There was much sensational reporting of the wine scandal in the press in
the US, UK, and elsewhere. First, the compound that was supposed to have
been added is diethylene glycol. This is an extremely sweet substance,
and likely only a very small amount of it would be needed to sweeten. It
is not antifreeze, athough it may be used in some antifreeze solutions
that usually are a mixture of several compounds. However antifreeze made
a good headline for scandal sheets. The period of concern probably
extends from sometime in the 70s to 1985 when several were arrested and
stocks of wine were seized. At that time there was a large demand for
less expensive sweet wine in Germany, and Austria was able to supply
large quantities of sweet wine to meet this demand. There were contracts
between Austrian and German wine firms to fill this need for sweet wine.
The bulk of the wines sweetened were cheaper ones that were shipped to
Germany. There appears to be no record of anyone being harmed by this.
However there are 2 serious problems. In the pure legal sense,
something was added to wine that was not allowed. The second problem is
the health issue. Here you must remember that nearly everything,
including table salt, can be toxic in a high enough dose. The lethal
dose of diethylene glycol that cause 1/2 of those taking it to die
(LD50) when taken by mouth is 20.76 grams per kilogram of body weight
for rats and 13.21 for guinea pigs. Extrapolated to a large human size
100 kg super rat, this would be over 2000 grams. Thus traces used to
sweeten wine are likely to be of little health concern, although
undesirable. For example, much, much less of some of the oil soluble
vitamins, that we all need, can make you extremely sick or even kill.
The LD50 information quoted comes from the 11th edition of the Merck
Index.

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