Thursday, January 01, 2009

Hello,
I just ordered your organic wines. I did have a question that maybe you could answer. I recently heard on a TV news program about wines tested contained metals. They listed the wines from 3 countries that had no metals. They were Brazil, Venezuela, and Italy. Why would wines have metal and were does the metals come from? Processing, soil? Any danger to health?
Thanks, Nancy
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Hi Nancy,
While this study has been drummed up if you look carefully at the way it has been conducted the results seem at a minimum unreliable or even not significant.
It is a meta study, gathering results of a bunch of previous studies and the way these things are put together and weighted is central to the quality of the results you get. Unfortunately this kind of occurrence is frequent nowadays in journalism under the cover of “science”!
The presence of lead for instance may be attributed to studies done before 94 when lead capsules were still in use (for expensive wines mind you) and therefore be totally irrelevant nowadays. It is not clear either if the amount found of any of the co-called heavy metals (I did not think Manganese belonged to them) is really significant in terms of their bioactivity. All of that seems pulled by the hair.

Based on these results I would not worry about it. In any case, if metals are found in wine, apart form copper which is widely used in the fields as an anti mildew, they probably come from their presence in pesticides or weed killers or even as pollutants in synthetic fertilizers. Since none of these are used in organic agriculture, this particular risk is probably close to 0 when you drink organically grown wines anyway.

All the best

Dr Mic

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