Why You Should Choose Your Wine Carefully
Would it not be very scary of cheap wine or even some of the finest could make your sick or kill you if you drank a lot? Amen! This was the headline at bengreenfieldfitness.com last month. The notion presented was their caution about wine with additional headlines you may have seen. These include: “California Winemakers Sued over High Levels of Arsenic in Wines” and “Bad News for Those of You Who, Like Us, Drank Cheap Wine Each and Every Night of Your 20s”. That was enough to scare me.
Basically, a class action lawsuit that was filed in California against a number of the country’s top winemakers over reported high levels of arsenic in wine. The lawsuit claims that some of the most popular wines have “up to four and five times the maximum amount of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allows for drinking water.”
Obviously, it's time to stop drinking wine and go back to hot chocolate. Maybe not! As an IBM Systems Engineer, for years I solved my client's problems for free so they could make productive use of IBM equipment which they rented or owned. I would always listen to my client's complaints. "I did not do anything other than." or "I did not do anything except."
My ears always piqued when I heard other than or when I heard except. I followed what was said next. In almost all situations, the reported problem was caused by the action noted after other than or after except. Not everything reported by the best of people is the truth even though it sounds very believable, and we think we should believe it.
Who wants to die from drinking wine? Nobody!
There was immediate backlash by researchers who know better against the veracity and the suppositions suggested in the lawsuit.
A stray comment on an Internet article is shown below to show how intense this debate has become:
This is grossly irresponsible journalism. Anyone can file a lawsuit against anyone else without a shred of evidence. Is there a single lab report showing excessive arsenic in any of these wines? I think not or we would have a criminal case, not a civil one. Now these listed wines and wineries are impugned and that bell cannot be unrang. This article was written by an "alleged" journalist who clearly has no idea what news is. No, Lili Tan cannot be fully blame. She just parroted what was on the news services.
I searched and found the Wine Institute's response which was very well done and which appealed to minds which think logically to make determinations. Personally, I think the whole thing is crap but since I am not an arsenicimotologist, I researched the responses. Check out the Wine Institute's idea of the facts in their well-stated fact sheet below in the meat of Chapter 4 in the wine book:
