Drinking and health – you pays your money and you takes your choice. This week, we’re all gonna die.

Heavy metals in wine could pose potential health problems to regular drinkers, claims a scientific report published today.

RAWK!!! Drink, Drink and be Damned!

The report, which appeared in the online journal Chemistry Central, claims that a daily 250ml glass of red wine could expose wine drinkers to hazardous levels of metal ions linked to Parkinson’s disease and cancer. 

According to the study, wines from Portugal, Hungary, France and Austria are among those to have dangerous levels of metal ions. Argentinian, Brazilian and Italian wines registered very small levels of the so-called ‘heavy metals’. 

Using a formula developed in the US to estimate health risks, boffins at Kingston University in London analysed the wines against a Target Health Quotient (THQ). A THQ of one is considered safe. Looking at a range of elements including vanadium, manganese, chromium, zinc, copper, nickel and lead, the researchers found that THQ levels in red wine were around 110. 

Professor Declan Naughton, co-author of the report, called for consumers to be made aware of the risks. 

‘Levels of metal ions should appear on wine labels,’ he said, ‘along with the introduction of further steps to remove key hazardous metal ions during wine production.’ 

Naughton, who told decanter.com he still enjoyed drinking red wine, stressed he was calling for a ‘regulatory push’ – not an end to wine drinking. 

He said he could only speculate as to how metal ions get into wine, but that soil types, vineyard sprays and yeasts were the likely culprits. The study added that ‘processing and packaging may add to the metal’. 

Although it contains some of the highest levels of metal ions, wine is not alone is posing a risk. Apple juice and stout was also found to have a THQ above one. 

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has tried to reassure consumers, saying it has yet to review the findings in full. A spokesperson for the FSA said the scientists’ methods were ‘not widely used in Europe’.  

If only Thames water could make this kind of mistake.

I just turned on the tap and there it was!

Quoting from Decanter online from an article by Lucy Shaw -

“Inhabitants of a tiny Italian town thought there had been a miraculous intervention yesterday when wine started flowing from the taps in their kitchens

The ‘miracle’ occurred during the town’s annual harvest festival, the Sagra dell’ Uva, in Marino, south of Rome. 

A huge crowd, gathered in the square to witness the annual spurting of 3,000 litres of the year’s newly pressed vintage from the Fountain of the Four Moors, became increasingly restless as the fountain continued to produce only the usual trickle of water. 

But then a shout of ‘miracolo’ rang out from a nearby house and a woman appeared at her balcony to announce that wine was flowing from her kitchen tap. 

It transpired that instead of connecting the wine to the 17th century fountain, plumbers had hooked the pipes from the local vineyard into Marino’s domestic water supply. 

One resident said, ‘I was in the kitchen to fill a bucket with water. I immediately noticed a sweet smell from the tap and recognised instantly it was wine. Word quickly spread and everyone filled up bottles and plastic containers with the wine.’ 

Mayor of Marino, Adriano Palozzi said, ‘It was a surprise and completely unexpected. People were calling it a miracle which it wasn’t – it was a mistake.’ 

The Castelli Romani area has been producing straw-coloured, slightly effervescent, white wines since the Roman times. Known generically as Frascati, the wine is made from trebbiano and malvasia grapes. “