20 YEARS AFTER METHANOL SCANDAL A VICTORY FOR QUALITY. COMMENTS ON EVENT THAT MARKED TURNING POINT FOR WINE PRODUCERS AND CONSUMERS

Real Italian wine has just celebrated its twentieth anniversary. In fact, according to many, quality Italian wine was not the norm until after the notorious events that took place in February 1986. At that time, one of the most serious scandals of the wine world exploded and Italians were to discover that drinking cheap wine could cause death. Due to high amounts of methanol added to lower quality wines, 22 people lost their lives, and, many more considered themselves lucky to have just lost their eyesight.
But from these events, lessons were learned. After the tragic results from cutting wine with methanol to increase alcohol levels, the Italian wine industry was forced to push up its sleeves and begin the long hard task of recreating faith in its products. The methanol disaster happened to occur during a particular moment for the market, which was experiencing an export boom. In 1985 exports had reached almost 17 million hectoliters. In 1986, that number dropped drastically to just under 10 million hectoliters exported. Today, after two decades of a slow but unrelenting return, export levels are back up to 15 million hectoliters. But the distinguishing factor is now the quality of the product and, as a consequence, also its value. Exports now earn about 3 billion euros, while in 1985 the total was about 1,500 billion lira.
At the time of the methanol scandal Ezio Rivella was president of the Italian Enologist Association. “The scandal made a switch click with consumers - Rivella noted - among whom, up to that point, there had been a push for the lowest prices and it was only after that occasion [the methanol poisoning] that they understood what it really meant to buy cheap wine”.
According to Rivella, it became clear after the methanol scandal that a quality product would cost more and “the market opened up to more expensive wines, higher quality wines, and closed to cheaper products: this was the virtuous mechanism”. But the president of Italian enologists also has some bitter memories of the episode: “Our category was targeted even though we were not at all responsible - Rivella explained - the guilty ones were the witch doctors who had invented a product that should not have existed”.
Marchese Piero Antinori, another top name in wine, thinks along the same lines as Rivella, and pointed out that the methanol tragedy initially seemed to be the “de profundis of wine”, but actually sparked a “virtuous mechanism” both among producers who “had to start doing things more seriously”, as well as among consumers who realized they had to pay “a fair price for a genuine product and that it can’t cost less than mineral water”.
Francesca Planeta, the young Sicilian producer, was just 15 years old at the time of the scandal: “In that period Sicily was experiencing a different problem, that of bulk wine, which was being sold for the sole purpose of cutting other wines”. But the methanol incident had an effect even on that front. “It can be said that by the mid 80’s and the early 90’s - continued Planeta - an emphasis on quality and investments in research were increasing; in the last 6 or 7 years this phenomenon has exploded, although there is still quite a ways to go”.
In any case, the methanol story sparked a revolution. “It shook up the sector - pointed out Andrea Sartori, president of the Italian Wine Union - because starting with that episode, producers quit just talking about changing and managed to start truly orienting themselves towards quality: methanol changed the minds of producers and consumers”.
The last words to WineNews director, Alessandro Regoli, who has no doubts about the issue: “ Italian wine, the real kind, was born exactly on that date twenty years ago”.