Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 30: Austrian Wine Tainting Scandal

Episode Date: June 18, 2020

More organic chemistry urrrrgh DONATE TO BAIL FUNDS AND ETC AND PROVIDE THE RECEIPT TO US VIA TWITTER OR E-MAIL AND WE WILL SEND YOU THE BONUS EPISODES: https://www.phillybailfund.org/ https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bail_funds_george_floyd https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019 E-MAIL IS IN THE CHANNEL ABOUT PAGE austrian wine By Mussklprozz - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1216323 red wine By André Karwath aka Aka - File:Red Wine Glas.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28162331 rose By Agne27 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21880373 sparkling wine By bgvjpe - originally posted to Flickr as champagne, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5236631 fortified wine By Jon Sullivan - pdphoto.orghttp://pdphoto.org/PictureDetail.php?oldpg=2479, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25990 mead By Stormbringer76 - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9031743 wine press By Sanjay Acharya - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4670436 grapes By Dragonflyir - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18407480 fermenting must By Agne27 - English Wikipedia [1], CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2975990 rotary kiln By Chmee2 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2162820

Hey, this is Justin in post-production. So we recorded this episode a while ago, so the goddamn news is not very current. Now since then we've entered into what historians call the cool zone, and that means there's probably some more important things for you all to do with your money than give it to us to get bonus episodes. So for the duration of the protest for George Floyd and against police brutality, you can donate to any of the charities listed below and send us the receipt via Twitter DM or email, and we'll send you the link to the bonus episodes instead of you all having to give

to our Patreon. So far you all have raised over $5,000 for bail funds across the country, which I guess means podcasting really is praxis. Um, anyway, so Black Lives Matter and on to the episode. Liam, you were you were upset about what a 24-hour club do you even need to be here about a three-day long club that you can go to? I can just go to the stage a long time. I can just go in a drinking binge and a drug use binge in my house in the hills of Kentucky,

nothing in Germany is a trip. I have been to Frankfurt, I achieved I achieved totally self actualization on the seventy face hour in this club and I was being jerked off by another man. And you, but which is fine. My objection is just like, God, for people with no sense of humor, the Germans are extraordinarily unusual. No, you get the Germans wrong. You have completely misunderstood the Germans in every sense.

Yeah, I wonder why that might be right. Let's go. Modern Germans, the current day Germans, the today Germans are not a people with no sense of humor. They're just a people who really don't like, they just think when it's time to have fun, they're just like, yes, we would get the most fun into this period of time. So why would we go to bed for just going to keep the club open from like Friday midnight to like Monday dinner time, like keep going throughout this whole time.

I like the introvert German a lot more, who is like, you know, I get home from my job at the like at the at the forklift driving factory. And then I play forklift driving simulator all day. It's all stupid min max shit, right? You know, I'm trying to do the maximum amount of fun over the maximum amount of time, which either involves using all my spare time to go get jacked off at the club or I pick the job, which is my dream job, which is driving a forklift. And then I drive a virtual forklift in my spare time.

There's they're all so much happier than us. And I resent them for that immensely. Right. I don't believe people should be happy. Every German is fundamentally a power gamer like they've all like that's the thing that their entire culture is based on realizing like, wait a minute, everybody likes the breakdowns of something like electronic music like was born when people in America were realizing that the breakdowns of the songs and the records, the people that like the

parts that people were having the most fun with. And so the first DJ started cutting those parts out of records, buying multiple copies of them, and then stitching them back together so that they could have entire records that were just these beat heavy breakdowns of songs that they could then mix together. Like that's how it was born. And the Germans were like, what if we just like made this originally just made nothing but the breakdown. And then we had this party of nothing but the breakdown for like two, three days.

The most our economy could bear subsidize the party as a vice, it will not go on long enough for us to achieve transcendence. No, I mean, honestly, like, um, I, I, I, I often say, like, um, there are several points of my life that I would consider pinnacles. And I'd say like, I don't know, of the top 10, five of them have been spent inside Burghain. Oh, God. Yeah.

Jesus Christ. No, I'm here. Here we are, folks. Welcome to Well, there's your problem, a podcast about German clubs. Will come and I'll do your problem. Oh, I have so many opinions about different clubs in different parts of Germany. Cutters, Mike.

Cutters, Mike. It's my Zencastre session, babies. Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. Yeah, this is a hostile situation. We're camped of audience. Now you have to hear my opinion. It's about pay in Munich.

Got a club in Munich sounds like that. I like that. We Munich is the worst city on earth. No, it's really bad. Um, it's like, there's lots of beer. But I put some there. You get beer in Nuremberg and it's much less fascist. Frankfurt's the worst city with the worst airport.

Oh, yeah. Frankfurt's Frankfurt's not great. I mean, honestly, for me, it's Berlin and Hamburg like tied. Yeah. Like anywhere in west or south Germany, just fucked vibes for 100% fucked vibes, you've got to go, you've got to go east. There are parts of Berlin that are that are pretty fascist. Yeah, I know.

But like, I'm still thinking about how in like 1990, the East German government opened a state subsidized gay bar just because they thought it would be cool. Like that's the energy that I want from my socialism. Well, you know the, you know, the story behind Burkheim? No, it's that two guys had a party called snacks. Like a gay, like a gay sex party called snacks in an abandoned pool. OK.

And then the the newly unified like Berlin, like city government was like, you could all burn to death in here because there is literally not a single fire exit in one ladder out of the pool that you're all fucking in. Please go somewhere else. It was a Sims 2 style situation. Yeah, it was a Sims 2 thing. And then the two guys who who started snacks bought this like old abandoned East German power plant for like $10 and then just renovated it.

And then snacks slowly transformed into Burkheim. And then they hired this guy who was a like a gay, like a gay punk from East Berlin called Sven Marquardt who work on the door. And then Sven had this whole idea that he wanted to curate the crowd to be like this German man goes down a line and decides which of you are acceptable is not like a great thing. Vibes wise, nine, nine. The fascism is gay now.

So yeah, this is that the the reason the East German economy cratered after reunification is they just took every productive facility and turned it into a nightclub. And that was just dumb as hell, like every factory, every warehouse. They're all nightclubs now. Yeah, I love I love the back story of every gay club when you get into it a little bit is just the steel mill from that episode of The Simpsons. We work hard, we play hard.

Yeah, but like and now it's it's really funny. There are lots. There's a whole economy in Berlin that's grown up around supplying people who want to go to Burghain with the kind of clothes that Sven likes. This guy's like a this has like a French child king level of control of like a whole social order in Berlin at rules. So there's a store called UY Studios. It's one that OK, it's one that coincidentally I have a lot of clothes

from and also your full blooded Italian shirt from. I have two kinds of clothes, right, Alice? I've got my Burghain clothes and then I have my clothes I buy because I think it's a punchline and for example, right now I'm wearing my full blooded Italian one because I'm like walking a small dog in West London. And I think it's very funny to be walking around like a fucking weed. Oh, my God. All right, we have to talk about wine.

We also we also have to do the introductions, which is like destroyed podcast once again. This is my favorite episode I've been on already. We're talking about everything I'm interested in. We're talking about techno. We're talking about why because you control the audio recording. You can like wish us into the cornfield. So we all have to do it. Exactly.

We have we. Anyway, I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the I'm the person who's talking right now. I've been talking about we're going to talk about I. I don't want to do the dumb credential thing anymore. Everyone knows. Yeah, so anyway. Oh, interesting. We're done. We're done talking about credentials when I come on.

Yeah, that's right. You can talk about your degree if you want to. No, I won't. I will. What are your pronouns, Justin? Oh, my pronouns are he and him. Sweet. I was called while Kelly, my pronouns are she and her. I have no qualifications whatsoever and I'm being treated well by my audio counselors.

Lea Anderson, my pronouns are he and him. I am making this recording under duress. Just blanking out torture and worse code. We're all doing USS Fueblo shit. Yeah, I'm Riley Quinn from Trashfugir, Riley's. Riley's Alice's co-host. Also your own co-host. Yeah, I'm also my own co-host on that other show we host.

My pronouns are he and he and him as well. And I'm actually not holding these hosts under duress. This is, again, a kind of kink we all agreed to do in the basement of Lab Oratory, another club in Berlin. Why would it be called that? Why? Never mind. Because they're inventing new kinds of weird sex to have. I see. Well, I mean, get more power to them.

But like, like when, when Berghine became like kind of like just a club segment. Yes. When this is all over, I'm just going to go to a quiet, sad bar in Port Richmond. John Dorton's RIP. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So this is where we got to. The music's real quiet here. Yeah, we're really keeping it on. Hold up. Hold up. I'll move the the what do I have?

Yeah. OK, it's. Oh, god damn it. Where's the fucking shit I can probably probably find. OK, I got it. I got it. So right, I'll do the news again. And you can like you're also not full screen on the screen sharing thing. I don't know if that matters. Really? Yeah, we're just looking at the thing the whole the whole sharing the right thing.

And like hopefully it's recording the right screen. And just you're not in the slideshow is all I know what the thing is, is the thing the thing is doing the thing. Oh, come on. Is it fixed now? I can tell you about how laboratory was founded. We're waiting for this. Yeah, it wants to let me try and on. There we go.

