In the mid-1980s, misguided choices from a select few Austrian wine producers turned an industry upside down. We explore the reasons why someone would be compelled to make such risky decisions and what it has to do with ancient Rome.
Listen Now: Vinfamous: Wine Crimes & Scandals
Episode Transcript
ASHLEY SMITH, HOST:
The ancient Romans: they knew how to party. Anything goes. Maybe you’ve seen paintings inspired by this Bacchanalia. That’s the festive times when Greco-Romans celebrated their god of wine, Bacchus. They show these one-percenters as if they’re floating. Togas barely drape over their bodies. Smiling cherubs drift from tree to tree, feeding everyone grapes. There’s a guy just slumped over on a donkey. Raise your glass. The wine was flowing … flowing with lead.
Wait, hold up. Lead?
PROFESSOR TRAVIS RUPP, GUEST:
We actually know that they were producing essentially a lead-infused sweetener that was highly, highly toxic. Why were they doing it? It was for the drug-induced effects.
ASHLEY:
This week on the podcast, we travel back in time …
TRAVIS:
This is one of those adages that’s been kicked around for a long time. Did the ancients, specifically the Romans, did they kill themselves off because of their use of lead?
ASHLEY:
… and reveal toxic transgressions that can only be described as vinfamous. You’re listening to Vinfamous, a podcast from Wine Enthusiast. We import tales of envy, greed, and opportunity. I’m your host, Ashley Smith.
Why would anyone put something toxic in wine? To solve this mystery, we uncover the history of poisons in wine. It’s a story that’s so surprising, it leads us to ask, “Did poisoned wine lead to the fall of the Roman Empire?” And what does this mean for wine production in modern times? So, let’s travel to a country with arguably the biggest and most recent vinfamous wine-poisoning scandal.
Austria is known for its castles, the Alps, wiener schnitzel, the birthplace of one Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and, of course, hills that are alive with the sound of music. But Austria is also home to a rich culture of winemaking.
FERDINAND MAYR, GUEST:
Wine and music. We in Austria, we call it “the taste of culture.”
ASHLEY:
I love it. Those are certainly two of my favorite things, wine and music.
Ferdinand Mayer runs a winery in Eastern Austria.
FERDINAND:
Before I came into the wine business, I studied music and I was a music teacher for 21 years. That’s very much Austrian.
ASHLEY:
When we spoke last fall, I had just finished my morning coffee over here in Seattle. He was finishing another day harvesting grapes with his team at the winery. It was his harvest season.
FERDINAND:
This autumn is very, very demanding. We have to select and select and select and select. That’s my work now, seven hours per day and then five hours in the cellar, to go to bed very late and being up very early in the morning. We have to do that to get the fine wine.
ASHLEY:
Ferdinand and his team cultivate and grow Grüner Veltliner grapes. That’s the German name for the grape varietal.
FERDINAND:
It’s an indigenous grape variety, so it’s spicy.
ASHLEY:
He’s also a lecturer at the Austrian Wine Academy, where he received his professional training in the 1990s. On his first day of lectures at the academy, he was taught a very important lesson.
FERDINAND:
It was at my very first day at Austrian Wine Academy. I’ll never forget that. It was in a basic seminar, some very few guys.
ASHLEY:
Wine drinkers around the world discovered that a handful of Austrian wine producers were using glycol in the winemaking process.
Wait, I should back up. Unless you’re a chemist or a car mechanic, you’re probably wondering what that is. Diethylene glycol, sometimes just called glycol for short, is a chemical found in antifreeze. Yeah, that’s liquid for your car engine. If a person ingests too much diethylene glycol, they could experience liver or kidney damage, which could be fatal.
