"Very high levels of arsenic" in top-selling wines

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/lawsuit-claims-high-levels-arsenic-found-some-california-made-wines/

Mar. 19, 2015

Following recent warnings about the amount of arsenic in apple juice and rice, a proposed class action lawsuit is being filed Thursday in California that claims some of the country's top selling wines have high levels of the element: up to four and five times the maximum amount the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allows for drinking water, reports CBS News correspondent Carter Evans.

There are almost no federal labeling requirements to tell you what's really in wine, that's why a Denver laboratory started running tests to find out.

After 15 years working in the wine distribution business, Kevin Hicks started BeverageGrades, a laboratory that analyzes wine. What he discovered shocked him.

"Some very, very high levels of arsenic," Hicks said.

He tested more than 1,300 bottles of wine. Almost a quarter of them had levels higher than the EPA's maximum allowable amount of arsenic in drinking water: 10 parts per billion. No one can say for sure why, but Hicks noticed a pattern.

"The lower the price of wine on a per-liter basis, the higher the amount of arsenic," he said.

They included Trader Joe's famed Two-Buck Chuck White Zinfandel, which came in at three times the limit, a bottle of Ménage à Trois Moscato was four times the limit and a Franzia Blush had five times the EPA limit for drinking water.

He took the test results to some of those wine companies.

"Most wine companies, when I mention arsenic and wine in the same sentence, literally almost hung up the phone on me," he said.

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"We've done testing with two separate labs," Kabateck said.

He said they've checked Hicks' results and they "absolutely" stand up.

CBS News took those results to epidemiologist Allan Smith, associate director of the Arsenic Health Effects research program at U.C. Berkeley.

"These are about two to three times in this particular sample, the drinking water standard, and they vary, they fluctuated, but some of them were up to three, four or five times the drinking water standard," Smith said.

Smith said 50 parts per billion of arsenic -- the highest level found in one of the bottles Hicks tested -- can be deadly over time.

Even though "parts per billion" seems like a very small amount, Smith said "Arsenic is highly toxic; it's astonishing."

"It has as many effects inside the body as cigarette smoking does," Smith said.

But he based that on studies of drinking water, which is the only beverage with an arsenic limit set by the U.S. government.

"We estimate that approximately 1 in 100 people who drink water like that throughout their life will die from the arsenic, ultimately, due to mostly cancers from it," Smith said.

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CBS News also spot-checked and tested the four wines listed in the lawsuit. They were not the same vintages, but the arsenic levels were all considerably lower than BeverageGrades' results. One of them, the Wine Group's Flip Flop Pinot Grigio, came in within the acceptable federal arsenic levels for water.

The others were at or above that limit, including Trader Joe's Two Buck Chuck White Zinfandel, which tested at more than twice that standard.