That looks right. OK. Well, welcome to Well, there's your problem. An engineering podcast about engineering disasters. All right, fine. Now we're going to hear the news. Yes. OK, so. In our first piece of news for the day. Hold on a second. That OK, there goes our first piece of news.

Such a smooth podcast show the fuck up the Canadians. You know how they're doing these flyovers everywhere? Yeah, morale for morale. Well, the Canadians fucked up and wrecked their fancy aerobatics jet into somebody's house. Oh, man. Demonstrating your support for the key workers by like blowing up a small part of them. Yes, let's all be honest, right?

This was literally a matter of time. Every single country had decided all together that they were going to instead of like funding their national health systems, we're just going to be like, well, it's cheap, it's slightly cheaper to burn a lot of jet fuel. So let's do that. Anyway, we also have like just military supply chains that are 90 percent graft, so I'm pretty sure we're flying a paper airplane anyway. It's going to be fine.

We're just all flying our combat air force at 100 percent capacity all the time because we'd rather do that than fund the health system. It's never going to crash. Of course, it's going to happen. It's going to happen the whole time, because this is all anyone was doing. OK, but how funny is it that it happened in Canada, though? It's pretty funny. Yeah, it's pretty funny.

Like I never heard the Blue Angels crashing into anyone. It's pretty funny because Canada also has a particularly fraught history of military aviation procurement, like the Canadian history of military aviation procurement is like 80 percent boondoggles. Wasn't there an RCAF officer who was also like a literal serial killer? So. Oh, yeah, that's absolutely for sure. Also, like I don't know, maybe like the Avro Arrow almost might be worth doing a Well, There's Your Problem podcast about where like Canada spent like

billions and billions of dollars designing a stealth airplane that like where they they made one and it flew for like a minute. It's like an F 35, but it's where I can do a moose. Yeah, it's got big antlers like it's got a beaver tail. Yeah, that's right. That's not reducing the radar across the chair at all. The funny thing is we did it for it was like one of the it was we tried to do it like when the first like fighter jets were being made.

So I've got the dates here. It's first flight was in the 25th of March, 1958. Anyone want to guess when it was canceled? Oh, it lasted all the way until February, 1959. Wow. That's incredible. Almost a year. And it was like it's I actually in my like history class in Canadian high school. I learned about this is like in history class, it was that big of a boondoggle.

I love that. I love that you call Canadian high school, Canadian high school. Like you have to say the whole thing every time. Oh, man, I don't want to go to Canadian high school today. Every subject has a at the end. Well, I'm taking trigonometry. A yeah, anyway. It's a trick you like to university. Here's the thing.

It's utterly it's utterly unsurprising that eventually someone wrecked one of the aerobatics jets in support of the carers into someone's house because I mean, come on, we keep flying jets. It's going to happen. Yeah, you know what they should have done? They should have got the French guy from last time who just ejected from the jet on his own in this. Yes.

Yeah. And secondly, it's totally unsurprising that it's the Canadians because we have a very checkered history with military aviation procurement. Well, like the house looks OK. Like it just looks like a lawn dart just like plowed into the guy's lawn. It wasn't a jettos or missile. I'm panicking. I'm truthering this house. Yeah. But Bush did whatever this was. Unfortunate.

What? They're in Crawford Ranch just painting painting a little portrait of a dog with secret instructions in it. Yeah. All right. In in our second. In our second piece of news, you're going to dwell on. So. Oh, that's not good. Yeah, two dams collapsed in Michigan and they flooded a bunch of stuff. Hey, hey, hey, check this out.

Well, there's your problem. He said the name of the thing. Yes, it's true. It's clever. So this is a 1925 Earthen Dam in Edenville, Michigan. It collapsed and that caused another dam further downstream to also collapse. Where's my where's my? Would you would you describe the status of God's love as being mysterious right now?

Yes. Yes. And then this this water is all now flowing down into the city of Midland, Michigan, which is where Dow Chemical is headquartered. Oh, no. Or one of the headquarters. And that's where they make the boobit play. Yes. Back up a bit. What? Oh, yeah.

So there's this big, big chemical plant here. Big chemical plant, right? And they make silicone here, not to be confused with silicone, which is the microchip thing. This is silicone, which is the fake boob thing. Oh, I'd love to get two fake boobs and call that silicone valley. Yes, I was getting the confused with DuPont. Now is Midland, Michigan.

Oh, boy. That's the suck kids. Yeah. So. So this river here is now flooded like up to like some massive flood stage, like 18, 19 feet or something, right? So all these you see all these retention ponds up here. They're full of bad things and they've all flooded. So now all that bad stuff is everywhere.

This big pond in the front is for a cogen. It's not so bad. It's just a cooling pond. Does that mean that like people are going to start posting now when they can't think of something fun to say they're going to say something like Midland still doesn't have clean water? Yeah, probably. But also you're going to find like a bunch of fish in like 10 years with massive tits.

That's right. This is someone wish on a cursed monkey's paw for to fuck Ariel from Little Mermaid. For the one with the three boobs are totally we got recall. Yeah, I was thinking about that. Yeah, it's like the fish with three eyes from the Simpsons, but with three boobs. Yeah, it's the controllable boob growth. Yeah. Again, this is another one of those things that was inevitable, right?

Because we just decided, well, we have all this infrastructure from the sort of New Deal era before just by a river. Yeah. Why the fuck would you not build it by a river? No, you know, nothing's ever going to happen. Well, also again, it's like we decided we have this infrastructure from the sort of 20 years surrounding the New Deal on either end. And we assume that's the end of it. And the rest of all of society's resources can go to, you know,

Furby's and, you know, supply chain derivatives and, you know, I don't know, really get our missions to the moon. Like we're done. We're done maintaining dams, which are boring. And now we can make like a drone that bombs you with makeup. Well, like the thing is right, a 50 year flood happens once in 50 years. That's what you designed to. There's nothing that's going to cause it to become more often than that.

Oh, absolutely. Not nothing. Well, I mean, and it's incredible because this this infrastructure was owned and controlled by a Randian Superman and captain of industry. This is Lee Miller, Lee Muller of Las Vegas, Nevada. Was he in this guy's drone by Ali Vali? And one one fun fact is he refused to do eighty three thousand dollars worth of repairs to the Sanford Dam.

That's the lower one because he thought it was adjacent property owners. Responsibility to pay for the reservoir. Sorry, I like hillbilly side yard dispute has now destroyed a gigantic chemical company and washed all of its like leavings into a nearby town, all of its fake boobs just like floating like like fucking cherry blossom on the water. I've got gold sculch with fake boob. This is like the fucking like Frank

that you get in like a college movie, but it's like a boob house has flooded the town with boobs. Yeah, it just. Hey, you know what? This is what objectivism is all about. It's about the triumphal figure of the businessman fucking up and being like a Benny Hill sketch. Pretty cool that he has those like dad glasses, though. You don't see those as often these days.

My dad wears those actually. Hmm. Yeah, well, you know, he's got he's got to, you know, he's got to see what's going on directly underneath him. He's got to be able to have that fight. Absolutely. Like our peripheral vision has been like greatly damaged by us stopping wearing dad glasses. So wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, everyone wears the accepted

exceptionally thin advertiser spectacles. Yeah, I look good and leave me alone. My question is, has he had to like how do you square objectivism with this happening to something that you've been too stupid to maintain fake news, fake news? Yeah. So you know, it didn't collapse. No, I didn't have it collapsed because of welfare queens. Yeah. And Tifa came and like flooded the river.

The government stopped me from maintaining my property because of regulations. If they let me build it with just paint and Papier Mache, then maybe I would have had an incentive to keep it maintained. Yes. Well, like this guy is going to like die of hydroxychloroquine overdose in like a week anyway. So who cares? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Anyway, this is this is basically a perpetratorless crime

because this guy has already ingested nine different kinds of poisons to piss off Jake Tapper. Anyway, that was the goddamn news. Oh, yeah. So yes, today we're talking about wine in Austria, specifically in 1985 on a podcast for so long. And my Pagish co-hosts will not let me talk. OK, I'll buy what's wine? What is wine?

I'm going to preface everything I say in this episode. I'm not a not a sommelier. I have made wine in my basement. Big job. Big job, anyway. Yeah. Sommelier. Yeah. So is that how you say it? A sommelier decides which anecdote from the battle of the psalm the diners are to be told to accentuate their food.

I don't I don't know anything about wine. Um, so the only one who does is Riley. Hello, Mike. I used to work at the liquor store. I know stuff. I I I've had two bottles of wine this evening. No, I want to hear from Liam instead. Tell us about liquor store wines. I mean, the liquor stores in Pennsylvania. OK, cool. So for those of you who don't live in Pennsylvania,

I we are a control state. And what that means in Pennsylvania terms is that the state up until a few years ago was the only place you could get wine and liquor. It's changed now, so you can still only get liquor in state stores as well as some other weird kind of esoteric stuff like in Pennsylvania. Anything apple flavored, like a cider, but like a cider, anything that's made for fermented from apples above a certain ABV is classified as wine.