Okay, let’s get back to it. So now you might be wondering, “Why?” Well, glycol is also very sweet. Starting in the 1950s, Austria would mass produce light, sweet wines. The rest of the world, especially Germany, drank it up. But the trouble started when harvests in the early 1980s failed to produce sweet grapes for the sweet wines. Then, according to an archived New York Times article, certain Austrian winemakers were on the hook to deliver sweet wines. They had “lucrative contracts” with major West Germany grocery stores, so to meet the taste of consumers and to cash in on the contracts, some desperate wine producers added diethylene glycol as a sweetener.
FERDINAND:
And it’s the same everywhere in the world, all the time. People plant cheap wine, sell it as a wine of high quality. It’s cheating because of money, and it was the same in Austria. Really, very sad.
ASHLEY:
In the summer of 1985, health officials in West Germany, Austria, and the United States detected glycol in certain wines from Austria. Millions of gallons of Austrian wine were removed from shelves in Austria and around the world. Here’s one headline from the cover of the New York Times: “Scandal over poisoned wine embitters village in Austria.” A headline from the Associated Press warned, “Antifreeze chemical sends Austria, West Germany reeling.” The Washington Post simply said, “Wine scandal ferments.”
Despite rumors on online blogs, when I was looking at newspapers from the 1980s, I didn’t see any deaths, thankfully. There was one story that reported someone dumped 4,000 gallons of toxic wine down the sewer, which poisoned the town’s trout. Ultimately, the Austrian police arrested a total of 34 people and charged them with fraud.
FERDINAND:
Export stopped overnight to zero, really. Zero bottles to Germany, for example. Before, our main export market was Germany, and they were used to drink cheap and sweet wines.
ASHLEY:
This had devastating effects.
FERDINAND:
That was a shock for the entire industry because it was just a few people who did it, and it affected not only the production of [inaudible 00:07:23] wine, it affected the production of dry wines as well. So I remember that we had … Overnight, we had zero bottles to Germany. So that was really, really dramatic.
ASHLEY:
Though it was only a handful of wine producers who did this, the whole world shut out Austrian wine. In West Germany, more than 350 Austrian wines were blacklisted in the immediate aftermath. Previously, West Germany was two-thirds the export market for Austrian wine. Two-thirds. That’s almost their entire consumer base. Japan warned customers to not purchase Austrian wines. Switzerland and France ripped Austrian wine from their shelves. In the United States, 12 wine brands imported from Austria were contaminated, and consumers were told to not drink any Austrian wines. Just like that, the world’s desire for Austrian wine vanished.
This obviously had huge ramifications for the Austrian wine industry. One year after the scandal, wine exports fell to one-tenth of the level they were at in 1985. The value of exports sunk from 29.4 million euros in 1985 to 6.9 million euros the following year. It took 15 years for Austria to return to exporting pre-scandal amounts of wine. 15 years. And actually, in 2021, Austrian wine exporters broke records by exporting 216.8 million euros of wine.
The question I still have is, “Why?” Why introduce a chemical sweetener, and one that could lead to kidney damage or even death? In the search for answers, I found a historian who was asking similar questions.
TRAVIS:
What in the heck are they doing, and why would they be doing that? And are they literally poisoning themselves?
ASHLEY:
Travis Rupp is a history professor at University of Colorado Boulder. He started as a history scholar focused on ancient Greece and Rome. But when he was a bartender and beer maker at Avery Brewing Company, he realized he could combine his curiosity with the ancient world and alcohol.
TRAVIS:
I had started home brewing with my dad back when I was maybe 19, 20 years old, and as I became much more hands-on with the brewing process, I became far more curious about how all of this history had developed. Ancient alcohol in general is a very kind of niche topic to focus on in classical studies or in the ancient world.
ASHLEY:
He’s now known as “the beer archeologist.” In 2016, he launched a limited series called Ales of Antiquity with Avery Brewing Company. He recreated a porter from George Washington’s lifetime and ancient beers from Peru, Egypt, and all around the world. For one, an ancient Viking beer, he brewed beer in a stump like how the Vikings would’ve done it in the ninth and 10th century, which is crazy, so long ago.
