No Veritas in the Vino

"Wine: Fermented juice of grapes." --Webster's International Dictionary "Crush the pulp and stone of dates in a container, mix with hot water, clarify with lead acetate, add sugar to the mixture, then add chloridic acid. Heat to 60 or 70 degrees Centigrade. Let cool immediately and neutralize with potash." --Fake-wine recipe quoted in Italian court

Italy produces more wine than France or Spain, yet has fewer vineyards than either country. The reason for this phenomenon is that a considerable amount of its wine production is as far removed from the fermented juice of the grape as molasses is from pink champagne. For years, racketeers have bedeviled the country's important wine industry by ingeniously simulating the taste, bouquet and appearance of every known type of Italian wine. Using a grizzly variety of waste materials and chemicals, they make wine in as little as eight hours (v. as much as a year for genuine wine). They then sell the fake brew to unsuspecting Italians and tourists as the real vino.

To reduce the uncertainties of wine drinking in Italy and protect the worried industry, the government has recently begun to enforce strict wine legislation. It set up a special food-and-wine-standards police squad that quickly became known as "the Bacchus police." Last week, in the biggest Italian trial in decades, 174 men and women were charged with adulterating or faking wine. Heading the list of accused in the crammed courthouse of Ascoli Piceno on the Adriatic coast was Bruno Ferrari, 65, boss of the Casa Vinicola Ferrari, largest of seven wine companies involved in the case.

Household Name. After weeks of watching the eight Ferrari wine plants and shadowing the company's delivery trucks all over the country, the Bacchus police arrested Ferrari and his associates and seized 10,000 tons of adulterated wine. For more than ten years Vino Ferrari had been a household name in Italy. A popular Ferrari commercial--which was taken off the air when Ferrari was arrested--showed a tired businessman reviving his sagging spirits after a hard day by knocking back a glass of Ferrari wine. "I'm a new man," he shouts to his wife.

Now the origin of the wine's restorative power is being called into question: Ferrari wine, charged the prosecution, is artificial. Police cited a variety of recipes for making such concoctions, listing such unlikely ingredients as tar acid, ammonia, glycerin, zinc sulphate, seaweed, banana paste, citric acid, lactic acid, a pungent liquid dredged from the bottom of banana boats, and ox's blood. The prosecution also said that illegal chemical substances and hidden vats of artificial wine were seized at the Ferrari plants.

The authorship of at least one successful fake-wine recipe was attributed by Italian police to Celso Sereni, an alleged Ferrari accomplice, who was said in court to have netted $3,000 a day from his association with Ferrari's thriving "wine" business. He was described in the press as "the Doctor Faust of the grape."

Significantly, the court has not charged that the fake wine is harmful. "The aim of the adulterators is not extermination," said one Italian police officer wryly. "After all, they have to safeguard their market." Italians' confidence in their wine has been severely shaken; in some parts of Italy, beer has at least temporarily replaced wine on the dinner table.

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