So it's up to the state whether it decides to sell or not, which is the whole other thing. But I but you're really getting mad at the concept of cider being classified as wine. It's different. Oh, by the way, I forgot. I forgot I had a secret weapon that was going to destroy Justin's entire worldview. So long as no one has broken Omerta and told him.

No. Alice, you haven't. Justin. What? Justin, are you there? Yes. Guess what's real? What? The Pennsylvania Secret Service. Really? It's literally true. Yeah, we found this out on the stream last night because Riley went guling and he found the Pennsylvania Secret Service. Now, granted, it's not the Pennsylvania Secret Service

in the sense that I wanted, which is a secret service that's like administered by and responsible to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Right. But the Secret Service's Philadelphia Field Office calls itself the Pennsylvania Secret Service. And as such, they have like a web page and everything with Pennsylvania Secret Service on it that is just full of the most Pennsylvania Secret Service crimes imaginable. It's like small scale credit card fraud, right?

Like, yeah, I tried to pass some counterfeit bills off at the Wawa. Yes, I think that big bus was right there in the federal building. Yeah, I think it was like two guys who like cloned like, I don't know, a couple of hundred credit card numbers, which is not a large number. Oh, I'm going to tell you right now. Oh, good. OK. I'll tell you exactly what happened. Then we'll go back to wine. But it was a December 20th.

Also, they don't keep their website updated. The last time they updated their website was 2013. I mean, that's a highly Pennsylvania Secret Service move. Yeah, it's a 13 conviction. The Secret Service agents were active. Pennsylvania Secret Service agents were actively involved in an investigation that result in the December 2013 conviction by a Harrisburg jury of two men found guilty of stealing approximately a hundred credit card

numbers from Harrisburg banks. The pair was initially spotted in a target trying to buy gift cards. Real sick, sons of bitches. Yeah, so that's the Pennsylvania Secret Service right there. I'm still so mad that like I with my Patreon money last month, I tried to buy Pennsylvania Secret Service badges and I got an email a week later from like pigcopsupply.com or whatever. That's like, sorry, we won't make these because they've got Secret Service on.

No, it's got Pennsylvania Secret Service. It's a different thing, but they literally refunded my money because they wouldn't print it because that person is real. Anyway, sorry, Roz, I feel like I had to tell you that because someone had to and I wanted it to be me, but the Pennsylvania Secret Service is real. Anyway, I also I adore in seconds now. Also, I'm like wackadoo about wine.

And so I've been very excited to do this episode for quite a while. And so, you know, I'm I'm I'm just I'm just here. I'm ready to talk about why I love Austrian wine. I used to my first job when I was a young was in a winery. I'm fun. Yes, I worked in a winery called Stratus, which was an estate winery. So that means that they made wine with grapes grown on the property

and they had seven red varietals and five white varietals. And out of those varietals, they did an assemblage, a red and a white, where they blend it to taste every year based on the expression of the vineyard of that year. And it's like scenes from the class struggle, right? Working on working in the like vineyard place and working in the liquor store, right? It was it was really lovely. And I and my my parents actually destroyed the staff discount program because they were like, yes, I've got 25 percent off whatever.

But I was like a teenager and they just assumed that staff would buy like one or two bottles of wine for themselves. Like dad rolled in. It was just like, yes, please. I'd like to buy our house wine for the year. And then they were like, well, we have to give you 25 percent off of that. But we're going to no more. Strong dad move, right? I respect that to like Min Max, your your kid's staff discount, right?

Like very, very German. Yeah, but like the thing is, right? Most most kids don't get their first jobs at places where dads want to buy stuff. This is like if if your son gets a job at like Old Navy or something and you like you just roll in and like start stacking pairs of Bermuda shorts on the counter and just like, yeah, 20 percent motherfucker. No, yeah. So no, and it basically it it fostered in me a real like just sort of hopeless adoration of wine.

I've loved it ever since and I find myself sort of helpless before it now. And so for a while, I've been looking for different disasters that have involved wineries and this is this is the one we settled on. And I'm very excited to talk about it. I mean, this is OK. So if we go very much back to basics, wine is made of fermented apples in the states of Pennsylvania. So there's many kinds of wines.

There's white wines. There's red wines. There's Rosé's. There's orange wines. Orange wines are great. Well, what the fuck is an orange? Why are you ferment oranges? No, no, no.

And orange wine is made when you take white wine grapes. But OK, so red wine is made when you you crush like red wine grapes and you leave them on the skins for a few days. The thing where you like you have like you have like a guy stomp on the grapes and like a bucket, right? But then you don't like strain the skins off. You leave them on for a few days or longer, sometimes. And then that leeches the tannins, which is what makes red wine

kind of make you pucker up. It leeches that into the wine and also gives it its color and so on and so on. You can leech it for you can leave it on the skins for any different amount of time, depending on like what grape you're making, what kind of wine you're making, what you want, the climates, like whatever. Orange wine is made when you do that with white grapes and then you also leave it on the skins because usually with white grapes, the standard white grapes used to take the skins off immediately.

You don't let any of that tannin seep in. Whereas with orange wine, it's basically white wide made with a red wine method, and it was very unfashionable for quite a long time. But it sounds like this sounds like cheese, whereas like one of those things that was clearly invented by accident. And it's like, hey, we put the red grapes in the white thing. And then somebody's like, hey, this tastes pretty good, actually. Yeah, that's right.

And then it's telling it and dusted for a lot. Anyway, that's orange wine. But what's this? Hey, but if wine's so great, how did it become a disaster? Oh, we're going to learn. Yeah. There's like fortified wines, you add extra alcohol, like brandy. There's mead, which is sort of like wine. Then there's stuff that's not wine. Like brandy is brandy is distilled wine.

Oh, is it distilled? Yeah. Oh, yeah, it is. It's burned wine, literally, yeah. I'm a moron. Excuse me. That's where it's where brandy comes from is brand wine. Oh, well, I feel stupid. Anyway, that's basically this. Look, I'm I'm I'm a spirit scale.

There's basically two types of spirit, like there's the kind of spirit where you just like take your staple crop and leave it. And you usually call that something like water of life in your language, which then becomes whiskey or vodka, or there's the kind of we are already making wine and you distill that and that's brandy. And it's various like derivatives. All right. We should have grappa for this.

Jesus, I love the taste of gasoline. I'm not drinking and I feel so mad that I'm not drinking for this episode. Well, I've actually switched to wine for this episode, which is a rare occasion for me. What's your wine selection for this? Let's let's have Riley judge your wine choice. I have a I have a Castillo day of Montserran from Spain. Twenty eighteen vintage.

Yeah, seems fine. Yeah, it's got a castle in there. So, you know, it's good. I don't know. I'm not I'm not going to go on this podcast and be like, sounds good, but I don't know. I imagine it's drinkable. It's dry and it's red. I like that.

It was nine dollars. Yes, also good. So I've had two bottles of wine this evening. I have a a a Saint Estef, which is from Medoc. And that is usually like a cab Franck cab. So like standard Bordeaux grapes. That was from twenty fifteen. And then before dinner, that was with dinner before dinner.

I then also had a much more sort of lively and younger Grenache. I still don't understand wine talk. I don't understand the adjectives that you use for wine. Like how the fuck is it lively? Yeah, I'm not interested. I like look, I like there's two kinds of alcohol, right? There's the kind that punches me in the throat when I drink it. And there's the kind that doesn't.

But Alice, Alice, Alice, that's your mistake. Wine doesn't punch you in the throat. Wine punches you in the mouth. It's different. But I'm if I'm I'm not like it's no alcohol that I'm consuming is staying in my mouth long enough for me to taste anything. All right. So. Well, you ever clear.

Yes. Have you heard of a certain Mr. Ray and his nephew? All right. All right. There's also there's things like there's things that are called wine, which are not so like rice wine, not a wine, barley wine, not a wine. That's a beer. Wine was invented in Georgia in 6000 B.C.

OK, how do we make wine? Well, I guess Riley is the expert here. But we also kind of went through this already. Yeah, you take some grapes and you smush the grapes sometimes by just having a guy or a lady just step on them a bunch, which is like, I guess you pay a lot for the like foot fetish premium there. Alice, not your tumbler. Yeah, shut the fuck up.

Or you get a big machine to like crush the thing and then you separate off the grape skins. And then you do that to some grapes. You separate off the liquid and then you like put the liquid in a box for a while and then you drink the thing out of the box. That's my understand. There are a few more dimensions to add to that, which just might be of interest. So like there are some decisions you can make in the easiest way.

Oh, yes, go for it, which was demonstrated by Jesus of Nazareth, which is you just declare some water to be wine and it is right. Man, yeah, that guy, that guy, man, that that guy, he sure he sure was one of three profits, huh? Yeah, one of one of at least one, but, you know, no more than three profits. Unless you're unless you're that guy in Burlington, Vermont, who said it was grape juice, which is full of shit. That guy was full of shit.

