The winemaker Mario Arnoldo Torraga was denounced in February 1993 for
adulterating wine and killing 29 people throughout the country
.
At that time, Torraga (from Buenos Aires, based in San Juan) owned the Nietos de Gonzalo Torraga SA winery
As determined, the businessman added
methyl alcohol
to the wines he offered in the demijohns identified with the "Mansero" and "Soy Cuyano" brands.
He wanted to adulterate the product to reduce costs.
The alcohol in the wines comes from the maturation of the grape itself.
All wines have to meet the
minimum alcohol content authorized by the National Institute of Viticulture (INV)
, which varies according to the warmer or colder years.
Torraga, with this maneuver, may have wanted to introduce ethyl alcohol but it was mixed with methyl, and caused a chain of deaths in different provinces.
There were victims in Misiones, Corrientes, Entre Ríos and Buenos Aires.
Mario Torraga in his winery with his son Guillermo.
Photo File
The then president Carlos Menem closed the winery in the San Juan municipality of Caucete, which Torraga had bought from a cooperative at an auction.
The winemaker, who knew about the industry because he had worked for Resero during the state intervention in the Grupo Greco companies, was a fugitive for 45 days.
He appeared walking towards the Federal Court of San Juan and turned himself in.
He denounced that he was the victim of a "
plot orchestrated by Mendoza
to harm the San Juan wine industry."
But he already had a prior conviction for falsifying wine quotas in the early '90s.
The trial for the mass poisoning was in June 1996. The Federal Justice sentenced
Mario Arnoldo Torraga to 15 years in prison
.
Several employees, including winemaker Armando Ribes and his son Guillermo, received lesser sentences, between two and 10 years in prison.
Demijohns with adulterated wine.
Photo File
For the benefit of
2x1
, the majority regained their freedom much earlier.
Three employees of the National Institute of Viticulture in charge of supervising the wines were acquitted of their criminal responsibility, and after a few months, dismissed from their posts due to administrative irregularities.
Guillermo Torraga.
The winemaker's eldest son, he was sentenced to 6 years in prison for the case of wine adulteration, when he was 30 years old.
And another of his sons, Facundo Martín Torraga, in 2021, was arrested and convicted of sexual abuse against his wife.
It was at the trial of his son Facundo that Torraga was seen publicly again.
He continues to live on Avenida Libertador at 2300, in the city of San Juan.
He is 81 years old.
the silences
In the wine industry, hit by frost, hail and the rise in grape prices due to the lower harvest, nobody wants to talk about the Torraga case.
The few who agree to remember the case request anonymity and put forward different hypotheses about what could have happened 30 years ago: “A war on alcohol;
a boycott of the demijohn in favor of new containers such as cardboard, and even a settling of scores from a Torraga supplier because he had a reputation for defaulting on his payments ”.
They detected ethyl alcohol in a higher than tolerable percentage.
Photo File
This Tuesday marks 30 years.
It was Sunday, February 21, 1993, when a family reunion in a house in Ensenada, in the province of Buenos Aires, ended with
the death of six people
, including a pregnant woman, as a result of having toasted with wines from the "Soy Cuyano" and "Mansero".
In total, 29 people died.
There were also hundreds of complaints from people who suffered symptoms of
blindness and irreparable neurological damage.
The demijohns, containing 4 and a half liters of red and white wine, had been adulterated with methyl alcohol, in a proportion 200 times higher than the permitted amount.
They were sold at 3.50 pesos each, under the labels Soy Cuyano and Mansero, in various areas of the country.
They were the cheapest on the market
.
They had a warehouse in Buenos Aires, where the product arrived in trucks and was distributed throughout the country.
Although in the trial Torraga had acknowledged that he bought the alcohol in Buenos Aires and adulterated the wines, he said.
"Who can be so clumsy as to mix wine with methyl (burning) alcohol instead of ethyl (medicinal)?"
, to substantiate that he had been the subject of a betrayal or plot.
And he excused himself: "The mistake was that I bought an alcohol that was obviously not adequate. I bought bottles of medicinal alcohol, pure alcohol and inside that bottle came another alcohol that was not what they said I bought," Torraga said in statements to
Radio America
.
In 2002, after
five years on the run
, Carlos Alberto Blanco, the distributor in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area of Mansero and Soy Cuyano wines, fell.
The Torraga winery
The cover of the case against Torraga bore the name of businessman Jorge Vartanian, owner of the firm Química Armenia SRL, supplier of methyl alcohol.
Vartanian was acquitted and the charges were pointed at Blanco, who had testified as a witness, but disappeared when he was accused.
He was condemned as directly responsible for delivering the raw material with which the wines were "stretched".
Where did the wine of death go?
The National Institute of Viticulture (INV) managed to seize
23,000 demijohns
with the Mansero and Soy Cuyano seal.
The shipment, in a truck with a trailer, went to the Federal Court of San Juan, and since there was not enough space, the then judge Julio Fernando Correa ordered that they go to a warehouse in Mendoza.
For seven years, the supposedly poisoned demijohns remained in the warehouse at Calle Tirasso 2131, on an INV property, in the populous municipality of Guaymallén, Greater Mendoza.
Mario Torraga during his investigation in 1996. File Photo
"Nobody wanted to take care of that deposit, they feared that someone would find the demijohns and drink the adulterated wine by mistake," says one of those in charge of the transfer.
The legal area of the INV obtained judicial authorization to destroy the demijohns in 2000. In an operation that was not publicized,
each demijohn was spilled
for the equivalent of 100 liters of water.
"A sink was used to mix the wine with water and that liquid was
spilled into the sewers in Mendoza
,"
Clarín
, one of the inspectors, assured.
In a couple of days, no trace of those wines remained.
How the wines are controlled
Different wine referents say that the Torraga case was a turning point in wine control.
It was
the end of the demijohn as a mass container
, it had a precipitous drop in sales and never recovered.
Now all the control of alcohols is supervised by the INV, which must control the production, circulation, fractionation and commercialization of ethyl alcohols and methanol (Law 24,566) and be the authority for the Application of the Designation of Origin System for Wines and Spirit Beverages of Wine Origin (Law 25,166).
Clarín's notes on the case of the "Soy Cuyano" and "Mansero" wines, which killed 29 people.
The control of the genuineness of wine products is carried out in the pre-harvest, harvest and post-harvest stages.
For this, plots of vineyards distributed in all the wine-growing regions of the country are evaluated, sugar content readings are carried out when the grapes enter the registered establishments, stocks of new and old products are taken in order to determine the alcoholic degree minimum that must have the wines that are marketed.
The genuineness controls of the wine begin in the aging, conservation and fractionation stages with inspections in the wineries.
Official samples are extracted and analyzed in one of the 13 INV laboratories in the country.
Through the Directorate of Studies and Sustainable Development, controls are carried out on exogenous water content in wines, varietal identification and the origin of alcohol in wines.
Regarding the control of the production, circulation, fractioning and commercialization of ethyl and methyl alcohol (Law No. 24,566), the INV carries out controls both in the production and commercialization area.
MG-EMJ
look too
The son of a well-known winemaker was sentenced to 10 years for raping and threatening his wife
The life of the family behind the "Soy Cuyano" and "Mansero" wines, which killed 29 people