How a Salad Bar Disaster Changed the Course of U.S. Wine History
Republishing my classic article, a year in the making, on how the U.S. got such weird organic wine labeling rules
This landmark story was originally written for Pix.com, but since Pix is no more, I’m bringing back. It was an important article I wrote that launched to high praise.
The history of the no sulfite weirdness in the U.S. goes back aways. And it was a real detective story finding the facts...took me a whole year plus a chance encounter on a bus in St. Chinian with an American importer who knew where many of the bones were buried.
Unveil the truths in the fog of history here.
Will there ever be hope for certified organic wine grapes? Can the industry rid itself of this outdated stigma? Or is it just too convenient for the dominant conventional players to cling to this old stereotype? Meanwhile we know younger consumers are clamoring for organically grown wines (per Wine Market Council and NIQ data).
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Confusion over organic wine sulfites has plagued the industry since the early 1980s.
A pitched battle between anti-sulfite purists, many in the food sector, and the mainstream U.S. wine industry led to laws about organic wine that have been confusing for decades.
The result is the U.S. has wine laws specifying three different sulfite standards, whereas the E.U. only has one.
It’s a situation that has caused confusion for consumers and held back the cause of organic wines. And it was all thanks to the salad bar. The salad bar?
Salad wars
By 1985, salad bars were so popular that even Burger King introduced one, complete with a now famous TV commercial featuring model Elle MacPherson. The video juxtaposed her “perfect 10” body with close-ups of broccoli, tomatoes, and lettuce.
But salad bars had a secret problem. Lettuce wilts or turns brown. To prevent that, restaurants put lettuce in sulfite solutions ― but some didn’t measure carefully.
Sulfites can affect people with asthma. People with a rare genetic defect called multiple sulfatase deficiency can have reactions. Soon there were 500 reports of sulfite reactions, some mild, others severe. Authorities reported that 13 people died from salad bar sulfite solutions.
But the dose makes the difference, according to wine chemistry expert Andy Waterhouse, director of the Robert Mondavi Institute of Wine and Food Science at University of California, Davis.
“There are reports of severe and life-threatening reactions when sulfites were added at erroneously and enormously high levels,” he wrote about the salad bar sulfites scare, adding that the amounts in salad bar sulfites were as much as 100 times higher than recommended.
In 1986, the outcry over the deaths led the Food and Drug Administration to ban sulfite solutions on raw fruits and vegetables and to require sulfite labeling on foods with greater or equal to 10 parts per million of sulfites.
The next year, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the federal agency that regulates wine, chose to follow the FDA’s lead and declared that any wine with greater or equal to 10 parts per million of sulfites had to put sulfites on the label.
The decision was made without evidence-based, peer-reviewed published medical studies showing wine sulfites were a health hazard.
