Cape Town - The Distell Group has had to recall tens of thousands of bottles of wine after a hiccup at one of their bottling plants left small fragments of glass in some wine bottles.
Several different brands of wine were recalled from the UK, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and Liberia.
Distell said the tiny glass fragments had come to light when one of its agents in Japan had carried out quality assurance tests on the South African wine.
The company said in a trade recall statement that investigations had isolated the cause to a small proportion of bottle wines it produced, all of which had come from one of its bottling plants.
Less that 0.01 percent of its wine was affected, but the discovery meant hundreds of thousands of bottles had to be checked.
The company said in its recall statement that although it had been assured the risk to consumers was “minimal”, they had decided to recall and replace the batches of wine affected.
Vernon de Vries, Distell’s director of corporate and regulatory affairs, said they had isolated the cause to a single bottling line at one of its bottling plants.
The fault was with the part of the machinery that put the screw tops on the wine bottles. A technical investigation had been carried out and a report produced.
Some of these bottling lines worked at high speed, processing thousands of bottles an hour.
De Vries said the particles of glass were “extremely small” and had affected only certain batches of wine, which were numbered and listed on the company’s website.
The decision to recall the wine had been taken after discussion with bodies such as the Consumer Council and the Food and Safety Standards Authority.
“Japan got a very small quantity of wine, but they decided to do 100 percent inspection. They picked up two bottles they were concerned about. If you use a very powerful light, you can see particles.
“Because of the small size they are probably not harmful, but just to be sure, we recalled the wine,” De Vries said.
The fault had been picked up at the Bergkelder bottling plant in Stellenbosch.
While the company knew what batches had passed through the faulty bottling line, because they were numbered, they did not know how many of them were affected, so they recalled the whole lot.
“A few hundred thousand were checked. There were all over, in warehouses awaiting delivery, on ships and in retailers.”
Eleven different wine labels were affected.
Consumers can see the batch numbers and names of wines affected at www.distell.co.za. Anyone with queries can telephone 0861 600 600 or e-mail: [email protected]
Cape Times