What's up, Liam and I went to Burlington, Vermont, and we we were in we were on the main street and there was a test your Bible knowledge booth. So you're like, oh, yeah, one of these test your strength hammer things. Yeah, you know, with the hammer of faith and it goes out. Smarmy Protestants, the Crusades, right? So yeah, Smarmy Protestants who say the wedding at Cana. Jesus made grape juice and not wine.

It was wine. It was fucking wine. Shut the fuck up. It was like, did they say that? Like, aren't Protestants like Sola Scriptura? Why wouldn't they like it says wine? Yeah, they found a way to contort themselves into making it sound like they're supporting pro they're they're they're they're pro a bit. Like it's like temperance, Jesus.

Yes, temperance, Jesus, right? It's Sola. Yeah, Sola Scriptura unless it doesn't unless it's not convenient. Yeah. Yeah, Sola Scriptura, mostly, mostly Scriptura. No, but so there are several different things that you can like there are more factors that you can add to the winemaking process. So if you it depends how widely you want to stretch it, it could go all the way from like climate to storage.

So like, for example, if you just want to look at the process, though, from after it gets picked to once it gets bottled and leave it there. Yeah, that is farming, which we don't care about. Yeah, there are lots of different choices you can make. For example, once you what there's the the crushing method, you can say, OK, well, which pressing of the grapes are we taking the juice from? So there's the first pressing, second pressing, third pressing, depending on where you are, there can be more.

You can say how long are we leaving the great the skins on the grapes? You can also say, how are we actually moving the grape juice from each stage and in what kind of vessel is it being aged? So, like, for example, if you if you pump the grape juice from stage to stage, then that can cause that can like bruise the fruit that can cause problems in the. How do you bruise it's liquid? How do we're talking about? We're talking about must, right?

Where there's still like grape skins and stuff on there. So depending on how you move it, you might cause you might damage the grape skins more. I say kind of there's that, but there's a second thing where even once the grape skins are off, you still want to avoid like some people, some winemakers want to avoid pumping it because they want to keep it exposed to a consistent amount of oxygen and don't want to put it in that anaerobic environment for a while.

Like you can get really, really down into details with the obsessiveness through which the environment that you're going to be controlled. That's kind of my question. Like this is what I'm saying is that should set us up for the for the engineering disaster we're going to talk about is that this level of detail, this level of control is relatively common in fine winemaking. And that's also my question as a result of that is how much of this is made up, right?

Like, I know a large amount of wine tasting is just psychological. How much of the manufacturer and the consistency of fine wines is just like a guy reckons. I think we should all get on the same page here, just to know the basic process, which is you pick the grapes, you press them, you get the must, which is over here. And then you add yeast and she ferments and you get wine at the other end, right? The you do you follow those steps?

You can make toilet one. Yeah. Yes. But what I mean is I not a lot of this stuff, not a lot of this stuff is made up. Like there are some things that are absolutely made up. Like I'm firmly of the belief that like terroir is a completely fictional concept, like that there are some ineffable quality of the soil of Bordeaux that makes Bordeaux unique. It's like, no, it's it's about it's about climate, elevation and drainage. Like that just gives you a certain kind of grape. There's no magical element of the soil that makes that happen.

Just like, but like the way that you treat the grape juice, like if you store it like in certain temperatures and so on. Yeah, that absolutely does have an effect on the final product, like it's things for nothing. So so wine makers and wine drinkers are a superstitious bunch, but like there is still a difference. Yes. Yes. Because like there's a whole bunch of stuff that definitely makes

on a chemical level a difference, you know, which is what temperature it is, you know, type of yeast to use, maybe how you ferment it. You might do secondary fermentation in a bottle. You might age it. You might carbonate it. And certainly your growing conditions, that's climate and weather affects it a whole bunch, right? And that's, of course, why we have vintages, right?

Because different years had different weather. And that's why you can say, you know, you can sit there with your wine glass and swirl it around and say, hmm, very good year. You know, that is half the fun, right? Like, yes, I feel like half the fun of wine is pretending to know stuff about wine. Maybe that's me being a Philistine. Yeah, the video you get invited on a podcast. It's great. Yeah, exactly.

Right. But yeah. So, you know, your geography is important, which is why we need to talk in particular about Austria in the 1980s. Austria is down here. No, not loving that eagle. Got to say, you know, they're really kind of stuck to that, huh? Not a country, you know, they're a lesson, huh? They did. They did eagles before any other animals.

Austria, well, this is actually German. Oh, yeah, it's from Hesse, huh? Because I just see that there. Yeah. OK, Germany, not very happy with that eagle either. Why do people use the eagle? Yeah. So in in the 1980s, right? Austria was not the biggest wine growing region, but they had wine. This is back when, you know, the Iron Curtain was still there.

So, you know, we got we got the good guys over here, the Soviet Union. And then that's right. Everyone else, right? So we had East Germany and West Germany. Yeah, I like that you have you have Albania in a different color just to demonstrate the weirdness, like the barber pole color is for bunkers. Yes. Every every where there's a red stripe, Hoja has put a bunker.

Those are all of the defense lines of Albania. They're just arranged diagonally. So there was a big market for Austrian wines that were exported to West Germany, right, because it was a little bit cheaper to get Austrian wine. And they were sold like this wine was sold in bulk. And then it was bottled in West Germany, usually. Oh, so it's like it's like the wine that you're drinking. It's like the like nine dollar wine. Yes.

Yes. Yeah. Almost to do to do like a little spoiler alert, which is that's kind of like Austrian wine right now. It's like it's good. The Austrian wine is like generally very nice. So there has been a transformation. I wonder if any disaster precipitated. Like my question is right, like because of this idea of terroir,

which like even like Riley, we believe there's a myth, right? Like there's there's something ineffable about Bordeaux that makes Bordeaux wine different, right? There's still like a place called Bordeaux that you can't move. There's still a like an origin that's like defined. Germany has some of those. I don't know if Austria does like I know Germany has some like prestige wines like in the Rhineland does Austria has.

Yeah, Austria has like Styria, Austria, Austria has got a few actually. Like that of them are as famous as as like Bordeaux or Burgundy or whatever. But like you'll still you'll still see Austrian wines, like, you know, pop their pop, pop their region on. And like there are some regions that are kind of that are kind of like a distinctive versus others, right?

But we're mostly when we're not really talking about those, are we? OK, like it's it's almost like, yeah, unless you're like a massive wine person, it's slightly pedantic to talk about different regions. But I'm sure there are going to be a few people like we're going to comment on YouTube or to be like, ah, fuck you, I fucking fuck out. It's a great region, fuck off. And it's like, yeah, it's just if you ask someone on the street, what's Bordeaux, they're more likely to identify it as a wine region

than any of Austria's wine regions. Yeah, mostly because the place names in Austria are just crimes against humanity. It's like, yeah, I love to drink a wine from OK, so in 1971, the West Germans passed a wine law, right? Which defined certain wines by region and quality, right? You know, so they had Saltug. Yeah, you just get a message through from Bonn.

It's just like, yeah, the the federal the federal government has like assessed your wine to be shit here. Yeah, yeah, you know, that's your job. That's what happens when the French are administrating your region. The farm, the farm will be liquidated, of course. The French came in and got all snooty about wine. Oh, really? Yes.

West Germany, the West Germans had to be like, yeah, we're going to systematize our wines. No, like there is a part of West Germany administrated by France. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah, yeah, yes. Yes. So the French imposed their wine regulations. Anyway, so that is divided into a qualitats vine. It's just regular.

Sounds verbose. Regular old wine from certain regions. And then there's Pradaquette's wine. That's superior quality wine, again, from certain regions, certain varieties of grapes, certain production methods required. Right. OK. And your Pradaquette's vine included a prohibition on artificially sweetening wine.

That's like you add sugar at the end or something like that. Yeah, you're not supposed to do that for like a good wine. Right, Riley? Yeah. Yeah, well, no, I mean, no, no, you're not. You're not supposed to do that for a good wine at all. You're supposed to like you're supposed to like get into this really granular thing of fucking around with must and stuff. And like, I can't pump it because what if it's supposed to oxygen

and it bruises a liquid, a thing that can definitely happen instead of like getting the thing out at the end and then doing some food science to it. And being like, you need some respect to Riley here, but why there's the fucking worst people on the planet? No, why did they come on this show? Why did why did you come on beer drinkers anonymous? Well, no, why did like why did I bring my wine tasting kit to the cool frat house?

Yeah, this is like an hour of us shoving you into a locker. Yeah, yeah. No, so the thing is like again, like not all it's not like universal that like wine can't have stuff added to it. It's just that when it has stuff added to it, it becomes something other than wine. It becomes something like say port, you know. And yeah, I try, I try not to be like one of these assholes who's, you know, like a fucking like a wharf, a wine exclusionary radical feminist.

I try to be a wharf. I try not to be one of these people who just get sucked in by branding, which is basically what Walter Benjamin's article about. I say about the work of art, the 21st and the modernity. You know what I'm talking about. The work of art and age of mechanical reproduction. But like there is something special about wine in particular and about having it not fucked with.