TRAVIS:
And they produce those beers with something called a kuurna, which is literally … They cut down a juniper tree and they hollow it out, and they brew the beer inside of the hollowed-out … they do their mash in the hollowed-out tree trunk.
ASHLEY:
That’s pretty badass. So, to put all of this ancient alcohol production on a timeline, beer production dates back to around 11,500 to 11,000 BCE, starting in modern-day Israel. Wine production, on the other hand, dates back to about 6,500 BCE in the Georgian Caucasus. This is some deep history, y’all.
It’s often assumed that ancient people drank beer or wine instead of water because the water wasn’t safe to drink, but according to Travis Rupp, that’s not completely true. In his study of ancient Romans and Greeks, he’s learned the ins and outs of their beverage preferences and habits. Ancient Romans had their pick of beverages, and it turns out they were picky.
TRAVIS:
It’s not as though there weren’t other beverages around, but they wanted wine. It was such a major component of their culture, for that matter. It’s not as though they had to drink alcohol because they had no other option. That presumption that the ancients were simplistic, backwards, sometimes dumb, and didn’t know what they were doing, and were literally just producing things to survive is completely just not true. The alcohol culture grew because of an appreciation for it, because of a care for quality and flavor.
ASHLEY:
Ancient people: they were just like us.
TRAVIS:
As we morph eventually into the Roman era, we have multiple Roman authors, or even Greek authors, that talk about certain wines as being better than others. If you want to get the good stuff, you get it from this spot or this location. And so, again, there was a quantification of good wine and bad wine, or wine that was for the peasants.
ASHLEY:
Just like we read about wine in, say, Wine Enthusiast, or listen to podcasts, ancient people had their own way of communicating the culture of wine. As Travis has studied this, he’s found Romans had formed their own prejudices against people who drank wine a certain way.
TRAVIS:
There are several authors in both the Greek and Roman context who will comment on peoples as barbaric if they drink wine straight. So if you drank wine at full strength, you were a barbarian. You were considered of a more refined status if you knew how to control your drinking, even though these elites were getting rip-roaring drunk all the time, we know that, at their parties. But there was this idea of stamina in your drinking, and they would say barbarians who had this lust for wine, they always wanted to drink it straight, and so they would get super, super drunk. And so that was considered bad. That’s a non-Roman thing to do. You’re a barbarian if you do that.
ASHLEY:
Hmm. Does any of this remind you of judgments people might hold today? And how would a “sophisticated” Roman or Greek drink their wine?
TRAVIS:
Also, though, in both a Greek and Roman context, they’re using these large ceramic vessels to mix wine with water to bring the alcohol down, and we do assume that it was pretty much a 50-50 mix. So you’re assuming that it’s probably going to drop the alcohol by volume by about 50%, roughly. They would drink it out of clay vessels, like these little drinking cups that had two handles on them that they would tip up to drink out of, or even kind of just a normal mug or cup like we think of.
ASHLEY:
Just like certain circles today, the elite drinking class wanted to always outdo each other.
TRAVIS:
One of the problems with the elite drinking class and their audacity, and what we might consider bad taste, of trying to one-up each other all the time … We’ve found very ornate cups and drinking containers that they would dote around at these drinking parties to basically show off their status.
ASHLEY:
And just like today, people can go to extremes.
TRAVIS:
Have we found lead cups? Yes, we have. And so it means that when they were pouring the wine in and drinking it out of a lead container, they were actually giving themselves kind of a micro-dosing of lead. Even more problematically, though, what the Romans did is we actually know, or we hear documented, that they would add lead to the wine in some instances. There’s even a hypothesis, though it’s not well-supported, that they may have even done the same with mercury, putting it into wine. Now, you can imagine how toxic that is.
ASHLEY:
What? Wait, and mercury?
