MAINZ, West Germany -- 'In vino veritas,' runs the Roman saying: 'The truth lies in wine. But West Germans are finding something else in their goblets these days -- toxic antifreeze.
The latest in a long line of wine scandals has broken with the disclosure that millions of gallons of imported Austrian wine has been spiked with a principal constituent of antifreeze, diethylene glycol.
West German health officials determined that huge quantities of the wine was adulterated with the chemical either before or after being shipped by road in bulk tankers to West German wine centers in the Rhineland Palatinate around Mainz early this summer.
There it was bottled as 'Auslese' (selected grapes), 'Beerenauslese' (grapes with noble rot) and 'Eiswein' (grapes picked after being nipped by winter's first frosts).
At least one case of wine-linked paralysis and more than a dozen cases of mild poisoning have been reported in West Germany, where authorities found antifreeze in the wine in amounts 100 times the level deemed a health hazard.
The wine scare spread to three other European nations Friday despite assurances from Austrian Chancellor Fred Sinowatz that all the contaminated wine has been confiscated.
Authorities in Britain and the Netherlands said some of the Austrian wines were being removed from grocers' shelves, and Denmark also banned certain brands after tainted wine was discovered.
The bottles were labelled as coming from vineyards in the Burgenland and Neusiedlersee, Austrian wine-growing areas on the Hungarian border, and stocked by supermarkets all over West Germany.
'Caution with Austrian quality wines,' German authorities warned. 'For the time being, abstain from drinking them.'
Shipping white wine to Mainz may seem like taking vodka to Moscow but the trade is lucrative because the highest quality 'Auslese' Austrian wines can be marketed in Germany for as little as $1.30 a bottle, half the price of better known domestic varieties.
This lures 7 million gallons of the cheaper Austrian wine into Germany every year, mostly in bulk since this saves on customs duties.
Stores are yanking the wines from the shelves as quickly as they can. But one man reportedly sustained kidney damage and health officials in North Rhine-Westphalia were shocked to find one consignment of tainted bottles, which contained 52 times the dose of diethylene glycol considered to be safe.
The antifreeze agent is extremely difficult to trace in the laboratory.
The scandal is the latest in a long line involving German-type white wines, vulnerable to fraud because some the most expensive varieties are extremely sweet. The longer the grape is left on the vine, the sweeter the wine becomes.
The usual wrinkle is to start refermentation of a poor quality white wine by adding liquid sugar. This can be detected by compulsory laboratory analysis, but this has not stopped massive frauds netting millions of dollars.
In the biggest such German spiking case, a Mainz court in 1985 jailed a local wine dealer for four years for adding 530 tons of sugar to 2.5 million gallons of cheap white wine. In a big case in 1981, no less than 2,000 Palatinate vintners were convicted of doing the same.
The latest scandal has produced a rash of wry German bar jokes like: 'Austrian wine beats the cold.' In another, a wine waiter pours an elegant glassful to a discerning diner, who takes a sip and says: 'Ah, a Ford '76.'
The Austrian wine industry does not see the joke and fears the worse. Germany was its biggest market and orders for quality wine are being cancelled wholesale. Austrian Agriculture Minister Josef Wieseler says orders for 4 million bottles already had been withdrawn.
'This will have far reaching consequences,' he said.
The red-faced West German government, priding itself on wine laws supposedly the tightest in Europe, has called for yet stricter import regulations. But the chemical ingenuity of the fakers seems to know no bounds.
As the antifreeze scandal peaked, health experts in Bavaria said they were checking all imported Italian sparkling wines for further traces of a carcinogenic preservative and alcohol 'accelerator' found in some bottles of spumante.
