Cooking & EatingWine is often only a pittance in the supermarket. This is only possible through large-scale production and the use of pesticides and that does not seem without risk, the makers of the TV program discovered The prize stunner.
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Wine for an apple and egg is very normal in the Netherlands. For 3.5 euros you can already buy a liter of white wine, red wine or rosé. That can never be good quality, says wine seller Erik Tax, who speaks in the TV program The price stunner from KRO-NCRV that can be seen tomorrow evening on NPO 3.
In other words, you can make wine with that price tag, but only by growing, harvesting, making and bottling grapes on a large scale. Peter-Josef Zenzen, wine merchant, shows in the episode of the new program that he bottles wine from all over the world: from California to Australia. Bottling at one central point is much cheaper than bottled wine at the winery where the grapes grew.
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There is also very little romantic to discover about harvesting: no human hand is involved. Large machines remove all the trusses from the vine plants, which come with branches and leaves. The yields are small and the supermarkets have the winemakers by the throat. They are instructed to deliver wine for a certain price and how they do it is their problem, Zenzen admits. “If I don’t deliver, I don’t have a job.”
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Wine full of pesticides
To increase production, the winegrowers use grape varieties that supply a lot of grapes. These species are susceptible to diseases, which makes spraying with pesticides commonplace, winegrower Patrick Farbos admits. He and his colleagues also work with weed killers. The result: cheap wine (Zenzen prefers to refer to it as ‘affordable wine’) contains pesticides. Up to 26 different species, according to scientist Violette Geissen.
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We don’t throw our hat at it
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Dangerous, says Valérie Murat, who joins the non-profit organization Toxic Alert has been committed to the fight against pesticides for many years. Winegrowers in some wine regions resort to chemical agents as many as twenty times between April and September.
Sylvie Berger can agree that this is not without danger. Pesticides made her sick. She worked in the French vineyards and now suffers from Parkinson’s. In France, this is now a recognized occupational disease. That is why she receives a benefit from the French government. However, that does not mean that pesticides are banned. Winegrower Patrick Farbos states that he is not doing anything wrong. He follows the rules and feels he has no choice. “We don’t throw our hats at it.”
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