Man who debunked 'killer wines' theory dies

Gilbert Stowesand

Gilbert Stoewsand, a Cornell University food scientist who helped rescue New York’s fledgling wine industry from "killer wine" charges in the early 1970s by debunking shoddy science and malicious rumors that attributed health risks to drinking wine made from hybrid grapes, has died. He was 83.

As reported in the Cornell Chronicle:

"In what may seem absurd to today’s enologists and wine drinkers, French and German scientists in the early 1960s attributed physiological deformities in animals to drinking wine made from hybrid grapes. Hans Breider, director of the Bavarian State Institute for Wine, Fruit and Horticulture in Germany, purportedly verified French research in 1965 that showed liver damage to chickens when hybrid wines were fed to them, according to the Cornell University Press book 'Wines of Eastern North America,' by Hudson Cattell. By 1967, Breider reported that wines made from hybrid grapes fed to chickens produced malformed legs and feathers."

The controversy was perpetuated by the then-popular syndicated newspaper columnist Jack Anderson, who picked up the charges wholesale and reported them under the headline "Wines cause deformities." Go here for the full, fascinating story.