There is something nice about like just tasting the thing and not, you know, having not having someone be like, well, time to put in a bunch of sugar because if that was the case, drink, yeah, I only drink peyote. But like I get what you mean. You're paying for like that. You're paying for authenticity, which is a rare quality on the capitalism, right? Yes. So, yeah, exactly. Sometimes various wines were illegally blended, right?

In contradiction of the German wine law, including blending Austrian wine with German wine, which is going to be relevant in a second. I hate when I get busted by the Anschluss. Yeah, I hate when I get busted by the German wine cops. Some very fancy men kick my door down. The Germans have a good reason to prevent intermingling with the Austrians again. Did you know that this is actually not the first German alcohol production law that was created?

No, because, of course, they had the Reinheitsgegurt. That should just be a rule that exists everywhere. Three ingredients, baby. Yeah, you can't. All I mean, all people get like, we talk about wine nerds. Beer nerds are almost as bad sometimes. But basically, all the Reinheitsgegurt means is don't piss in the fucking beer, you goddamn animals.

Like apparently ruined everything. Apparently, that's too much for some people to follow. No pastries. Stouts flash a Belgian flag up on the screen for me at this point. No more Berliner vices. Yeah, Belgian beers can fuck right off. They were made by monks. Fuck off.

Fuck out. Yeah, you put the beer in a big vat and you let it drain into gutters on the outside of the building so it can start fermenting from the birds that shat in it. Yeah. But I love Belgian beers. They're great. The only the only people who aren't Germans who did something interesting with beer were Czechs.

And that's just because the Germans like left them all of the beer infrastructure in Pilsen, which became Pilsen, which became Pilsner. And that's, you know, eventually you get to like the good Budweiser and then indirectly to the American Budweiser. And yeah, yes. So and of course, Pils is where we get the word piss, which is a similar thing. That's not true.

No, that's not true. That's not true. OK. It's just that, you know, that the American the American adjunct logger was derived from the Pilsner slowly. Yeah. But surely they reduce the quality to something which is acceptable for Americans. Just having more water. Every water, more rice.

OK, so then our Beechwood ships and ages on that we chemically treat that it doesn't actually make the beer taste any better. Yes. King of beers, baby. So Austrian winemakers in this era, they had contracts with West German grocery stores, right? For Austrian wines that were equivalent to, you know,

certain grades of predicates vine in certain quantities, right? So they had to meet certain standards. It had to be produced in certain quantities now. You get like a grocery, like a nice grocery store wine. Yes. Like say you're going to like a party or something and you want to bring a bottle of wine, but you don't look cheap. You just like you can point to the thing and say, look, it's a it's a it's a

predicates vine, right? It's like it's it might be from Audi, but like I'm not a total piece of shit. So Audi. So in the 1980s, the Austrian wine industry had a succession of very bad vineages, right? They had bad harvest where they didn't get a lot of grapes or the grapes didn't reach the required levels of ripeness. So and wine quantity was the wine quality was affected, right?

It wasn't as full body. It was more acidic. It's not as good as it could be, right? You're just looking at a field full of raisins and you're just like, ah, fuck. That's shit. Oh, oh, damn it. I planted plums again. Yeah, I love being an Austrian, an Austrian wine maker

and also being the dumbest piece of shit imaginable. And just being like, oh, man, apple trees again. You remember apple, brandy, apple, brandy. Cabalos, baby. You should plant grape seed, right? And it's like, yeah, I planted rape seed. We'll have all the oil next year. I love to drink.

I love to uncork a big bottle of canola. It's a giant. It's just a field of watermelon. All right. So a lot of these, especially the bigger producers, they had all these contracts they needed to fill and they had this sub subpar wine, right? They're like, OK. Let's see if we can fix this wine somehow, right?

You can't disappoint Big Aldi. Big Aldi soon. Yes. All right. We're back to organic chemistry. No. I retire. I retire.

Everybody. All right. So this is a chemical called. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. This is an Austrian place. Yeah. Yeah. It's the village above Oberammerburg, Dorfendief

and this is Diethylene glycol, right? So OK, here we go. Christ. So this is so this is an O. This is an O here or O A or this is O H. This is H O different. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So then normal organic chemistry, there's C's with two hydrogens bonded.

There's an O in the middle. And same thing on the other side. That's why it's diethylene as opposed to ethylene glycol, which is where this guy over here would be right there. And then ethylene glycol is what you have in a vape, right? Like a bad quality vape. If it's one that kills you, sure. I mean, ethylene glycol is much more toxic than diethylene glycol.

If there's a polyethylene glycol is fine for you. That's when you that's when you add a whole bunch of these together and then it's fine. Well, now I've got to check the package my vape came in. I mean, just don't don't. The other thing is it's only toxic and barely large quality. I don't know. That's that's that's the confidence you want to hear from your poison control guy. Yeah, I'm pretty sure you need, you know, a little more of that before you're in trouble.

Anyway, call us when you have a real problem. I love it. I love the implication that the poison control guy is just like going to call you a pussy on the phone. Yeah, of course, with budget cuts. Now we've had to implement a tough love policy and poison control. Read the packet. Read the back of the package for me.

Does it say I'm a pussy who can't help myself? Well, I don't know why you're calling me then, because this sounds like a YP later. Pennsylvania poison control. We've invented a new state institution again. So what you want to do, right? So what you want to do is you want to go down to the sheets again. I don't tend to dip you, you please. By the way, you can actually rub tobacco on wasp stings and it will help.

I promise you. Oh, did this go from a joke about Pennsylvania poison control into actual Pennsylvania poison control? Yeah, that's actually true. Yeah, you're going to learn something from this. It's not going to be staying here. It'll we're going to learn you. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, other than that, it's just me with some shitty Logitech headset from the 90s. I think you go from Megatronics. Yeah, yes. Well, have you considered rubbing tobacco on it? Yeah, shit. I was just like, yes, yes, I have. Well, I can't help you. Next call.

Yeah, I can't really do a Pennsylvania accent. But it's like, because every time I try to do it, it sounds like a surfer. But I really do enjoy that idea. You should you should just just do the the accent of that Jersey eagle that the Internet has just canceled us. I refuse to watch that because I she talks about the Internet, the Internet. I didn't watch that. And no, if I watch that, then the the Internet is going to be turned off.

Turn off. No, I went down to my buddies down the shore. It's my recording session, baby. That's fine. I'll just drop off. I can fuck. I will take this podcast out with me. All right.

So ethylene, diethylene glycol, sometimes used in antifreeze, more commonly, regular ethylene glycol is used in antifreeze. They have some of the same properties. They reduce the freezing point, a whole lot of water. Now, this is this is like all the other things that are dangerous. It has the same properties, which is a taste sweet, right? So kids will eat it, right?

That's why kids like antifreeze and lead paint because they taste sweet. Right. Why did why did we have a whole field of chemistry just designed to like murder children as efficiently as possible? Who put Willy Wonka in charge of all this? Because these chemicals work really good. At killing kids. Why did we use lead paint?

Because it was good. It adhered for a long time. It's like leaded gasoline. It stops engine knocking. And it created a generation of culture war super soldiers accidentally. Yes. So. But it's also a viscous liquid, right?

You know, it's which is relevant in a second. But one of the things about diethylene glycol is it's very toxic, not as toxic as regular ethylene glycol. But it upsets your body's natural pH, right? Let's see. That's right. So that makes you go into something called metabolic acidosis, right? So this is basically a turbocharged vaginal douche is what I'm hearing. Yeah, sure.

Why not? Do not use Austrian wine vaginally. I was going to say, wait, I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure that guy from Pennsylvania, the control said that to me after I said I drank some Windex. Just like putting a big for external use only sign on all of the wine bottles in the alley. So this can do a whole bunch of stuff to your system, but notably it can cause acute kidney failure,

which, you know, could put you on a dialysis machine for the rest of your life. And just make the rest of your life like real short. Oh, yeah. That's the other thing. You can also fuck up your brain, can cause paralysis, quadriplegia can also cause death. Now, if they catch it early enough, there's some drugs that can be administered to prevent this chemical from being metabolized and thereby chew on this big stick of activated carbon.

Oh, no, no, it's more fun than that. So there's one drug which is very expensive, right? Called from these from a Pizzoli. Yeah, invented by Italian scientists. Yeah, yeah, it's mostly it's mostly just baked into a pasta. Hey, that's a 88 inhibitor. That's a $3,000 per treatment drug, though, very expensive. Alex, there's another treatment for this,

which can be very expensive or it can be very cheap, depending on how you want to do it. Oh, no, there's going to be something. Is this going to be something upsetting? So it's the other way you can prevent this chemical. The first segment was at the front of the episode. The other the other way you can prevent this chemical from being metabolized is through this chemical called ethanol.

Well, yeah, just drink more wine. Yeah, the doctors will just say you need to get drunk for two days. You need to be drunk for two days. Are we saying the only way out is through? That is how I got off heroin, actually. So this is you have a doctor prescribed sesh. Yeah, right. Don't say sesh. Don't say sesh.

