REAL LIFE NEWS: WINE LABELS UNDERSTATE ALCOHOL CONTENT
by Hazed
How much alcohol does a bottle of wine contain? You can find out by reading the label. At least, you could if the labels were reliable –but it turns out they are not.
It’s not even a case of the manufacturers making a mistake. No, according to recent reports, they deliberately misstate the alcohol content in order to meet customers’ expectations.
A study by the University of California took samples from nearly 100,000 bottles of wine from across the world. They found that in nearly 60% of the bottles, the alcohol content was higher than that stated on the label, by an average of 0.42%.
The biggest discrepancies were in Chilean and Spanish reds, and Chilean and American whites.
The research showed “a tendency to overstate the alcohol content for wine that has relatively low actual alcohol, and a tendency to understate the alcohol content for wine that has relatively high alcohol content.”
That certainly makes it hard to judge how many glasses you should drink before you are over the drink-drive limit, or when you should stop drinking to avoid a hangover!
