide thing, the issue here isn't its toxicity, but that vendors use it to mask the color appearance of non-fresh, unhygienic meat. Naive visual assessment is wrong.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    I thought meat was more tasty/tender when it's "aged" for a while anyways.
    - kadoban 3y ago
      It has to be aged correctly to be safe.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago

Not really comparable. The glycol is only ~4 times as damaging as the alcohol that wine contains anyway, and there were no known health issues triggered by it.

vario 3y ago
don't you think by saying "there were no known health issues triggered by it" you are committing a statistical fallacy? Just because something has not bee observed does not mean it is not there....
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

thih9 3y ago

> That was only a few wineries though (…) The article you linked shows it was more than that and that the country’s industry was affected.

pseudo0 3y ago
Because of the practice of blending wines into other wines. So a few criminal wineries impacted orders of magnitude more blended wine production. The distinction I was trying to draw was that unless there is a similar practice of blending for tumeric, this a systemic, widespread issue where the practice of poisoning customers has become normalized in the industry.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- thih9 3y ago
  Do you have a source? I.e. on the number of criminal wineries and that the rest of the Austrian industry was unaware?

crazygringo 3y ago

That's insane: > 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 (DEG), 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. > Most of the recalled wines contained up to a few grams of DEG per litre (and many only a fraction of a gram), which meant that dozens of bottles would have to be consumed in a limited period to reach the lethal dose of approximately 40 grams. However, in one record-setting wine (a 1981 Welschriesling Beerenauslese from Burgenland), 48 grams per litre was detected, which meant that the consumption of a single bottle could have been lethal. Also, long-term consumption of DEG is known to damage the kidney, liver, and brain. > The industry's practice of DEG adulteration was traced back to Otto Nadrasky, a 58-year-old chemist and wine consultant from Grafenwörth, Lower Austria. It boggles my brain that a professional chemist could recommend winemakers incorporate an actual poison into their wine. And it's not like this was some unknown substance -- it's literally the harmful chemical that was the impetus to found the FDA back in 1938! In a way, it's the poster child for a harmful adulterant [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylene_glycol#1937_%E2%80%93_The_Massengill_incident_(United_States) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylene_glycol#1937_%E2%8...

emmelaich 3y ago

And poisons added to henna for Westerners because they think normal brown henna tattoos are less genuine.

HideousKojima 3y ago

Didn't realize that Simpsons episode was based on a real incident (though they depicted it in France, not Austria).

hilbert42 3y ago

I lived in Austria for a while and have been aware of that story for a long while but it still perplexes me because I can't figure out why these idiots chose to use diethylene glycol, it was not only an irresponsible and dangerous choice but also it seems such a such a stupid one. Di and ethylene glycol are both toxic and sweet which makes them risky chemicals to handle and store and that's been known since they were first used. These greedy idiots should have known that. After all, they knew the chemicals were sweet and whenever the properties of di/ethylene glycol are mentioned the terms sweetness and danger/poisonous are bundled together so why didn't they know they'd likely kill their customers? (Fortunately, these days, the extremely bitter denaturant denatonium (Bitrex) is added to them stop consumption.) Moreover, why didn't they use its closely related mate propylene glycol which is both sweet and non toxic and used in the food industry, it even has its own E number (E1521)? The only reason I can come with is that propylene glycol isn't as sweet as its ethylene cousins. That said, it does provide that 'bulky' consistency or body that one finds in very sweet wines. BTW, PEG as it's known, is often painted onto cakes and pastries to give them that shine after baking.