You lost a sesh. You lost a war. You can't say it. This is this is British culture is calling different things a sesh. I'm sorry, sir. Yeah, yeah, no. OK, so you just you just literally. Yeah, my doctor gave me orders to like just drink as much as possible. You know, he said it got tired to text this number with my postcode. Do you think I can bribe a doctor to diagnose me with the ethylene glycol poison with a shot, baby?

Well, it's not exactly difficult to get your hands on ethylene glycol. You could just you just buy some and drink it. Viewers at home, do not drink antifreeze. Don't do it. Do not do it. Yeah, it's it. The anyone who has just woken up in a coma who went into that coma in 1929 in America, prohibition is over.

You could just buy alcohol. You don't need to do this convoluted scheme. Right. You don't have to do the thing that like Russian drunks do. You drink the hand wash or whatever. Doesn't always get medicinal whiskey. So for whatever reason, this chemical diethylene glycol has a very long history of winding up in food and medications. Right. Usually it's a substitute for something.

Yeah, it tastes great. Less filling. Did it kill a bunch of people in the United States in the 30s? Like 20s. Yeah. An anti biotic elixir, I think. Yeah, because it was used as a substitute for glycerin, which is a little bit more expensive to produce. It's either glycerin or polyethylene glycol. Polyethylene glycol, again, being the non-toxic version of this.

So and they just figured, well, it's mostly the same name. It'll do. Yes, it's like before we had like, you know, toxicology and stuff like that. Or we had it, but it wasn't required to be done. Yeah, we only had the Pennsylvania poison control. Yeah, I just, I also, I do love it all. Like in, in, in a regulated private market,

the best way to deal with like, oh, oh goodness. It turns out that my, my product kills everyone who eats it. I know how to solve this problem. And the answer is just like a grease pencil where you change the name of the thing. They were, they were on some tumbler Wiccan shit. You change the name of the thing. And like, it says character is dustly authors.

Right. It's basically like branding homeopathy. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so, so what happened with this fun little chemical and tastes amazing? Apparently, like what happened with this amazing tasting chemical that no one who's listened to this should have, but we've all had little bits of just so we can see. It's better than anything you've ever had, but you can't have any. It's too dangerous to have any of it.

Yeah. You're not cool enough. You're not cool enough to consume any diethylene glycol, but we have. So an enterprising chemist, Otto Nadrarski, right? Realize that you could add. Small quantities of diethylene glycol to large quantities of wine. And that would sweeten it and improve the body of the wine, right? Because it tastes great. Yeah, it tastes great.

Less filling has has any good sentence ever started with an enterprising chemist. Realize that one that one chemist who invented chlorofluorocarbons and also of what was it? Leaded gasoline and also a machine of his own design that killed him. Well, it was Christ that if that's not America, I don't know what it is. No, listen, seriously, that was a real guy. His his whole career was he he started working as an industrial chemist

at like, I think, Dow or somewhere. And his first his first invention, Thomas Midgeley, Jr. Right. He invented leaded petrol and then he invented chlorofluorocarbons. And then he like broke a bunch of his limbs. And while he was in traction, he invented a traction machine that then strangled him to death. He also invented freon. What the fuck?

Look, I want engines that don't knock and I want air conditioners that work. Yes, there. Yeah, and all you and all you socialists are out here posting on his invention. Pretty ironic environmental historian, J.R. McNeil, a pint that Midgeley had more impact on the atmosphere than any organism in Earth's history. That's rough.

All right. So a couple of big Austrian wine makers decided, all right, let's do this stupid thing. Let's fix our wine with diethylene glycol. And they they did this on a mass scale to rescue the bad wine from early 1980, vintage vintages, particularly 1982. They couldn't have been the ones like they couldn't have been the first ones to have this idea, right?

This had to have come from somewhere, surely. I well, people have been sticking diethylene glycol and stuff for years and years, and they continue to do it to this day because they're morons and assholes. Because they because they want to give people the forbidden taste sensation. Yes. Do you think actually, like just because of just perverse

curatorial mindset that early 1980s Austrian wines have taken on a special value if you can find them? Oh, they must they've got to be rare now, right? Like, oh, yeah, you got to get a fine one that won't kill you. I mean, maybe people will pay more for like the opportunities to be killed that way. Like people people get like Fugu, like a puffer fish sushi and they pay like the ass for that.

So most of these wines were dosed in such a way that, you know, they they they would have far less than a lethal dose of ethylene glycol in them, right? Yeah, most wines weren't lethal. That's what you want to be hearing out of your out of your store. Ninety nine, ninety nine point nine percent of wines guaranteed not to give you like permanent brain damage or kidney failure. Well, the dice, baby, let's go.

There was at least one that was tested that they found it had enough ethylene glycol, diethylene glycol in it that if you drank the whole bottle, it would kill you. But, you know, who would ever drink a whole bottle of wine by themselves? Would do that. Yeah. So now the thing is, this probably would have gone completely unnoticed, except that prior to this incident, West Germany had just been hit with a couple of batches of illegally sweetened wine from Italy.

Right. And put the sugar into the wind. Yeah. And well, you know, at least the Italians. That's not even close to an Italian accent. I don't. I've been fasting. OK, shut the fuck up. And this was sweetened with, you know, sugar as opposed to nasty chemicals, right, but it was done in an illegal fashion.

I'm going to be like a keto guy and be like, oh, another deadly chemical. Oh, my God. Yeah, that's right. Honestly, like I love the backwards reasoning of keto guys would just be to look at the Austrian wine tasting scandal and just like, see, carbs are bad. Is diethylene glycol a carb? It is now.

That's right. You know what? Carbs are good. I love me some bread and some beer. And I also weigh 700 pounds. So yeah. This is like I feel like the animating force behind all all three of us regular hosts on this is the Ben Franklin quote about beer being proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Yes. So wait until the beer bonus episode.

That's going to be a dumb. That's going to be a dumb episode. Oh, I'm so looking for weight. Wait until after Ramadan so I can get drunk during that. And yeah, we'll have a time. All right. So so anyway, because they even hit with illegally Sweden wine from Italy, they had ramped up their quality control programs. So, you know, previous testing would not have picked up diethylene glycol in the wine. But on June 27th, 1985.

West German authorities tested a 1983. Rooster, Auslöse. Auslöse. It's it's it's a it's a rooster. Auslöse. It's an Auslöse of like a like vintage from Roost. OK. I mean, I was bicing my time when you when you went through like you went through quality, it's fine and kind of kids fine. And I'm like, there's all louts.

I don't. The exits are just there to let you know. Look, the Austrians have been engaged in like a 60 year project to convince themselves and everybody else that they were the first victim of German fascism. OK. So like that they certainly don't think that they lost. I believe the word is collaborators. But yeah. Yeah.

No, worse than collaborators in places just straight up perpetrators. But like, yeah, in historical narratives, it is like a selection of like 40 people in Vienna who weren't directly responsible, you know. Yeah. So anyway. So they tested this from a supermarket in Stuttgart and they discovered, oh, shit, there's diethylene glycol in here. And that's bad.

Um, so. But it tastes great, though. Yeah, it just tastes like great. Yeah. Yeah. Two thirds into drinking the bottle of wine, which has nothing in it. They put this because they, you know, they assume they put the swab in. There's like, oh, shit, I knew this tasted too good. Forbidden wine.

All right. So they start testing more and more Austrian wines. And then more and more are found to contain this diethylene glycol. Mass hysteria ensues, right? So there was one wine. This is a long word. Oh, boy. It's a it's a beer and aus lesa. Yes, it's that.

From a winery called Hans Sotner of Goals. And this once again, fake ass names in Austria. Yeah, not a real place. What the fuck is a golf's not a place that won a gold medal at a wine fair at. I have no idea how to pronounce this word. Who? Look, yeah, look, the honor. Look, the honor.

Look, the honor. It's in. It's in. It was in Yugoslavia at the time. Yeah, it is, in fact, the capital of Slovenia. So I'm getting myself a prize here. Sold. You know, what else got the prize was that wine,

even though it was full of diethylene glycol. That's probably why. It's like, yeah, give it the give it the gold medal. The shit is the best thing I've ever drunk in my life. The best wine because the glycol. I'm very drowsy right now. I'm sure I'll wake up at some point. Tastes like delicious neurological damage.

All right. So the West German authorities advise against consuming any Austrian wine on July 9th, 1985. Yeah, that's like a big deal. Right. That's a diplomatic incident to have a whole country that's in Europe. Just be like, yeah, don't don't drink this shit. Don't drink this shit.

You'll get poisoned. You'll get poisoned. Yeah, a bunch of other countries follow suit. Swincerlin and France start recalling bottles. Brons, France, France, France. Shut up. Yeah. So I have to defend the people according to Wikipedia. Although I couldn't actually figure out where this was mentioned in their sorts.

But I'm going to say it anyway, because it's funny. Japan and China banned Austrian wine, but accidentally also banned Australian wine. That sounds kind of I wanted to be true, but that feels kind of racist. No, it was they link to their Spiegel article, which I ran through Google Translate because of course, I don't speak German. Once again, it's just me. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm it's probably not true, but it is very funny.

