It's always relaxing to end the day with a nice glass of wine with some good music and perhaps a few intimate friends. But watch out: according to a lawsuit in California, some of these wine bottles may be deadly, containing very high levels of arsenic.
In a California class-action lawsuit filed by at least 4 residents of the state to Los Angeles Superior Court on Thursday, March 19, more than 80 bottles of cheap wine have too much arsenic that they can be very deadly when taken.
According to them, these data have been based on the wine examinations performed by 3 independent laboratories. Brian Katabeck, the lead attorney of the lawsuit, mentioned that BeverageGrades were the first ones to study over 1,000 various bottles of wine. About 83 of them have significant amounts of arsenic, some of which contain as much as 500 percent more than what's considered safe. These wines, moreover, are usually of the cheap kind, those that cost no more than $15 a bottle.
Although naturally occurring and found in soil, air, and water, arsenic found in these wine bottles is not, which suggests that it might have been introduced during the wine process. Very high levels of arsenic, meanwhile, can lead to poisoning wherein a person develops headaches, diarrhea, confusion, muscle cramps, vomiting, and failure of the vital organs causing death.
The Wine Institute, which represents most of the wine owners and sellers in the United States, immediately dismissed the lawsuit claims. They cited the lack of proposal from these California residents to pull out these supposed contaminated wine brands from the market. Moreover, the basis of comparison for arsenic, which concluded the extremely high presence of the element, is actually meant for water and not wine. The group contended that the lawsuit was not only misleading but also irresponsible and that they believed that all wines in the market, whether they are cheap or not, are safe to consume.