New Zealand is known for its premier, high quality wine industry, enjoying a steady growth for the past several years. Even just one isolated case like the one reported here can hurt the reputation of an entire country’s wine industry. The Ministry of Primary Industries in New Zealand found that a large wine producer in New Zealand is responsible for falsely blending wines, as well as mislabeling the vintage and origin of the wines. The wines do not pose any health risks but due to the damaging nature to the New Zealand wine industry, this fraud is being punished by a hefty fine and other sentences.
If you really want to know whether your $200,000 bottle of wine is worth every penny, you should explore using isotope ratio mass spectrometry for authentication.
Susanne Kuehne joined Decernis in 2016 as senior manager, business development. She has 20+ years of experience in the chemicals, plastics, coatings and beverage spaces. Kuehne is located at the Washington, D.C. office, but is originally from the Stuttgart, Germany area. She studied chemistry and business in Germany, then worked for Grace GmbH in Worms, Germany before moving to the United States in 2000. She worked for Grace in the United States before joining the beverage industry for eight years. Kuehne’s focus is food contact and chemical industry clients world-wide, across the multiple disciplines Decernis covers.
Kuehne holds a Dipl.-Ing (FH) Farbe/Chemie from Fachhochschule fuer Druck, Stuttgart, and a Dipl.-Betriebswirt (FH) from AKAD Fachhochschule, Lahr.