And also banning Australian wine is worth it, because it's dog shit anyway. OK, no, shut the fuck up. That's not correct. It is correct. Every Australian wine is called something like it's Cobb's landing and it tastes like a boot. It's just wrong. It's not true. It's true. It is true. It's like I love I love to like fucking drink like like,

oh, it's a bit of unwashed barefoot creek. Look, OK, look, Austria. Austria. I know. No, no, no. I did. I went to I went cockney there once again because I have fasting madness, but it's the oldest vintage we have a whole 1988.

No, we call it Shirazirah seemingly for no fucking reason. Are you? Oh, OK. Oh, my goodness. I can't I can't believe that I'm I'm the straight man as the guest, but they're a lot of really good Australian. Between between this and Burkine, they should be used to being the unexpected straight man. I can't do it. Exactly. Shut up. Oh, god damn it.

God damn it. So yeah, as a result of this, Austrian wine exports fall to a tenth of their previous levels, right? Yeah. Well, one guy is just thinking, yeah, I'm getting a fucking steal on this Austrian wine. Yeah, I found the only one that doesn't have the diethylene glycol in it. All right. So an investigation and says, by the way, this is not a tainted wine right here.

This is just a picture of an Austrian wine that I found. You can see that the the vintage here is 2005. Kind of like why would you put your wife's name on the wine? Also, like Martin and it feels a little bit like, I don't know, polycule to me. Well, she's the one who stamps on the graves with a bear feet. Oh, OK. And then uploads the video to all the fans. You all bear feet.

Well, ten of her toes just stamping on the grave. Thank you, Riley. Thank you, brother. So this was eventually traced back to Otto Nadraski as well as a few other chemists and winemakers, right? I mean, I kind of want to know how. And like, we didn't really find any good information on this. Like, I want to know the wine true detective thing. This was the way it was.

It was difficult to research this one. There's not that much information out about it. And what there is is all in shame. Yeah. Yeah. And I, of course, do not speak German. Once again, literally could have asked me and I would have like read stuff and been like, yeah, I understand like a third of this. I hope that helps. All right. Well, you know, next time we do a German thing, I will.

I will I will contact you and say, can you read this German? Yeah, I'll be like, not really. You expect it, do it. Do it. Do it. She's broken, she's very good. Once a wagon is kaput. Yes.

Oh, no, my wine has that tasty chemical. I'm pretty sure that if you get on YouTube, you get one of my favorite songs. Your favorite. Oh, we kill Justin. Justin has come to it now. I got over from a joke. We walk up in German. Why are we blaming the Chinese as the Germans who caused the.

Yeah, the German virus. Someone made a joke in German for the first time in the virus. The virus just ran from there. Oh, man. I. I. No. I.

And. The. The. And. And. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I.

I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I.

I. I. I. I. So one of the things is the bulk of the wine that was tainted, right, was made by a couple of big winemakers and they exported it in bulk. It was bottled in West Germany, right? Not a lot of small fill out the supermarket shelves.

Yeah, not a lot of small winemakers were affected by this at all. Right. And there's a big German bottler and wholesaler called Pyrroth that was implicated. Am I mispronouncing that one, too? Pyrroth. Pyrroth. Yeah, like the T-H is like a, it's like a T. Yeah.

Why would you do a T-H if you're not going to do the. I mean, like I once again kind of stumbling over it because my mouth and brain don't work, but the German, the German R is the most fucked language because it's just like an H. Because if you can't quite roll it like what you should, then you just kind of have to just say an H like Pyrroth. All right. So a bunch of employees were fined for like a million Deutschmarks over this. The company itself tried to hold that when the German minister for health blacklisted

Austrian wines. He had overstepped his authority because that's like unconstitutional to be like, don't drink the forbidden poison wine. Don't drink the poison wine. Yeah. No, you can't do that. You, you know. I'm an American.

I'll drink the poison wine if I want to. Yes. Open her up. By which I mean the wine bottle. So this was so they could try and recover money from customers they had sold wine to, you know, like, because they're a wholesaler, they sold wine under contract. They probably delivered the wine before they got the payment, right? All that shit got held up in courts until 1990 when they finally ruled that, yes, actually

the health minister can blacklist tainted wine as it turns out. Yes. Classic German efficiency. I think it was like, I vaguely remember it was slightly more like circumspect than this because as I remember it, the health minister also had like an interest in a competing wine company. And so they were like, oh, this dude is doing corruption by telling people not to drink our poison wine because that will make his non poison wine do better.

I only saw like half of that story where I know that there was like some some inter CDC or CDU strife over that one because the health ministry was Christian Democratic Union. You know, your general sort of stupid European Christian party. You know, that's right. And and but also the CEO of the wine company was also that I didn't fully understand that one. Oh, that's totally continental politics right there, which is like, you're part of like a nominally progressive party, but it was a nominally progressive party set up by the

CIA to forestall communism and and also everyone's in it. Like it's like the mob, like basically everybody in Germany all has a fake doctorate from the same place and is all in the Christian Democrats. Yeah, like they're all Christian Democrats and like every single major company also is somehow partially owned by the political party and all the CEOs all also are in it. But when you dig into it a little bit, they all have blackmail material at one another. Yeah, this is this is what Germany did instead of having like a strategy of tension. I mean, aside from the Barton-Meinhof group, like this is what they did instead of

Operation Gladio is form the Christian Democrats. Oh, you know, German politics is basically just the Christian Democrats are everywhere and everything to nearly everyone and they're involved in more or less anything and that means they're involved in every corruption scandal, but also like most good, most like positive political efforts also are involved with them as well. Like you just can't escape them because again, like I think there are a lot of Americans and I say this to someone who's come from well near there anyway over to Europe. A lot of Americans think that like Europe is somehow like a better way of governing your

governing your society and like in some ways it is, but in a lot of very fundamental ways, Europe is sort of just deeply more psychotically fucked up than America, where it's like in America, you just sort of put out into the street and left defend for yourself. Whereas in Europe, like you have a nanny, but the nanny's fucking psycho. Oh, God, all right. I can't believe that Riley managed to like shoehorn in a bit of like actual Marxist terminology in the form of the psycho nanny state in something that sounds like a joke. That's literally why I have a podcast.

So, I mean, how this all worked out in the end is no one actually got ethylene, diethylene glycol poison from the wine, probably because the ethanol counteracted some of its effects. Yeah, it's the homosimson thing. Alcohol, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems. Yes. So then a few people got some pretty short prison sentences. I mean, like a year and a half in German prison, I assume is basically the same as a year and a half in a German club. Less vinyl. In every sense. A year and a half in German prison is like a year and a half in a nicer apartment than anyone in Britain can afford. Yeah. That's right. Absolutely. Like there's less black

bold in prison. You ever see the footage of like, you know, Anders Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazis, you ever see the footage of his prison cell that he's like constantly complaining about? And he's like, oh, no, I don't have enough PlayStation 2 games in here and shit like that. I don't have Shenmue 2. It's considerably nicer than any apartment I've ever lived in. Look, maybe you shouldn't have murdered 72 teenagers or whatever. Yeah, don't do that. It's over to China. I can't figure it out. The Dreamcast game only goes so far.

How am I supposed to live not knowing what happens? It won't send me a Nintendo Switch. Where the fuck's my PS2, you know? Anyway, yeah, no. So it's like this is constantly happening in Europe. Like people are always going to jail for fucking with food in ways that's like not only illegal, but encouraged in America. Like you just think, oh, yes, you're calling this Comte, but it's from just over the road from the region of Comte. I'm sorry, you have to be executed now. It's an archaic law from the 19th century.

Austrian wine exports didn't recover for several years. They couldn't sell Austrian wine on the global market because they're like, oh, I must still have diethylene glycol in it. Even though it didn't, I believe they passed the law very quickly to ensure stricter testing to make sure no one was doing dumb shit to the wine. Don't do dumb shit to the wine. And then there was the question, you've got all this wine that's been impounded. What are you going to do with it? So destruction of the wine was difficult.

In Austria, there were some Vittners like one Anton Schmid from Mitterstachstahl. The police got him for dumping 4,000 gallons of diethylene glycol wine down the town sewer. And the poison in the wine, as well as probably the alcohol from the wine, the poison in his wine wiped out the microorganisms that clear the town sewage. So it spewed untreated into nearby streams, which killed all the trout in the river. Food of that. They could not dump the wine. So what they wound up doing is they used it as coolant in rotary kilns and cement plants, such as this guy here. And then after that, moral of the story, I guess, is don't put dangerous chemicals

into the wine to make it sweeter. Yeah. And beer good. Also drink never been tainted with anything bad ever. I don't know. You're talking about the beer. Good. Oh, because like it's too ubiquitous to be a scandal scandals. Yeah, it's more of a it's more of a beer tainting business model. It's like you can't talk about a car crash scandal, for the most part, because it just happens every day. Yeah. Yeah. Always be cheap. No, beer can be cheap and cheap on its own merits. There isn't. In 1900, more than 6000 people in England were poisoned by arsenic tainted beer, with more than 70 of the afflicted dying as a result. Also, it doesn't even taste good.