TRAVIS:
Why were they doing it? It was for the drug-induced effects. Mild lead poisoning comes off with kind of a hallucinogenic properties, things that they may have actually thought felt good in the first few instances of it, but a prolonged exposure is going to cause major issues.
ASHLEY:
And lead happens to be sweet. Similar to Austria or modern wine brands that add sugar, they were adding substances to wine in the pursuit of sweetness.
TRAVIS:
So when we think of sweeteners in a modern era, we think of sugar, we think of sugarcane-based items. That plant did not exist in the Mediterranean. So you go back to the ancient Roman, Greek eras, they were making their sweeteners out of other things. So they would usually make sweeteners out of grapes, and they would essentially make a reduction, kind of like we do with, say, a grape preserve. That’s what they would consume as a sweetener. They would often do it, unfortunately, in lead containers. We actually know that they were producing, essentially, a lead-infused sweetener that was highly, highly toxic. It’s well-recorded. Experimental archeology has shown how easily it can be made, but also how toxic it really is, this “sugar of lead,” as it was called. And they could add it into wine to sweeten their alcoholic beverage, they could put it on food, and it was going to be highly, highly toxic, cause a lot, a lot of problems.
But were people poisoning themselves? Yeah, and what’s kind of … I guess you might say slightly comical about it, it was usually the elite classes. It’s not going to be something that you’re finding in the lower classes, because they didn’t really have direct exposure to lead like that.
ASHLEY:
So the 1% of the 1% of ancient partygoers were poisoning themselves with lead in their wine. Wait, does this have any connection to the so-called “bad emperors” of Roman history?
TRAVIS:
Your Caligulas, your Neros, Domitian, Commodus, for example.
ASHLEY:
Come on, we can’t talk about ancient times without touching on their rulers. More after this short break.
Caligula reigned over ancient Rome for four years total. The first two years were pretty good. He did some public works projects, he helped victims of natural disasters, but then …
TRAVIS:
It’s recorded in history that he got some kind of brain fever. When he came out of the illness, he was doing the most ridiculous things. He had forced, by ancient accounts, his sister into an incestuous relationship. He had promoted his horse to the level of consul within the Senate. But there are speculative hypotheses of, was he consuming excessive amounts of this kind of material which would’ve caused a very maniacal behavior in the individual that was consuming it? It’s possible.
Nero, on the other hand … It’s hard to say with Nero.
ASHLEY:
Nero’s greatest hits as ruler include murdering his own mother and kicking out one of his wives while she was pregnant, which ultimately caused her death.
TRAVIS:
Was he a good guy? Definitely not. So, what caused those things? And we don’t know if it was various types of drug consumption or alcohol consumption. It could have been.
ASHLEY:
What’s even more fascinating is that doctors documented the harms of lead poisoning way back when.
TRAVIS:
Now, there there’s one individual who receives a lot of attention, rightfully so, a man by the name of Galen, who was a physician who documented things quite intricately.
ASHLEY:
If you’re an ancient gladiator, Galen is your man. He wrote about how to cure wounds from battles and ancient sports.
TRAVIS:
But Galen also talks about lead. Interestingly enough, they knew what lead could do. The physicians talk about … Extreme exposure to lead can cause major, major issues. One of the most notable cases that they document has to do with what happens to the silver miners, and essentially that’s where lead comes from, and they’re getting direct exposure to lead fumes, all of these things. And Galen, one of the best sources, documents, essentially, the brokenness of these miners that have exposed themselves to this for prolonged periods, that not only are they mentally not there anymore, but their countenance is all hunched over or rickety.
Now, what’s curious, though, is Galen actually, though, still talks about the use of lead for various cures. For example, you can put a little bit of lead on the wound and he thought it would help heal these things. Now, of course, that’s horrible. You shouldn’t be putting lead in there. But he was doing it anyway, because he records it as having various curing properties or maybe even just relief from the pain.
