Читать книгу E for Additives - Maurice Hanssen - Страница 18

Look around any good off-licence and you will see that there must be a very wide variety of colours and additives in use ranging from caramel in whisky to goodness knows what in certain of the more exotic aperitifs and liqueurs. Effectively, there is no regulation whatsoever other than the general provisions of the Food Act.

Unless there is the safeguard of ingredient labelling on alcoholic drinks, disastrous and dangerous episodes such as the Austrian wine scandal—which proved to involve many more countries than just Austria—are certain to happen again. In July 1984 diethylene-glycol was found in Austrian wine in as many as 82 different brands, both in Germany and in Britain. Diethyleneglycol can be used as an anti-freeze, but when added to wine it improves the flavour, so that cheap wines can be sold as superior, more costly products. The expert view is that a consumption of 0.3ml of this contaminant daily is a potential health hazard to the kidneys and that 100ml can be fatal.

A bottle tested in Barnsley was found to contain 1.5ml, and so a heavy drinker could be endangered not only by the alcohol but also by the additive. It is ironic that the only reason the Austrian wine scandal was discovered was that one of the companies using diethylene-glycol in the wine requested a refund of the Value Added Tax. A sharp VAT inspector questioned the large volume of anti-freeze being used in the summer and the scandal was uncovered!

However, the fact is that food inspectors do not generally look very closely at the products which do not have lists of ingredients. Therefore, as things stand, we have very little protection against abuse.

Until public pressure and government action puts this situation to rights there is no reason at all why responsible manufacturers should not voluntarily tell us what is in their drinks. There will be a free, signed copy of this book and a place in history for the first three producers of alcoholic drinks who change their policy by listing all those additives and processing aids in all their products.