Up until the middle of last month, Chinese authorities have seized over 75 tons of fake wine in the country and revoked six business licenses in a national food safety campaign.

This clean-up campaign, launched last December, was reported by the State’s food safety office and is still underway as it continues to search out fake and low-quality wine.

At the end of 2010, the fake wine scandal was exposed in China’s Hebei Province, shocking the whole country. The Chinese authorities of industry and commerce immediately started an intensive crackdown on unqualified wine.

Subsequently, six people were detained, more than a dozen corporate accounts frozen and tainted wine bottles were pulled off of shelves. These arrests came after red wine made in Changli county, Hebei Province, was found to have been both chemically altered and falsely labelled, as a superior product. Local wineries have been accused of forgery and of adulterating their wine, during investigations by the local government that shut down their operations, the Xinhua News Agency reported, adding that sixteen corporate accounts involving 2.83 million yuan ($427,000) were frozen.

A total of 5,114 boxes of wine, thought to have been falsely labelled, and 19 templates for forged brand labels, as well as 280 unlabelled bottles, were seized. Five other wineries in Changli county were also suspected of making adulterated wines and labeling their products as famous brands.

CCTV’s footage showed a local sales manager admitting that some wines made in the coastal city of Qinhuangdao contained only 20 per cent of fermented grape juice, with the rest being composed of sugar water mixed with chemicals, including coloring agents and flavourings.

One of the three wineries shut down, was also found to use nothing but water and chemicals to make its wine, with the cheapest bottle selling for less than 10 yuan ($1.50) on the market.

Following the report, leading supermarkets in Beijing pulled the products off their shelves.