ASHLEY:
So they knew about lead poisoning and continued to use lead for certain beneficial properties. It’s like they knew the limits of what they were doing when adding lead as a sweetener to wine. Plus, lead was everywhere in Roman times, not just in the wine. Romans built salt manufacturing facilities where they essentially boiled off the salt in saltwater.
TRAVIS:
In the ancient world, we do know they used lead piping for things all over the place. They had lead pipes for their water distribution all throughout cities.
ASHLEY:
So we’ve established that certain elites, maybe even rulers, and groups of lower-class citizens were poisoned. But with lead in the wine, lead in salt production, lead pipes throughout the cities, how widespread was this type of poisoning? And the big question: could this have led to the fall of the Roman Empire?
TRAVIS:
I’ll tell you that it’s highly unlikely. Very few of us in the scholarly realm believe that there’s any kind of credibility to the idea that the Romans died of lead poisoning on a wide scale. Let’s put it that way. This is one of those adages that’s been kicked around for a long time, is that the Romans … Did they kill themselves off because of their use of lead? But yeah, wide-scale lead poisoning? No, it is not what ended the Roman Empire.
ASHLEY:
To solve what did cause the fall of the Roman Empire, well, that’s a rabbit hole for a different podcast. But, spoiler: it was not lead, and it wasn’t wine either. Travis says ancient peoples had a very sophisticated understanding of the lead in their infrastructure. For example, lead pipes were constructed in such a way that they didn’t lace the water with lead. And he says ancient peoples were way more sophisticated than we give them credit for.
TRAVIS:
This idea, this presumption that the ancients were dumb and didn’t know any better … The ancients were not dumb. They did care about flavor. They cared about quality. They had very advanced techniques that they were employing for culinary effect and for innovation, creativity. They really did care about what they ate and drank. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t find such a vast multitude of different kinds of food and drink, and agricultural processes, and domestication of animals if they were purely just trying to make food to survive. And we just know that that was not the case.
It’s a Friday here when we’re doing this interview, and if you think about it in the context of, “What are we looking forward to on a Friday night, a Saturday night?” It’s going out with our friends and drinking and eating. There’s no reason we shouldn’t believe that the ancients weren’t doing the exact same thing, and they were. 2000 years from now, someone would say the same about our milkshake IPAs next to our wine-beer hybrids, next to stouts, whatever it might be. They’re like, “Oh my God, look at all this crazy variety in the alcohol they were drinking.” Well, we should expect the same from the people in the past.
ASHLEY:
All cheers to that. At its best, food and drink connect us through time and space. Perhaps that’s the legacy behind the Romans’ penchant for sweet wines.
Let’s get back to 2023. What can we learn from Austria’s antifreeze scandal?
FERDINAND:
Nevertheless, I see it very positive.
ASHLEY:
That’s Ferdinand Mayer again. While the antifreeze scandal nearly devastated the national industry back in the eighties, today, he sees it as the industry savior.
FERDINAND:
And I call it a wine wonder now, a wine miracle, really. It’s like that. So Austria is in a better position than ever, I would say. It’s mainly dry wines and still having this small production of high-quality sweet wines as well.
ASHLEY:
When the world stopped importing Austria’s sweet wine, Austrian wine growers started producing fine, dry white wines. There was a massive cultural shift in taste.
FERDINAND:
But the positive thing was that we got rid of these cheaper fake wines, and then we started producing high-quality dry wine from that point on. All the people will drink dry wines now, and there is no real sweet wine market anymore in Austria. It’s really a very special small market. The same for the export. The real wine drinkers, even the normal customers, focus on dry wines.
ASHLEY:
Immediately after the scandal, the Austrian government implemented strict new regulations that restricted yields, among other things. This encouraged growers to move toward more red wine and a dry style of white wine. So, I had to ask what the regulations on wine production look like today.
Can you tell me more about the kind of regulations that Austria puts winemakers through? What does that wine production process and approval process look like?
