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Many small complaints as well as some serious infringements - this is the summary of the 2016 annual balance sheet of the Rhineland-Palatinate State Investigation Office (LUA) for wine monitoring, which was presented in Mainz by the Rhineland-Palatinate Minister of Viticulture Dr. Volker Wissing and LUA President Dr. Stefan Bent.
In 2016, the LUA staff appeared around 5,500 times in companies for inspection and examined 4,246 samples in the laboratory. Wissing said that behind the inspection visits last year was a verified quantity of more than 40 million litres of wine.
As a result, 369 samples of wines from Germany and abroad were objected to because they did not meet the legal requirements. That is about 8.7 percent. According to the ministry report, these included violations of labelling regulations such as missing A.P. numbers as well as incorrect alcohol or taste information. In 2015 the rate was still 10.5 percent. The complaint rate was even lower for serious wine adulterations due to inadmissible treatment substances and treatment processes. Here, only 81 of the 4,246 wines examined in 2016 failed - that is 1.9 percent. "The rate thus remains at a low level," said LUA President Dr. Stefan Bent.
Among the serious adulterations of wine is the prohibited addition of technical glycerine or aromas to enhance the value of wines. Glycerine makes wines appear more full-bodied. In 2016, the LUA again made several discoveries, including a sparkling wine from the Ukraine, a white Crimean sparkling wine and several Italian products, including high-quality sparkling wines.
The case of an Italian winery that used illegal aromas also shows that persistence pays off. Little by little, the Wine Inspectorate has checked all products and batches of this winery. The result: 16 of 44 samples examined were objected to. Other foreign wines, which had previously been detected by the LUA's wine inspectors during tasting, were also found to contain illegal aromas in the laboratory analysis.
One success for the wine control had been the sentencing of a wine merchant from Rheinhessen and his employees to suspended sentences and fines. The trader had been exporting wine with forged labels to several states for years. In total, wine products were sold for ten million euros with false grape variety, origin and quality indications. The wine shop had bottled cask wines from Europe and overseas, falsely labelled them and sold them abroad. The documents required for exports and the corresponding stamps were forged, and laboratory operations and foreign wineries were fictitious.
The couple who ran the wine shop and two former employees were sentenced in spring 2017 to suspended sentences of between six months and two years as well as fines of between 1,000 and 1,500 euros. 133,000 euros of the couple's assets went to the state. The husband, a trained master winemaker and viticulture technician, was banned from his profession.
Through the cooperation of the self-control of a German winery and official monitoring, consumers were protected in 2016 from Spanish wine with greatly increased contents of chromium and nickel. The worrying results of a private laboratory had been confirmed in the LUA: The imported wine was not fit for consumption. "Nickel can cause allergic reactions even with short-term acute exposure, whether after skin contact or after ingestion via food," explained Dr. Stefan Bent.
Samples taken from delivering trucks and retained samples had shown that the wines must have been contaminated before they were stored in Germany. Chromium and nickel had probably been transferred to the wine from unsuitable storage containers during the production process. About one million litres of wine were blocked as not fit for circulation. None of this had reached the end consumer. The batch of wine was denatured and returned to Spain.
(uka / Photo: Ministry of Economics, Transport, Agriculture and Viticulture of Rhineland-Palatinate)