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The shortest answer, according to Kenneth Spaeth, MD, chief of occupational and environmental medicine at the North Shore-LIJ Health System in Great Neck, NY, is we don’t know yet. But if we assume the BeverageGrades’ results are correct - a big “if” since the results have not been independently confirmed, the company has not described its methods, and the company is simultaneously attempting to sell winemakers its services after creating a news story - how much should you be concerned if you’re a regular wine drinker? This news report and lawsuit could easily be seen as creating one’s own demand. He’s also, by the way, marketing his company’s testing services to wine makers who might be concerned about… arsenic in their wine. The CBS report reads as alarmist - though they mention at the end that their own independent testing of four wines yielded arsenic levels above 10 ppb but much lower than BeverageGrades’ results - and Hicks clearly finds these results concerning enough that he’s filing a class action suit against more than two dozen wine makers and sellers for their unsafe products. Hicks told CBS he noticed a trend of higher amounts of arsenic the cheaper the wine was on a per-liter basis.
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“Very high,” according to BeverageGrades founder and former wine distributor Kevin Hicks, meant four to five times more arsenic than the EPA standard for drinking water, which is 10 parts per billion (ppb), or 10 micrograms per liter (mcg/L).Īmong the top-selling wines with three, four and five times the 10 ppb standard were, respectively, Trader Joe's Two-Buck Chuck White Zinfandel, Ménage à Trois Moscato and Franzia White Grenache. CBS News reported last Thursday that “very high levels of arsenic” showed up in almost a quarter of 1,300 wines tested by independent Denver-based lab BeverageGrades. So when I caught a headline about popular wines supposedly containing enough arsenic to eventually cause cancer, you can bet I raised an eyebrow. I’m picky about my wine and am even a member of a wine club, but I rarely pay more than $10 a bottle, mainly because I drink about two bottles a week. I am what I have termed a blue collar wine snob.