FERDINAND:
So for the sweet wines, it’s very clear. When you go out to the vignette, and you want to harvest the spätlese, the auslese, trockenbeerenauslese, for example, you have to tell the cellar inspectors before. So, you have to ask for permission to go outside. When you harvest, it’s not allowed to process the wine in your winery. You have to wait till the cellar inspectors come. Then they weigh the barrels, they see the sugar in the barrels, and then everything is recorded. So this is extremely strict. They know exactly what liters you have and how the wine was, the barrels, how sweet it is. So there is no cheating anymore possible. That’s a very good thing. And so we have a very strict system with the cellar inspectors. They check all the wineries all the time as much as they can, so that’s a very good thing. [inaudible 00:26:38] There was not a single scandal since then, not a single one.
ASHLEY:
There’s speculation that Germany exaggerated the antifreeze scandal to edge Austria out of the sweet wine market.
FERDINAND:
I remember the headlines in the newspaper, especially in Germany, is at that time, Germany also used the scandal to bring us out of the market to sell more of their own wines. So the headlines in the newspapers were crazy, that people died and things like that, but nobody died because of this glycol. I asked chemical people, and they said you had to drink hundred of liters to die, but then you die because of the alcohol and not because of glycol. Maybe it was not healthy, I don’t know, but it is never healthy you when you drink too much wine.
ASHLEY:
Right. So that was greatly exaggerated, and then Germany …
FERDINAND:
Yeah. Really, it was.
ASHLEY:
… Their media kind of ran with it.
FERDINAND:
And I will never forget. But by the way, it’s funny, because I know quite a lot of my German colleagues. Years ago, they told me that Austria is so lucky because they produce, now, high-quality dry wines, but Germany is still producing some cheap sweet wines.
ASHLEY:
So despite this huge scandal that rocked the entire wine industry, Austria managed to keep going, and 40 years later, it’s better than ever. In 2021, Austrian wine exporters broke records by exporting 216.8 million euros of wine. Ferdinand even invited us to drink wine with him in Austria.
What would you like people to know about Austrian wine now?
FERDINAND:
Very good question. It is really, really a beautiful country in the heart of Europe. Small, and friendly people, wine and food comes together. But then we have the good Rieslings, an international grape variety. Very good Sauvignon plants in Styria, which is the southeastern part. They are getting more and more famous. And then, due to global warming, we can almost grow every red grape variety, even the late-ripening Cabernet Sauvignon.
But I think now, we focus now [inaudible 00:28:58] especially in what we call Burgenland, we focus on Blaufränkisch. It’s also an indigenous grape variety, which is spicy, highish acidity, [inaudible 00:29:09] structure, but very fresh, always very fresh and fruitful. And I think that is what Austria is about in terms of wine style; we have a sort of freshness in our wines due to the more or less cool continental climate. And so we have everything, a good white wine production with a lot of grape varieties, good red wines, sweet wines, and now the sparkling wines getting better and better, I would say as well. Whenever you can, try a good glass of good Austrian quality wine, and a good glass of Austrian quality wine should never be counted. So, that’s what I want to tell people. It’s really, really fun having a glass.
ASHLEY:
That’s all for this week’s episode of Vinfamous, a podcast by Wine Enthusiast. In our next episode, the story of a conman who attempted to destroy the evidence but ended up accidentally destroying the livelihood of hundreds of California wine producers. Find Vinfamous on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and follow the show so you never miss a scandal. Vinfamous is produced by Wine Enthusiast in partnership with Pod People. Special thanks to our production team, Derek Kapoor, Samantha Sette; and the team at Pod People, Anne Feuss, Matt Sav, Aimee Michado, Ashton Carter, Danielle Roth, Shanice Tindall, and Carter Wogahn. Special thanks to Anna-Christina Cabrales, Danielle Callegari, and Alexander Zesiewicz.
(Theme Music Fades Out)
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Last Updated: June 6, 2023