At least this was like the forbidden good tasting chemical. There's also a brewery called Dow Brewing. Yeah, they were called that to like just as some tax loophole in Virginia. Oh, yeah. Dow added cold bolt sulfate to the beer for foam stability. Hmm. I love a stable foam. Here's the thing. I'm going to ask this question right now and I don't know what answer to expect. Is Dow Brewing related to Dow Chemical, given that they added some chemistry to the foam? It appears not. Huh.

So it's stuff called Dow just does that? Yeah. Dow Jones? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Hey, they added some tainter rate at the stock market. Yeah. Am I right? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right. This is that late night style comedy on whether there's your problem. Oh, shit. I meant to do the Bazinga thing, but I hit the wrong thing. Ah, very satisfying to see that. Where's my Bazinga? Oh, do not take out my Bazinga. Bazinga. There.

Yeah, it's louder than you expect since you got me to turn the volume back up for the years. Thanks for that thing. Anyway, look, there's been a lot of wine. There's been one wine tainting scandal. All right. I'm sure it's not the only one. I'm sure that's not the only one either. But you know, it did inspire an episode of The Simpsons where Bart learns to speak French. Yeah. Yeah. The one with the movementarians. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's right.

China 2010. Yeah. Yeah, but was that wine or was that Baiju, which is rice wine, which is not a wine? It's terminological slippage. No, it's like lychee wine. That sounds pretty good, actually. Yeah, lychee wine. Sounds great. They put like regular shit in wine now, like ice and glass, which is a very normal chemical. Oh, that's the fish bladder one, right?

That's the fish bladder one. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, frequently, now there's this big trend of... I say now there's this big trend. For the last eight years, there's been this big trend of natural wine where there aren't any of these additives that they put in. That's like raw water. Yeah. It frequently tastes like a foot. Just like a snail in here. We're just doing Donahue versus Stevenson all over again. I think a fish is pretty natural.

What are you going to do with all those dead trout? We're just chucking animals in the wine to see what happens. I was going to say, tell that to Jothra Swaganeva, the godfather of natural wine. You'll end up with a horse's head in your bed and then also win some wine. Chateau de... I forget what horse is. Chateau de chevo. Yeah, that's right. I'm sure there is a place called Chateau de chevo. Yeah. There is absolutely Chateau de chevo. You've just made a joke about several real wineries. Awesome. What's the next episode, Justin?

Oh, the next episode is going to be on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster. Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the little known Tacoma Narrows winery. Yes. They got a very nice microclimate up there. There have been two possible episodes that this wine episode could have been on. There haven't been many wine disasters, so I'm very grateful to the, well, there's your problem nation for... The problematics.

The problematics. I'm very grateful to the problematics for indulging the fact that I just love wine. I love talking about wine. We couldn't think of a good techno one, and all of the nightclub ones are too grim to do immediately after Bopal, because usually when you have a disaster and a nightclub, a bunch of people die. We had a good nightclub one in Philly that happened like 20 years ago, I think. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was saying that there was one winery one that I was agitating for,

which was the Lawns Winery Collapse, which was the only winery in Ohio on the island and whatever great lake abuts Ohio. Erie, isn't it? Yeah, Lake Erie. It was on an island in Lake Erie. It was a winery in Ohio, and then one day it all just fell down. It was the only spot in Ohio where a winery could compete with the corn subsidies. The funny thing is, I looked at this, right? It was like Lawns Winery. It was the biggest winemaker in the US, and it just piled up high

and sold them cheap. It was on this thing called Middle Bass Island, and one day in 2000, so pre-911, so maybe it was like a rehearsal for 911. It was designed as like a medieval castle with a moat and stuff, and then it just fell down. Oh my God. But then it triumphantly reopened in 2017. And so now they're just like, hmm, time to not learn any lessons from this. Well, that's the official wine of where there's your problem, is anything from Lawns Winery.

Yes. Yeah, and the other funny thing is, it's in a town called Sandusky. Is Ohio real? Is anything about Ohio real? I forget if it's Sandusky or Toledo that has a nice train station. I think it's Toledo. The weird modernist grand station, the last grand station built in the United States, has also got less grand very quickly. Yeah, I mean, that will happen.

Yes. That's a depressing note to end our wine episode on, but it's good to do a less deadly one after two episodes of Bhopal burn out everyone's brains. One more, one more funny thing about the Lawns Winery is one of the reasons they got so popular was that during prohibition, they would sell like bottles of grape juice with very explicit warnings on them saying stuff like, do not put in a barrel and leave with some yeast for three months or so. Did they also sell barrels and yeast?

Or this will become wine, which is illegal. Prohibition is wild. I wouldn't like to live under it, but I would like to see what it was like. Everyone is a teenager under prohibition. That's just, you can just go to like Saudi Arabian now. I have the ad in front of me. It's from OhioMemory.org. OhioMemory.org sounds like a brain disease. He's got Ohio memory.

It sounds like memory TV, but for Ohio. It says, the juice of the grape, what magic is conjured by those words? Sure. By Allah, I will. By Allah, behave yourself. I will give you a taste of my wine. From the very dawn of history, man has worked in the vineyards and found in their product a priceless reward for his labor.

The juice of the grape at its fermented state has been entwined in the destinies of the human race for centuries. Oh, Jesus. In modern times, however, man has discovered that without fermentation, it makes a delicious beverage with a high food value and important medicinal properties. High food value. Yeah, middle-based grapes have been, which is the island that Lawn's winery is not, have been famous for nearly half a century with the coming of the national prohibition law

that vineyard industry had to be revised to meet new conditions. The revision was affected by George Lawn's. Without loss or demand for his superlative product, herewith are presented some of the reasons why Lawn's grape juice is the finest that money can buy and why demand for each season's vintage exceeds its supply. And then every other page is just like, anyway, don't forget to not make wine out of this. Here's how to not make wine out of it. Yeah.

And don't ask about the time of winery castle collapsed. Yeah, absolutely. In 70 years from now. Yes. All right. Oh, Lawn's winery. Oh, wine. Oh, you delicious grape nectar.

Oh, you sweet, sweet, sweet liquor. All right, all right. That was mine. All right, yeah. All right, wine. Wine, good. I enjoy wine as long as it has only a small amount of diethylene glycol in it at most.

Yeah, that's right. You know what? A little drop will do you. Yeah, a little dab will do you. So does anyone have any commercials before we go? Listen to Trash Future. Riley and I are both also on it. We talk much less about wine, much more about German nightclubs.

And also we do some communism there. And also do check out the Boney Island Whitefish, a show I do with Andrew La from Buntavista. It's available on the Trash Future and Buntavista Patreons where Andrew and I watch and review one episode a week of the Fox Procedural Crime Drama Bones. In 2005, they ran out of ideas for realistic and compelling mystery of the week. And they hadn't quite discovered

that they could do like an overarching season long plot. And they thought that the thing they had to do was escalate each mystery of the week into more and more strange. What if it's alien bones? What if it's a pharaoh's bones? Yes, yes. No, Alice, you're joking. But yeah, that's that's what they do.

They did both of those? Yeah, they did. Yeah, they did an alien episode. They did an episode where it's like heavily implied that they're investing JFK's bones. They did one where it's like the entire main question they're wrestling with with the episode is, could leprechauns be real? Well, goodbye, everybody.

Oh, my God. All right. No, let me let me. Well, there's your problem. Let me let me say this. All right. So this episode or wait, when this episode is out. Oh, I hope Franklin 12 will be out by this time.

I'm not even. Well, Franklin 12. All right, it's going to be. It's going to be a good episode. We're going to learn about a lot of weird, weird shit about Steven Gerrard and also how he may or may not have stolen his wealth from the Haitian Revolution. Motherfuckers. Spoiler alert.

You got to avenge avenge desoline. So I don't know because this is going to come out in as the awkward thing. Everyone's going to know that we record all of these a bunch of them at once. And then. Yeah, do you want to record the next Patreon episode right now after this? No. Can we talk maybe if you record another Patreon episode about another of Liam's

different modes of transportation? Can I be honest? This one's about Liam's bike. Too fast about the bike. But, you know, yeah, the the the GTI, the GTI. That's not a disaster, though. No, that's a very good car. How many times can Liam save VMAX in one episode?

A lot of times. I love that car. I'm not sorry for it. What are you going to hit out there? Car good. Train bad. Car good. Train bad.

Riley, would you like to replace one of the hosts of our podcast? Wait a minute. Don't go wrong, baby. That's my bit that I do on TF all the time. One of my children is acting up. All right. Justin, I feel your pain. How badly did we do?

Wow, hour and 46. All right, so we can we can cut some stuff out of this. That's fine. I'm not going to do that. I'm sure you guys can turn this into an hour and 20 minutes of pure comedy missile. All right. I have stopped recording.

I was going to say goodbye first. Yes. Goodbye first. Yeah, I started recording again. Goodbye. Goodbye, everyone. It was a pleasure to be here. It's always a pleasure to be here and while there is your problem.

So see you all next time. Thanks for coming on, Riley. All right. All right. We're done. We're done podcast. Yes.