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Business: A Wine to Remember

2 minute read
TIME

Like prideful vintners everywhere, the winegrowers along the banks of West Germany’s Rhine and Moselle Rivers tend their vineyards with loving care and pray fervently that the inexplicable magic of sun, rain and vines will produce a wine to remember. Last week, as they prepared for this year’s vintage festivals, a dark pall hung over the vintners. The reason: an intruder wine that everyone will remember for a long, long time. Without loving care, with only cheap grapes and a different sort of magic, one of their number had produced something that millions of Germans mistook for fine Liebfraumilch, Niersteiner Domthal and other famed wines of the area. In the process, he had mulcted his customers of from $500,000 to $1,000,000.

The man was Valentin Korn, 43, for years a producer of unexceptional wines from a small hillside plot, but a vintner with a bright idea of how to make every year a vintage year. Hiring a chemist, he concocted a mixture of two parts grape juice, eight parts water, plus dashes of citric acid, tartaric acid, potash and glycerin. In two years Korn made between 1,500,000 and 4,000,000 quarts. Germans sipped it with satisfaction, noted nothing unusual; neither did the government controllers, who checked it periodically for bouquet and chemical content.

Korn became a big businessman. He installed a battery of modern machines in his middle-sized wine cellar in Johannisberg, tapped a water main to get enough water, boosted production higher and higher. Bigness finally proved his undoing. At one point, he forgot to mix in exactly the right amount of potash to match the area’s good wines, and a suspicious controller caught the mistake, also discovered Korn’s heavy purchases from the local chemical dealer. He called the police.

Last week Vintner Korn was in jail in Wiesbaden awaiting trial. If convicted of fraud, he faces up to ten years at hard labor. To German winegrowers, the law—if anything—is too lenient. At their annual convention at Wiirzburg, they denounced Korn’s alchemy as “Schweinerei” (swinishness), demanded harsher penalties against “gottverdammte Weinpanscher und Weinfaelscher” (wine waterers and wine phoniers). They fret that if Korn’s secret is revealed in detail at the trial, the publicity may encourage others to follow his example. Said a Bonn barkeep: “If it’s that easy to make good Niersteiner Domthal, I may just go around to the drugstore myself.”

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