{"id":4923,"date":"2016-03-25T04:00:25","date_gmt":"2016-03-25T10:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/?p=4923"},"modified":"2016-03-25T07:48:49","modified_gmt":"2016-03-25T13:48:49","slug":"wine-scaremongers-slapped-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wine-scaremongers-slapped-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Wine Scaremongers Slapped Down — For Now"},"content":{"rendered":"
Remember the arsenic-in-wine lawsuit that generated so many headlines last March? The whole thing was a load of horseshit, as reported here at The Brutal Hammer<\/a> and elsewhere: a transparent attempt to scare the public and enrich a pack of lawyers and other schemers. Finally, almost exactly a year later, a California judge has tossed<\/a> the bogus suit.<\/p>\n The would-be safety monitors claimed that 83 different California wines contained dangerously high levels of arsenic, fingering some of the most popular (and most profitable) labels — Franzia, Beringer, Sutter Home, to name just a few. But the whole thing stank from the start. BeverageGrades, the outfit that conducted the tests and uncovered these “dangerous” levels of arsenic, immediately began peddling its services to provide “retailers reassurance from arsenic in wine” — the classic ploy of conjuring up a supposed problem, then selling the solution.<\/p>\n BeverageGrades refused to disclose<\/a> its methodology to reporters, and its results disagreed<\/a> with independent tests conducted by CBS News. It also turned out that the European Union and Canada, both of which test for arsenic in imported foodstuffs, had no issue with allowing these “tainted” wines within their borders.<\/p>\n